First Edition · 5 Select B-Schools · Deadline 15 July
Marico Level Up Season 1 · Complete Preparation Guide
Marico just launched
their first-ever competition
for first-year students.
If you are at one of the five eligible colleges, this is one of the most valuable competitions you can enter this year. Not just for the prize money or the PPI. For what competing in a Marico business challenge tells recruiters about how seriously you take FMCG as a domain, and how early.
Start here, check if you are even eligible
Before anything else. Level Up Season 1 is open to first-year students from five specific b-schools only. This is an intentionally limited launch. If you are not at one of these five colleges, this competition is not for you in Season 1. Mark it for next year when Marico will likely expand the college list, and note that Over The Wall, Marico's flagship competition for all marketing students, will open to a broader pool later this year.
IIM Kozhikode
IIM Shillong
IMT Ghaziabad
SPJIMR Mumbai
XLRI Jamshedpur
If you are eligible, why this matters more than it might seem
Marico is one of India's most respected FMCG companies, Parachute, Saffola, Livon, Set Wet, Beardo, and over a dozen other household brands sit in their portfolio. They are known in the marketing world for genuine innovation, consumer-first thinking, and a culture that rewards intellectual curiosity. Historically they have hired strongly from b-schools for sales and marketing roles, and a PPI from a competition like this is as warm as a placement introduction gets. The college list for Season 1 is small, which means the competition is limited and your probability of advancing is meaningfully higher than in open national competitions with 8,000 participants.
The competition at a glance
Marico Level Up · Season 1 · 2026
A real business challenge from one of India's most innovative FMCG companies
Individual participation · 5 colleges · Deadline 15 July 2026
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What you can win
Pre-Placement Interview (PPI) opportunities for top performers, plus a prize pool of Rs 2.25 Lakhs for top 3 winners. The PPI is the real prize, a direct, priority interview pathway at Marico before standard placement season begins.
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Timeline
Registration and screening questions open now. Business case submission window open now. Both close 15 July 2026, 11:59 PM. Grand Finale at Marico HQ for top 8 finalists.
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Format
Three rounds: Registration and behavioural screening → Live business case submission (2-3 slide PPT) → Grand Finale at Marico HQ with senior leadership.
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Watch before you apply
Marico has shared a Launch Session recording explaining the challenge, what evaluators look for, and how to approach it. Access it by clicking "Enter" on the competition page on Unstop. Watch this before you submit your behavioural answers.
Register on Unstop →
The Marico context, understand who you are competing for
Why Marico, why now,
and what they look for in people
Marico has built a 30-year track record of creating consumer goods brands that outlast trends because they are built on genuine consumer insight rather than advertising muscle. Parachute did not win the coconut oil market through media spend, it won through distribution depth and a consistent promise to a specific consumer. Saffola did not survive the edible oil commoditisation because it was cheapest, it survived because it owned the health-conscious consumer relationship. This is a company that thinks about brands the way good brand managers think, not the way financial engineers think.
Historically, Marico has been a strong hiring destination for MBA students targeting FMCG marketing and sales roles. Their campus hiring is known for being merit-driven and process-thorough. The people they bring in tend to stay longer than average because the culture genuinely rewards commercial thinking, consumer empathy, and, this is the word that comes up consistently when Marico people talk about what they value, thought leadership.
Thought leadership at Marico means something specific. It is not about being the loudest voice in the room. It is about demonstrating that you have a distinctive, well-reasoned perspective on a business or consumer problem, one that goes beyond the obvious and pushes the conversation forward. In your application questions, in your case submission, and if you reach the Grand Finale, in your presentation to senior leaders, the question they are asking is: does this person think, or do they just execute?
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Innovation mindset
Marico has consistently launched innovative product extensions and business models. They look for candidates who do not default to obvious solutions and who can identify non-linear opportunities in mature categories.
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Consumer centricity
Every strong Marico candidate can talk about consumers as real people, not demographic segments. What they buy, why they switch, what they believe about their choices, how their behaviour is changing.
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Commercial thinking
Beautiful brand ideas that do not generate margin are not Marico's style. They want candidates who can hold both the creative and commercial lens simultaneously, brand-building that shows up in the P&L.
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Thought leadership
A distinctive, well-reasoned perspective on a problem, not just analysis, but a point of view. Candidates who can articulate why they believe something, not just what they believe, stand out in Marico's process.
Marico Over The Wall, the flagship competition and why Level Up matters
Before we go into the rounds, it is worth understanding where Level Up sits in Marico's competition ecosystem. Over The Wall is Marico's flagship case competition, a nationally known FMCG marketing challenge that has been running for years and is one of the most prestigious b-school competitions in the consumer goods space. It opens to a broader college pool and runs typically in the second half of the academic year.
