ITC Emerging Managers Awards · Season 3 · Individual Entry
This is not a case competition. It is ITC's entire summer hiring process.
Read one line from the official brief carefully. ITC will be hiring all Summer Interns for 2026 to 2027 exclusively through this program, and there will be no other summer internship hiring process on campus. That single sentence changes what the Emerging Managers Awards is. For a first year at an eligible institute, this is not an optional contest to add to your CV. It is the application form for the internship itself, run as an aptitude test, a case study and a campus panel.
Why we are writing this one
Last season an AceMBA student won the Emerging Managers Awards and walked away with a pre-placement interview at ITC. We watched that submission get built, so this guide is written from the inside of what actually clears an ITC panel, not from the brochure. Season 3 opened on 7 August 2026 with registrations closing 17 August, the aptitude assessment ran on 19 August, the case submission window closed 31 August, and the Campus Finals are still to be announced. If you are through to the finals, skip to the campus panel section. If you are a first year reading this early, treat it as your Season 4 brief, because the structure has held across three editions.
What is actually on the table
A ₹1.5 lakh prize pool, and a Trade Marketing internship behind it
Campus Finalists
PPI for a Summer Internship
Quiz and Campus Winners
₹1,50,000 pool
The prize pool is worth ₹1.5 lakhs across quiz winners and campus round winners, which is respectable but not the reason to care. The reason to care is the first card. Every campus finalist gets an opportunity for an internship with ITC Limited in Trade Marketing and Distribution, and the pre-placement interview is not restricted to the single winner on each campus.
Understand what that structurally means. On a campus with a few hundred first years, ITC shortlists a small set of finalists to present to its panel, and that entire set enters the interview funnel. The competition is not for one trophy. It is for a seat in the shortlist, and the shortlist is the internship pipeline.
Trade Marketing and Distribution is also worth naming properly, because a lot of students assume Sales and Marketing at an FMCG major means brand management. TM and D at ITC is the field function. It is distribution reach, retail execution, channel profitability, salesman productivity and market working. If you write a case answer that lives entirely in advertising and brand positioning, you are answering a different company's question.
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Participation format
Individual, not team. There is no group to hide behind and no division of labour. Every slide is yours.
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Who is eligible
First year MBA students at eligible institutes, plus third year students of Ashoka University's four year undergraduate programme, Class of 2028, who want a Sales and Marketing career.
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Who is not eligible
Students in non flagship programmes, including part time, distance learning and one year executive MBA programmes, cannot participate.
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The clause everyone should read twice
Anyone who wants a Summer Internship at ITC must register in this program. There is no parallel hiring process on campus.
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Function on offer
The internship opportunity for campus finalists sits in Trade Marketing and Distribution, ITC's field and channel arm.
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Scale of the field
Season 3 drew 2,348 registrations against roughly 77,000 page views, all funnelling through a single aptitude gate.
Where you can compete from
Eleven campuses, and the shortlist is drawn campus by campus
This is a closed campus programme, not an open national contest. ITC named the eligible institutes for Season 3.
The detail that matters here is in the Round 3 wording. ITC shortlists top candidates across each of the eligible campuses. You are not competing against 2,348 people nationally for a handful of slots. You are competing against your own batch for your campus's finalist positions. That makes the arithmetic far friendlier than the registration count suggests, and it also means the benchmark you should be measuring yourself against is the strongest sales and marketing aspirants sitting in your own classroom.
The five stages
A live session, a quiz, an aptitude gate, five slides, then a panel
1
Curtain raiser · 12 August 2026
Conversations with the ITC team, on YouTube Live
A thirty minute session with the ITC leadership team covering career opportunities at ITC, what building a career there looks like, and an explicit walkthrough of what the company expects from the upcoming case study. The recording stays available.
Most participants skip the recording because the session has passed. That is a mistake. When a hiring team says out loud what it expects from a case, that is the evaluation rubric being read to you. Watch it before you write a single slide.
2
Side event · 14 and 15 August 2026
Emerging Managers Awards Quiz, on LinkedIn
A two day quiz about ITC as India's foremost FMCG company, hosted on the Grad Partners LinkedIn handle, with five winners each day taking prizes from the overall pool.
Low effort, real payoff. It is a prize pool entry that costs you an evening, and every question you answer is ITC business knowledge you will reuse in the case round and the interview.
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Round 1 · 19 August 2026
Aptitude assessment, 45 minutes, pass or go home
Every registered participant sits a 45 minute assessment covering Data Interpretation, Logical Reasoning and Quantitative Analysis. Clearing it is the only way to receive the case study.
This is the round that quietly ends most campaigns, and it is the one nobody prepares for. It is a CAT style paper with a company logo on it. Forty five minutes across three sections means roughly fifteen minutes each, so accuracy under time pressure beats depth.
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Round 2 · 20 to 31 August 2026
Case study submission, 5 to 7 slides excluding the cover
Shortlisted candidates prepare a five to seven slide presentation setting out the case approach, the proposed solution and market working insights. Annexures with supporting Excel files and references are permitted outside the slide count. Files must be named Roll no._Name_Institute Name, and submissions can be changed until the deadline.
The phrase market working insights is the tell. ITC is asking whether you have actually been to a retail outlet, spoken to a distributor or counted facings on a shelf. Primary observation, however small, separates a submission from a desk exercise.
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Round 3 · Dates to be announced
Campus Finals, presenting to an ITC panel on your own campus
ITC shortlists top candidates from each eligible campus to present in person to an ITC panel. All campus finalists get the opportunity of a pre-placement interview for a Summer Internship.
