30 students from ESSEC MS MMD immersed in 6 startups incubated at ESSEC Ventures

For the second year in a row, the ESSEC Advanced Master® in Marketing Management & Digital (MMD) students were proposed to discover the “startups world” during their T2 course in Cergy.

Indeed, during Philippe Dailly's "Startup management" course, part of the Marketing Management New Businesses Major, 30 of them were associated to 6 ESSEC Ventures incubated startups previously selected for their interest in the program. (Crémeries Unies, Rob, Petit Côté, Greenly, La Miche et Caps’me ).

In groups of 5 and for nearly three months, despite the constraints linked to the anti COVID measures, they partnered with the founders in complete autonomy to work on a specific issue to each structure defined in January. They had to develop recommendations presented during a final restitution at the end of March; some of them were directly implemented by the managers. This work served as a basis for their assessment.

Communication strategy, preparation of a fundraising deck, management of the presence on social networks activities or even creation of new products are some examples of subjects brilliantly managed by the students.

The feedback is extremely positive, both for the students, who discovered the "backstage" and the challenges and requirements of entrepreneurship, and for the companies, which were able to benefit from the enthusiasm, creativity and knowledge of future professionals. We are looking forward to organizing next year's edition with the arrival of new students and incubatees creating new teams and facing new challenges. 

The experience of the company "Crémeries-Unies"

“Crémeries-Unies” is a new brand of organic, local and fair trade ice creams. We want to promote a gourmet food transition with additive-free recipes and French ingredients. We work directly with a farmer from the Biolait cooperative in Normandy, who is very committed to agroecology.

Our ambition is to develop a national brand with strong local roots, in the form of a network of regional processing facilities that source, produce and distribute their products locally. We are currently looking for distribution partners specialized in organic products and we are also developing our graphic identity and our packaging with an agency!

Over the past few months, we have focused our efforts on operational and commercial issues while neglecting our communication strategy. However, an entire axis of our project is based on the interaction between producers and consumers because we wish to recreate a strong link between all the stakeholders of the agri-food world to accelerate the transition to more sustainable modes of production and consumption.

The experience with the MMD program was therefore an opportunity to brainstorm with a group of students on our marketing issues by proposing to them to work on our communication strategy.

We opted for a remote operation using a WhatsApp group and video conferences. After an initial presentation of the project, we met every 15 days for 3 months to follow the progress of the project and to think together about the areas to be developed.

We are very pleased with the students' output, which brought a fresh perspective on our issues. Many ideas were generated, some of which could be developed in an operational way. During the final feedback, Océane, Marine, Manon and Valentine made several recommendations to develop our communication plan and integrate the work of our breeder for an original and committed customer experience.

You can follow our achievements on the following networks:

https://www.facebook.com/cremeriesunies & https://www.instagram.com/cremeriesunies/

We will soon be available in some Biocoop stores in the west of Paris and in the meantime, we deliver our ice creams at home. Do not hesitate to order on our website: https://www.cremeries-unies.com/ ???? 

Eléonore BEAU and Edouard FOUQUET, the cofounders