Level Up is Marico's first attempt at engaging with first-year students specifically, before they have done their SIP, before they have formed their domain preferences firmly, and before the standard recruitment season begins. The college list is deliberately small for Season 1. Think of this as Marico testing how early they can identify talent and build relationships, and creating an exclusive early pathway for students at these five colleges to get a head start.
If you are at one of the five colleges and you are considering a marketing or FMCG career, this is not a "nice to have" competition. This is the competition you should be focused on right now.
"Level Up is not just a competition. It is Marico's earliest signal of who they want to talk to before placement season opens. Getting shortlisted here is worth more than the prize money."
Round 1, Registration and screening: the round that most students underestimate
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Round 1 · Open now, closes 15 July
Registration and Behavioural Screening
This round requires you to answer a set of behavioural and application questions designed to help Marico understand who you are beyond your resume. These responses are explicitly part of the overall evaluation, not just a formality to complete before the case submission. Marico has stated that Round 1 responses will be considered alongside the case in the final shortlisting decision. Treat every question like a mini essay question in a fellowship application. The quality of your thinking here matters.
Watch the Launch Session recording before answering. Marico explains what evaluators look for and how to approach the challenge effectively. This is free intelligence about the evaluation criteria and almost no one watches it before submitting.
The single biggest mistake in Round 1
Treating the application questions as a registration form and rushing through them in 15 minutes. These are behavioural questions, the same type used in personal interviews, and they are being read by Marico's talent team to decide who sees the live business case. Vague, generic answers that could apply to any FMCG company will be filtered out quickly. Specific, well-reasoned answers that demonstrate genuine consumer and brand thinking will progress.
How to approach the behavioural questions
Since this is Season 1, the exact questions are not publicly known in advance. But based on Marico's hiring philosophy, the kinds of questions they typically use to assess first-year MBA candidates, and the specific language in the competition brief, here is how to think about the types of questions you will face and the angle to bring to each.
Questions about why you want to work in FMCG or consumer goods
Do not give the textbook answer about FMCG being a "people-facing, high-impact industry." Go specific. Which brands have you observed with genuine curiosity? What consumer behaviour change have you noticed in your own life or family that made you think differently about a category? The candidates who stand out have a lived relationship with FMCG, not just an academic interest in it.
ChatGPT prompt to try: "I am applying to Marico's Level Up competition. They value consumer centricity, innovation, and thought leadership. Help me frame my answer to why I want to work in FMCG in a way that reflects Marico's company DNA. Here is my raw answer: [paste your answer]. Make it more specific and authentic without making it sound like I'm listing their values back at them."
Questions about your leadership or initiative experience
Marico is specifically looking for evidence of thought leadership, which means examples where you did not just execute a task but identified a problem others had missed, developed a perspective, and drove action based on that perspective. Your story should show the thinking behind the doing, not just the doing. A project where you changed the direction based on an insight you had is stronger than a project where you delivered excellent work that was already defined.
Connect your experience to consumer or market thinking wherever you can. "When I led the campus marketing club, I noticed that our events were attracting the same 30 students, I questioned whether we were solving for club members or for brand reach, which changed how we designed the next campaign" is better than "I led the campus marketing club and organised six successful events."
Questions about a brand, product, or consumer insight that interests you
If there is a question asking about a brand you admire or a consumer trend you find interesting, ideally pick something from the FMCG space, and ideally Marico's own portfolio or adjacent categories. Show that you have thought about the "why" behind the brand, not just the "what." The candidates who say "I find Saffola's evolution from heart health to total wellness interesting because it demonstrates how a brand can expand its permission without losing its core identity" are showing brand thinking, not brand familiarity.
Questions about innovation or solving a business problem
Innovation is core to Marico's identity, they use language about "stepping beyond classroom frameworks" and "developing consumer-centric solutions" deliberately. When answering innovation questions, the framework that works is: what was the consumer insight you started with, how did it challenge an existing assumption, what did you propose differently as a result. Even if your example is from a non-FMCG context, structuring it around a consumer insight demonstrates the thinking they are looking for.
Using ChatGPT to prepare your answers, the right way
The application questions are personalised to you, your experiences, your perspective, your story. ChatGPT cannot write them for you in any meaningful sense. What it can do is help you align your framing with Marico's company DNA.
The process: write your raw answer first, capturing what you genuinely want to say. Then paste it into ChatGPT with the prompt: "I am applying to Marico's Level Up competition. Marico values consumer centricity, innovation thinking, commercial acumen, and thought leadership. Here is my answer to [question]. Please review it for alignment with these values and suggest where I can be more specific or sharper in my reasoning, without changing my voice or adding things I did not experience." Use the suggestions to sharpen, not replace. The answer must still be yours, because in the Grand Finale, you will be asked to elaborate on everything you submitted.
