Prime students present to Amazon Executives

For the fourth time in five years, the Montana State Marketing Team has been named to the group of finalists in the American Marketing Association (AMA) Collegiate Case Competition. The team will present its marketing strategies from Thursday, March 17 to Saturday, March 19, at the AMA International Collegiate Conference in Chicago, sponsored by Amazon Prime Student.

The team includes nine students, each with different roles. The team is built through an application-based class, BMKT 485 Applied Marketing and Strategy, led by Eric Van Steenburg, a professor in the business school. The entire focus of the class is this competition. “We interviewed to get in the class and only 10 students are allowed in this year,” Hunter Young, a senior in marketing and the team’s traffic editor, said. “This year there’s only nine students actually in the class, but the class is oriented around the AMA case competition every year and then by enrolling in that class we just are in that competition.”

Mary Landes, a senior marketing major, is also one of the nine students competing and is the team’s media specialist. The class begins in the fall with students working on the marketing plan for the annual case sponsor. “We all kind of contribute in the fall. We make the plan and then in the spring, if you’re in the top 10 - top 11 for this year, you get to present to the actual executives of the company at the National Collegiate Conference,” Landes said.

Previously, MSU has been a top contender at the competition. Last year, the team finished in the top 10 in the International Collegiate Chapter, 1st in the national sales competition, 1st for the best recruitment video, 1st for the marketing strategy competition, 3rd in the International Case Competition, 3rd for Giving Tuesday Collegiate Challenge,16th in the SABRE Business Simulation and received two honorable mentions at the Perfect Pitch competition: a competition where students are given 90 seconds to convince the judges they are the best person to hire based on a given scenario. 

“Our advisor, he really pushed us to do a lot of great work,” Young said. “Each year, we have really big footsteps to fill, but each year we all managed to somehow fill our due out so that’s really encouraging to see that how well we actually did because when you’re in the middle of making plans it’s very daunting and it’s very intimidating, but once that semester rolls around and you find out that you’re in the top 11 out of like 100 schools, it’s really rewarding.”

By the end of the competition, Prime Student will select the marketing strategy of the winning team. “It’s honestly an incredible experience,” Landes said. “You are doing real life marketing for big companies.”