In its 20th year, the Kellogg Healthcare Case Competition is one of the oldest and most recognized case competitions in the world. This year, the topic was, “Design the launch strategy for Pfizer’s new RSV vaccine and estimate the market potential of RSV and Pfizer’s market share in 2025.” 11 out of 35 teams from top business schools across three countries were selected as finalists and competed at Kellogg. Team Tuck—Leslie Akplah T’24, Hanz Mangan Antony T’24, Caitlyn Garland T’24, Marie Smoak T’24, Xiangyu Zhao T’23, and I took home first place.
As a team, what were your unique strengths?
Diversity was the biggest strength of our team. We come from diverse countries of origin, educational backgrounds, and divisions of the healthcare industry. Our prior experiences include, but are not limited to, healthcare consulting and analytics, clinical medicine, pharmaceutical sales, product management, new product planning, and business development.
What was preparation and research like? What went into building your final presentation?
We spent one week preparing for the case. The Center for Health Care and several classmates with relevant professional experience contributed to establishing our understanding of the case scenario. We also took a look at resources at Feldberg Library. All these inputs were helpful in building our final presentation.
What are some of your key takeaways?
Our success benefited significantly from connecting with other Tuckies who shared their insightful experience and knowledge, applying what we learned in multiple classes, and leveraging existing resources at Tuck. In addition, forming a diverse team helped to spark and solidify good ideas and creative solutions. It underlined critical challenges faced by pharmaceutical companies in releasing new products to benefit millions of patients.
This competition also served as an excellent opportunity to sharpen our understanding and skills for analyzing similar scenarios in the future, given the nature of complexity and intercorrelation of various components of the healthcare industry.
Are there any lessons you learned at Tuck that you were able to put into action during the case comp?
Yes! The Management Communication class helped a lot. We created our presentation slides using the concepts introduced in ManComm, including executive summary, trackers, consistent visuals, etc. More importantly, when we presented, we fully followed HOP-T. For each slide, we presented the headline, oriented on how the slide is organized, explained the key points, and finally transitioned to the next slide. Judges loved our slides and presentation style.
Our marketing class was also helpful in teaching us how to create our patient segments, positioning statement, and marketing campaigns.
The teamwork skills we developed in working within study groups also helped us to work together smoothly and efficiently and put together a final presentation in a week.
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