What your CV and profile need to say, the FMCG lens
How to position yourself
before the evaluators read your answers
Alongside the application questions, your profile will be visible to Marico's evaluators. Here is how to think about your CV in the context of a company that hires for sales, marketing, and innovation roles in FMCG.
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Lead with sales or marketing results, with numbers
Marico has historically hired for sales and marketing roles. If you have any pre-MBA experience in sales, marketing, brand, distribution, retail, or customer-facing roles, those bullets should lead your experience section and be the most quantified entries on your CV. Revenue driven, customers acquired, campaign results, growth percentages. Numbers are not optional here.
Instead of "Managed social media accounts for the brand", "Grew Instagram following 75% in 6 months through content strategy redesign; improved engagement rate from 1.4% to 3.9%"
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Highlight any innovation signals, even small ones
Innovation is a major touchpoint for Marico. If there is anywhere in your experience where you identified a problem others had not noticed and solved it in an unconventional way, that belongs on the CV with prominence. It does not need to be a product launch. It can be a process improvement, a new campaign mechanic, a customer segment nobody had considered. The pattern they are looking for is: saw something others missed, thought about it differently, did something about it.
"Identified pricing sensitivity pattern among Tier 3 retail accounts overlooked by team; proposed tiered promotional calendar that increased quarterly volumes by 18%"
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Add FMCG-specific vocabulary to your bullets where honest
Evaluators at FMCG companies read CVs with a specific vocabulary in mind: numeric distribution, weighted distribution, market share, category penetration, consumer insight, brand health, shopper behaviour, route to market, SKU rationalisation. If your experience touches any of these concepts, even tangentially, use the right terminology. It signals fluency in the language of the industry before you have formally entered it.
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Signal thought leadership through your extracurricular output
If you have written a brand analysis, published a marketing case study, led a consumer research project, or produced any content that demonstrates a perspective on business or consumers, that belongs on the CV. A "published a LinkedIn article on Marico's rural distribution strategy" or "wrote a case analysis on Saffola's health positioning evolution" signals exactly the kind of intellectual engagement with the industry that Marico's evaluators are looking for.
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Case competition results are a strong signal here
Marico's Over The Wall is itself a case competition, and the Level Up format is built around a business challenge. Case competition results, especially FMCG-related ones like HUL LIME, ITC Interrobang, or even Nestlé Genesis, signal directly that you know how to approach the kind of problem Level Up will present. If you have competition results, list them with context: competition name, participant count, and your result.
Round 2, The business case submission
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Round 2 · Live case, closes 15 July
Business Challenge Submission, 2 to 3 Slides
Registered participants receive a live business case from Marico and must develop strategic, actionable recommendations in a 2-3 slide PPT or PDF. The case will involve a real Marico business context, a brand challenge, a consumer problem, a market entry question, or an innovation opportunity. Since this is Season 1, the exact case type is unknown in advance. But the evaluation criteria are explicitly stated: relevance to Marico's business context, depth of consumer and market understanding, quality and practicality of recommendations, structure and clarity of thought, and data-backed rationale with business impact.
Three slides is a tight format. This is not a constraint, it is a test. The students who can make a compelling, evidence-backed recommendation in three slides demonstrate exactly the clarity of thinking Marico is looking for. Do not try to fit a ten-slide argument into three slides by shrinking the font. Think harder and say less.
The slide structure that works for a 2-3 slide submission
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Situation and Insight
Frame the business problem clearly, what is happening, why it matters, and what the one consumer or market insight is that defines your approach. This slide sets up everything that follows. The header should state the insight, not describe the situation. End this slide at the point where your recommendation feels necessary and logical.
Essential
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Recommendation and Rationale
State your recommendation clearly and specifically. Not "Marico should invest in digital marketing", "Marico should reposition Livon as a daily hair care ritual product targeting working women 25-35 in Tier 1 cities, using a micro-influencer led content strategy that builds category habit before category loyalty." Then two or three supporting evidence points, data-backed, specific, and directly tied to your recommendation. Show why this is better than the obvious alternative.
Essential
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Implementation and Impact
How does this actually happen, key actions, rough timeline, and measurable outcomes. What does success look like in 12 months? Acknowledge the biggest risk and how you mitigate it. A financial dimension, even directional, signals commercial thinking. This slide separates students who understand brand strategy from students who also understand how businesses run.
