Baruch Students Are Big Echo Winners: 14 MBA Candidates Honored at Yale Club Ceremony

Members of Baruch's award-winning Direct Marketing Club at the 2004 DMA Echo Awards. --photo by Elena Olivo

Fourteen Baruch College students were honored today by the Direct Marketing Club of New York at a special ceremony held at the Yale Club. The students, a multiethnic group typical of Baruch College, received silver and bronze DMA Echo trophies and honorable mentions in the nation-wide Collegiate Echo Competition, held annually by the DMA’s Education Foundation. This year’s competition was built around the challenge of marketing the Advanta credit card to women small-business owners.

The Baruch Silver Medal team selected as their target market Hispanic women who owned their own businesses. “The market has enough buying power to be significant. Advanta could take the business and grow with it,” observed Sachin Panjwani, an international student from India, and one of four who collaborated on the winning team. Only one member of the silver-medal team, Jorge Miranda, who hails from Equador, had first-hand knowledge of Hispanic culture.

The Silver medalists worked with a fictive $4 million budget. They concluded that all marketing materials should be bi-lingual and during their research discovered that pink, orange and other bright colors appealed to female Hispanics, who were best reached by “empathetic, personal service.” While doing their research, the team, which also included a Korean and an American observed that, “in general, first generation immigrant business owners are not well served” by major U.S. companies.

All winners honored at this year’s Echo Awards ceremony came from Adjunct Prof. Harvey Markovitz’s graduate course in Direct Marketing. Markovitz also taught last year’s Gold and Bronze-medal Echo Awards winners. That challenge asked students to design a direct marketing campaign for the launch of the Mazda Protégé 5 car.

The Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College is the largest business school in the country. Its mission is to train young men and women for leadership positions in today’s global economy. Zicklin students mirror the diversity of New York City and represent more than 90 ethnic and linguistic backgrounds The Zicklin School offers a wide array of marketing courses including advertising, e-commerce,direct marketing, marketing research and international marketing. Approximately 250 students a year pursue the MBA degree with concentration in Marketing while 30 opt for the M.S. in Marketing. At the undergraduate level more some 650 students major in Marketing each year.



Zane Berzins
News Manager
212-802-2881