Trent Business Student Team Reaches Finals in Prestigious Inter-Collegiate Business Competition

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Students Earn Berth in Final Round of Marketing Event to be Held in January 2008

Tuesday, November 27, 2007, Peterborough

A team of two Trent University business administration students, Scott Lloyd and Makenzie Martinson, learned recently that they were successful in reaching the final round of the marketing event in the internationally-renowned Inter-Collegiate Business Competition (ICBC), hosted by Queen’s University.

Dr. Ayman El-Amir, an assistant professor in Trent’s Business Administration program, selected Mr. Lloyd and Ms. Martinson to form a student team and supported their efforts during the marketing competition. The students’ task was to develop a business case to recruit technology and racing event sponsors for an experimental solar-powered car.

“Working as a team was an excellent opportunity for my partner and I to combine our individual talents to provide solutions to a challenging case,” said Mr. Lloyd. “We were able to pool together pieces of information from each marketing course offered at Trent along with outside information, to present real life solutions to the case.” Trent’s student team is one of only six national finalists who will compete in the final round of the ICBC at Queen’s University from January 10 to 13, 2008.

“I’m really proud of Scott and Makenzie’s performance,” said Professor El-Amir, who specializes in branding, retail marketing and qualitative market research techniques. “Unlike Trent, all the other finalists come from universities with dedicated marketing specializations, and yet our program produced an excellent student team whose creative and organizational strengths successfully earned them a berth in the finals, ahead of some of the best business schools in the country.”

Typically the most attended of ICBC’s eight event categories, the marketing competition challenges university teams to resolve issues in marketing strategy, advertising, distribution, pricing, sales, and product development. The marketing event cases are geared to address marketing issues in various industries ranging from beauty products to technology providers. In the final round, judges have historically come from a wide variety of consumer product firms.

Since its inaugural competition in 1979, ICBC has provided a forum for many of the brightest undergraduate business minds to challenge and perpetuate business knowledge while uniting students from across the nation and beyond. Regarded as Canada’s oldest and largest undergraduate business case competition, this year’s event attracted university teams from across Canada and from as far away as Thailand, Hong Kong and Singapore.

The accomplishments of Mr. Lloyd and Ms. Martinson at ICBC comes in the wake of the University’s success with Corporate Knights which earlier this year ranked Trent’s Business Administration program as the number one program in the country for infusing social and environmental impact management into the curriculum.

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For further information, please contact Professor Ayman El-Amir, business administration program at (705) 748-1011, ext. 7106.