A team from Yonsei University’s MARP Club won the 2015 L’Oréal Brandstorm, sometimes called a “marketing Olympics” that in the 23 years of its existence has involved 70,000 college students from 45 countries in trying to solve marketing problems posed by the French cosmetics giant with a portfolio of brands that include Lancôme and Kiehl.

Participants assume they are brand managers who must propose a feasible idea from product development to marketing strategy. Unlike other competitions, Brandstorm has a peculiar feature of actually collaborating with L’Oréal brand marketers while in the process of formulating a strategy. Also, the judges of Brandstorm are from L’Oréal’s top management, and the final winning team’s idea may actually be applied to the company’s marketing.

The theme of this year’s competition, was “A Proposal for Cosmetics Brand Lancôme’s Duty Free Division Marketing Strategy.” Many national college students participated for six months, and four teams were selected for the finals. Two of the four teams were from Yonsei University. MARP team members Kim Ji-won (Entering class of 2012, Business major), Jung Hye-wook (Entering class of 2011, English and Business major), and Yoon Jae-yeon(Entering class of 2011, Business major) won the competitive preliminary and final rounds.

Kim Ji-won of the MARP team said, “During these last, long six months, there were a lot of difficulties, yet I’m very glad with these good results.” Yoon Jae-yeon said, “We only applied the marketing concepts learned in class to practice, but the results were very good. I want to earn good results in international competitions as a representative of Yonsei University and Korea.” Team member Jung Hye-wook noted that “without the professors’ support, it’d have been difficult to win such an award. I want to give credit to Professor Dae-Ryun Chang of Marketing who guided the research team and to all the professors I met during my business major classes.”