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Auchan Challenge: SKEMA MSc students on the podium

Published on 06 July 2020

This project, put forward by four MSc International Marketing & Business Development students in Lille, is one of the three winning entries in the Auchan Challenge. Auchan is one of the world's largest retailers and a household-name supermarket chain in many countries.

​Each year, this competition asks the participating schools to liaise with one of the supermarket chain’s stores to solve a sales and marketing problem.

Auchan Retail France held the 16th edition of this national final by video conference on 17 June. This year, there were 14 business schools competing. Among the winners of this national finale was a team of SKEMA students that came third, alongside Université Paris-Dauphine and Audencia Business School.

Juliette Beghin did a brilliant job of presenting the SKEMA group’s recommendations to the jury based on the theme “Auchan Pedestrian Click & Collect: growth strategy and digital marketing”.

Their solution aims to increase the number of people using the Auchan Pedestrian Click & Collect service in Lille by 50% in three years. They developed a three-step strategy: a) improve the attractiveness, acquisition rate and communication of the Auchan Click & Collect platform, b) revamp both the internal setup of the collection points and the customer experience, and c) improve the digital marketing and the conversion rate of future users.

Each of the students will receive an Auchan voucher worth €100 for the quality of their recommendations. Since the competition is part of the Auchan talent sourcing process, the winners will also be invited for recruitment interviews.

The group had already represented SKEMA before the regional final jury on 14 May against teams from IESEG School of Management and the University of Lille School of Management. Due to the physical distancing rules in place, the regional final, too, was held via video conferencing. The jury, presided by the Auchan Nord HR teams, had praised the coherence of the SKEMA team’s propositions and the professional quality of their visual aids. 

The four winning students reflect the SKEMA values of internationalisation and innovation: Juliette Beghin is from Lille, Axel Falck is French and Lebanese, Fatme Hassouneh is Lebanese, and My Huong Giang is Vietnamese.

Marcos Lima, the director of the MSc IMBD programme on the Lille campus, supervised each step of the project’s development, right up to its presentation to the jury at the national final.

He is thrilled with the outcome: “The entire programme team is very proud of what Juliette and her teammates achieved. This result confirms how relevant our MSc is for tackling the challenges in mass-market retail and digital retailing. The students demonstrated creativity, innovation and digital skills. Combined with their highly international profile, in a way this result reflects SKEMA’s DNA: globalisation, innovation, digitalisation.

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