Challenge  As a business student, I have been exposed to a variety of opportunities from the corporate  world. These opportunities can come in the form of an internship or different case  competitions. In one particular case competition with a corporate client from an online  shopping industry, my team and I were tasked to create a marketing campaign in order to  boost the company’s sales. In particular, the company noticed a decrease in percentage  sales from the young female shoppers of their target market. The company gave us brief  information such as statistics on their company sales and the primary characteristics of the  target market. We are expected to produce a disruptive and feasible campaign that will  brand the company as a lifestyle destination women in the midst of the “new normal”.     On my team’s end, we are a group of close friends who haven’t worked with each, and  joining this competition is a first for all of us. All of my groupmates are from the same course  but different specializations while I was the only one studying from a different course and  school.    Selection  Although the task was rather ambiguous because we were given the freedom to approach it  in any way, our team has different experiences regarding the mind-mapping tool before and  it has worked for all of us, especially in organizing information from different aspects. Given  our differences and specialization, using mind-mapping will help us discover our unique  perspectives about the problem at hand by brainstorming. Hence, using mind-mapping  seems to be the appropriate tool for us to cover all the necessary room for improvements  from the company. It will also help us to dig deep into the relationship between the aspects  of the current performance of the company and its decrease in sales from the target market.     Application and Insights  We first examined the given data from the company. We discovered that what we have so  far is not enough for us to really understand our target market. As such we decided to create  a survey and then conducted interviews with participants from the target market. Here we  came across another set of data with social implications that we didn’t expect, regardless we  thought that it’s vital. We proceeded to organize the significant findings that we had and  began to brainstorm our ideas. We made sure that whenever an idea pops up, it will need to  be traced back to our findings before we finalize it.     Since we used to mind-mapping tool to organize our findings and ideas, I realized that it was  easier for us to set aside ideas with no connection at all with our current data, no matter how  disruptive it was. When ideas are starting to grow, we were able to relate these ideas to the  connections we found on the mind-map.  Even when we were not on the working document,  we came to remember vital points from the mind-maps while discussing among ourselves  given that it’s a visual representation that contains keywords. We have also realized that we  were more visual learners than we thought. While working on our document, we really had a  problem wording our ideas but when explaining it to other people, we tend to give a more  profound explanation when we explain it with imagery such as drawing.

Approach  Since I have realized my team’s visual learning tendencies, I think using visualization  especially during our brainstorming phase is a much more efficient tool to use. Although  mind-mapping gave us some pretty good progress, I think it would be more productive for us  to draw exactly what we think and not hesitate on finding the right words to explain the ideas  in our head. Regardless, for a newly formed team and for working with each other for the  first time, mind-mapping really gave us an edge in developing our ideas.

