Brandwitz branding competition is back

Brandwitz, the biggest branding competition is back for its seventh edition and is shaping up to be bigger than ever before. Brandwitz '15 is being organised jointly by the Access to Information (A2i) Programme of the Prime Minister's Office and the Institute of Business Administration Communications Club (IBACC) of University of Dhaka. Unlike previous six seasons when the competition was open only to the business school students, this time undergrad students from any department and university can participate in Brandwitz'15. The prize money is attractive,  BDT 4,75,000 in total.
"In previous editions of Brandwitz, the competition was often about branding imaginary or existing products in a fictional situation. So even though the participating teams came up with some fantastic ideas, those did not have any real life impact," said Injamam Alam Niloy, President of IBACC. He also commented: "Brandwitz'15 is about challenging the future leaders of the country to come up with realistic solutions for the citizen-centric problems affecting the majority of the population. Now the focus has been shifted to bringing about innovation in existing public service delivery. A2i is going to take suggestions from the ideas generated by this year's participants and the best ideas will actually be implemented. The competition has been opened up to all undergraduate students of Bangladesh. Students coming from grass root level are more likely to have a better idea about the bottlenecks in public service and so they can develop better solutions."
Mr. Kabir Bin Anwar, Director General (Admin) of Prime Minister's Office and Project Director of the A2i Programme emphasised that A2i and the Prime Minister's Office have always supported youth-led innovation and would continue to do so. He also said that through this joint collaboration Brandwitz can help bring about innovative ideas which can be piloted using Service Innovation Fund and other piloting mechanisms of A2i.
To participate in Brandwitz'15, students will have to form teams of four and get registered online on brandwitz.org. Students from any public or private university and any educational background can take part in the competition, just the teams will have to be students studying in the same university.
However, students of the host institute, the Institute of Business Administration, University of Dhaka, will not be eligible to apply in the online selection round. Four teams will be selected by IBACC to participate in the first round.
The case to be solved in the first round has already been made available on Brandwitz website. There will be a Webinar on October 4, 2015 where teams will get further clarification on the case. The teams will have to compile their idea within one thousand words and submit the solution online within October 10, 2015 for a chance to proceed further. After three levels of competition involving case solving, campaign development and innovative problem solving, the best six teams will get to fight it out for the three top titles in the finale event at Prime Minister's Office on November 15, 2015. The champion team of Brandwitz'15 will receive a prize money of BDT 250,000 while the runner-up and second runner-up teams will receive BDT 1,25,000 and BDT 100,000 respectively. A2i Programme is the major sponsor of the competition while IBA Alumni Association (IBAAA) is funding a portion of the prize money.
The writer is a third year BBA
student of Institution of Business Administration (IBA), University of Dhaka,  nabidhassan@gmail.com