Shruti Jayaprakash, Priti Rajput, and Hirachana Pandya, three final year students of the Symbiosis centre for Management and Human Resource Development(SCMHRD), recently won the international marketing game, Brandstorm, organised by the international cosmetics major L'Oreal.

6,200 students from 36 countries competed in the event, the challenge of which was to create the first fragrance for the Maybelline New York brand. The three teams that reached the finals presented the project before the jury, which was presided over by Jean-Paul Agon, CEO, L'Oreal, Geoff Skingley, vice president and general manager of human resources, L'Oreal, Cyril Chapuy, general manager, Maybelline, New York, and John Dooner, president of the communications group, McCann worldgroup. The team from Symbiosis named their product '6xy', an abbreviated version of the word 'sexy'. "Since the youth use chat and sms lingo so frequently nowadays, we figured this would strike a chord with them, since the product is targeted at the modern young woman who is always on the move," said Shruti, explaining the rationale behind the product.

A felicitation ceremony was also organised for the students on Friday. Speaking at the ceremony, Jacques Challes, managing director, L'Oreal India talked about the gender bias which a cosmetics company faces, and encouraged more male students to take up offers in the company. Sujata Tyagi, head of HR , said that that the company had recruited 20 students from SCMHRD alone last year. Speaking about the team's success, she said that events such as Brandstorm helped to identify the calibre in a student as they could actually observe how studenst work in real time situations.