Mannheim Exchange Week

Nishtha Sharma, Global MBA 2014-2015, India

In the third term of Global MBA at ESSEC Business School, you have an option to select courses from a wide catalog. Along with all these elective courses, you also have an option to select one of the two courses offered by Mannheim Business School in the holiday week at the end of April. This year the courses offered by Mannheim Business School to ESSEC's Global MBA students were: International Marketing and Innovation & Creativity Management. Though, the seats in these courses are limited, I had the opportunity to take International Marketing, taught by Prof. Dr. Sabine Kuester.

It was an intense course, in which the classes were held at the Mannheim Baroque Palace. The class was a mix of students from Mannheim Business School (Germany), ESSEC Business School (France) and Warwick Business School (UK), and of course the various nationalities. If anybody had doubts about the intensity of the course, they didn’t after it ended. We had longer classes but the time went by and we hardly noticed. But when we had to work on two cases studies after class, then the time seemed too short. In the span of first 3 days we officially did 4 case studies and discussed numerous incidents from around the world.

During this course, two guest speakers also graced us with their experience. Mr.Wilfied

Bartz, Heat of Marketing, BASF who enlighten us about the various challenges of entering the different African Countries. Mr.Thomas Kipp, CEO, DHL eCommerce who share his experience of the demands in the eCommerce industry in the various emerging economies of the world. The course touched all the current edges of the marketing industries and also helped us understand that although there has been much globalization but still every region every segment has their own perspective of seeing things. The course was concluded by an 8 hours simulation game called Country Manager. In this game we learnt a lot about being in a herculean situation where you have too many options and there is not one correct way of doing your work.

I personally had a great time with all my new classmates, learning from their personal experience and having the late night dinners after the hard day’s work. I also learnt so much about international Marketing from Prof. Kuester, which I hope to put into use as soon as possible. Oh, and when in Mannheim do try the German Doner and Apple juice with fizze and definitely visit Heidelberg.