Treat the campus final as the interview, because functionally it is. The panel is judging whether they want you in a market for two months, so how you handle a challenge to your numbers matters more than the polish of your deck.
Three rules that cost people the round
Slide count, file name, and the annexure loophole
The submission is strictly five to seven slides excluding the cover slide, and the naming convention is Roll no._Name_Institute Name with nothing else in the file name. Both are non negotiable. The part most people miss is that annexures with supporting Excel files and references sit outside the slide limit, which means every calculation, every source table and every market working sheet belongs there rather than crammed onto a slide. Keep the seven slides for the argument and let the annexure carry the proof.
The evaluation criteria, stated plainly
ITC lists exactly three things it scores the case submission on: market understanding and research, effective communication, and idea structuring and plan feasibility. Notice what is absent. There is no marks for creativity, no marks for design, no marks for ambition.
Two of the three criteria are about grounding and executability. A modest idea that a distributor could run next month scores higher than a brilliant idea that needs a budget ITC has not allocated. Write for the field team that would have to implement it.
Understanding the company you are pitching to
ITC sells to millions of outlets, and that is the real case
ITC Limited posted gross revenue of about ₹80,867 crores and EBITDA of about ₹25,208 crores as on 31 March 2026, with businesses spanning FMCG, Packaging, Paperboards and Specialty Papers, Agri and IT. It is one of India's leading FMCG marketers, and the newer FMCG businesses built over the last decade or so have grown into a portfolio of roughly thirty mother brands.
The brands you should be able to talk about without looking anything up are Aashirvaad, Sunfeast, Bingo!, YiPPee!, Candyman, mint-o and Kitchens of India in branded packaged foods, Fiama, Vivel, Superia and Essenza in personal care, and Classmate and Paperkraft in education and stationery. Knowing the names is table stakes. Knowing which of them lead their category and which are still fighting for shelf space is what makes an answer credible.
ITC's stated strategic intent is to secure long term growth by blending competencies across its businesses to capture emerging FMCG opportunities. In practice that means the distribution muscle, the agri sourcing backbone and the packaging arm are meant to make each new FMCG brand cheaper and faster to scale than a standalone competitor could manage. If your recommendation ignores that structural advantage, you are recommending something any FMCG company could do, which is not what ITC asked for.
The competitive pressure is also worth naming. Regional challengers and direct to consumer brands are attacking single categories with sharper price points and faster launches, quick commerce has rearranged how urban households buy groceries, and general trade still carries the bulk of volume in most categories. A Trade Marketing and Distribution case at ITC almost always sits somewhere in that tension between the traditional retail network and the new channels.
Six moves that separate finalists
How to write seven slides that read like a field plan
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Do actual market working before you open PowerPoint
Visit four outlets near your campus. A kirana, a self service store, a chemist and a quick commerce dark store if you can get near one. Count ITC facings against competitors, note the pack sizes stocked, ask the retailer which brand's salesman visits most often. Two hours of this gives you observations no competitor's secondary research can match, and it is literally what the criteria call market understanding.
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Prepare the aptitude round like it is a placement test
Forty five minutes of DI, LR and QA is where the field halves before anyone reads a single idea. Two weeks of timed sectional practice at fifteen minutes per section is a far higher return on effort than another day of ITC research, because no amount of case brilliance rescues you from a failed Round 1.
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Push every calculation into the annexure
Supporting Excels and references do not count against your five to seven slides. Build the sizing, the channel economics and the source list in an annexure and reference it from the deck. The slides then carry only the decision, the logic and the numbers that matter, which is exactly what effective communication is being scored on.
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Answer in TM and D language, not brand language
Reach, numeric and weighted distribution, outlet coverage, lines per call, salesman productivity, retailer margin, secondary sales, stock turns. Using the vocabulary of the function you are being hired into signals you understand the job. A deck full of positioning maps and campaign concepts signals you were preparing for a different company.
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Make the plan implementable in a quarter
Plan feasibility is a named criterion. Attach a rough timeline, name who executes each step, state what it costs and flag the two things most likely to go wrong. A recommendation with an owner and a risk is a plan. Without them it is a suggestion, and panels have heard enough suggestions.
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Rehearse the Q and A, not the presentation
The campus final panel already has your deck. What they are testing is whether your numbers survive a challenge. Write down the five hardest questions your own assumptions invite, answer each in under a minute out loud, and know which assumption you would defend and which you would concede. Conceding one cleanly earns more credibility than defending everything badly.
Resources worth an evening of your time
Official links and where Season 4 will show up
These are the sources worth your time. Click each link to open it in a new tab.
The complete round structure, eligibility list, submission guidelines, evaluation criteria and terms. This is the authoritative source and where Season 4 will be posted.
The leadership session covering careers at ITC and, more usefully, what the company expects from the case study. Effectively the rubric in the panel's own words.
Segment reporting, brand portfolio and the annual report. Pull your revenue and category numbers from here rather than from news articles, and cite them in the annexure.
Useful for the campus final, where you present in person to an ITC panel and the Q and A carries as much weight as the deck.
Click on each link above to read the official guidelines before you plan your entry.
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✓ Mentor review of your seven slide deck and annexure before you submit
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All details in this article are based on the official ITC Emerging Managers Awards Season 3 listing on Grad Partners and publicly available information as of the publication date. Registrations closed on 17 August 2026 and the case study submission window closed on 31 August 2026. Eligibility, eligible institutes, dates, rewards, round structures, prize pool and pre-placement interview opportunities may change at the discretion of ITC Limited or the event organizers. Please verify all information on the official listing before applying to any future edition. AceMBA is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially connected to ITC Limited or Grad Partners. This guide is for informational and preparatory purposes only.
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