High value
What makes a Marico submission stand out, from their own evaluation criteria
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Consumer centricity, start with the consumer, not the company
Every strong Marico submission starts with a consumer truth, not a market overview. Who is the consumer you are solving for? What do they actually believe about this category? What behaviour are you trying to change or reinforce? The students who begin with data about the market size and then work backwards to a consumer recommendation score less well than those who start from a human insight and build outward.
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Innovation, do not recommend what already exists
Marico's entire identity is built on brand innovation. A recommendation that says "increase TV advertising spend" or "expand distribution to Tier 2 cities" will not impress evaluators who have been thinking about these options for years. Find the non-obvious angle. What is the insight that most people miss? What assumption does your recommendation challenge? The format asks for innovation, take it seriously.
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Commercial impact, make the numbers work
Beautiful brand ideas without commercial grounding are not Marico's style. Include a directional financial model, rough revenue opportunity, cost estimate, payback period, or market share implication. You do not need perfect numbers. You need numbers that are logically derived and that show you understand the commercial stakes of the recommendation. The evaluation criteria explicitly include "data-backed rationale and business impact."
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Thought leadership, have a point of view
This is the hardest one to teach and the most important. A thought leadership perspective is not a recommendation, it is the distinctive reasoning behind the recommendation. "We should do X" is a recommendation. "We should do X because the conventional wisdom about this consumer is wrong in the following specific way, and that error is the market opportunity everyone else is missing" is thought leadership. Write the version of your submission that only you could write because only you had this specific insight.
The FMCG simulation connection
If you have been preparing for the Coca-Cola Mantra Challenge simulation round, that preparation is directly relevant here. Both competitions are FMCG-context challenges that reward commercial thinking, distribution understanding, and P&L awareness. The FMCG fundamentals you built for Mantra, distribution channels, trade promotions, market share logic, consumer segmentation, apply directly to a Marico business challenge. Read the Mantra simulation guide alongside this one. The thinking transfers.
Round 3, The Grand Finale at Marico HQ
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Grand Finale · Top 8 finalists · Marico HQ
Live Presentation to Senior Marico Leadership
The top 8 finalists travel to Marico HQ and present their analysis and recommendations to senior Marico leaders. Since this is Season 1, the exact format of the finale has not been described in detail. Based on Marico's approach in Over The Wall and their stated competition design, the finale will likely involve a live presentation of your case submission followed by a Q&A with the leadership panel, possibly with a fresh brief or an extension of the original case. The PPI opportunities for top performers make this the most consequential round.
If you advance to the finale, prepare to defend every assumption in your submission. Senior FMCG leaders are skilled at identifying where your numbers are soft or your consumer insight is assumed rather than evidenced. The students who advance confidently are the ones who can say "I assumed X because of Y data, and here is what would need to be true for my recommendation to fail", not the ones who have memorised a pitch.
How to prepare, the practical timeline before 15 July
You have until 15 July for both the application questions and the case submission. Here is how to use that time well.
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Day 1, Watch the Launch Session recording
Marico has provided a recording that explains the competition, what evaluators look for, and how to approach the challenge. This is the closest thing to inside information you will get for free. Watch it before writing a single word of your application. Take notes on specific phrases the evaluators use, those are signals about evaluation criteria.
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Days 1 to 3, Deep dive into Marico's brand portfolio and strategy
Spend two to three hours building your Marico knowledge base: annual report highlights, recent brand launches, their digital-first initiatives (Beardo, True Elements), the Saffola transformation story, how they have managed the Parachute franchise in a commoditising category. Read at least two Case studies or analyses on Marico's strategy. This knowledge will make your application answers specific and your case submission credible.
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Days 3 to 5, Draft and refine your application answers
Write first drafts of your answers to every application question. Then review them through the Marico DNA lens: does each answer show consumer insight, innovation thinking, or commercial judgment? Use the ChatGPT framing prompt described earlier to sharpen without replacing. Get one peer to read your answers and tell you which one feels the most specific and authentic, then make the others match that standard.
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Days 5 to 12, Build your case submission
When the live case is released, spend the first two hours just understanding it before touching a slide. Map the consumer insight, map the market context, form a hypothesis before committing to a recommendation. Then build the three slides with the structure above. Get feedback from a peer or mentor on whether the recommendation is specific enough and whether the consumer insight is genuinely original or just obvious with better vocabulary.
AceMBA · AceCase Pro · Super100
The toolkit our winning teams actually use.
AceCase Pro is our dedicated case competition program, sharpened by AcePrep Pro domain depth and delivered inside the Super100 cohort. Every session is recorded, so joining mid-way still gives you the full playbook.
- ✦ 30+ competition-tested frameworks and PPT templates, the same toolkit our winning teams reach for
- ✦ A private cohort of 100 ambitious MBAs across 30+ B-schools, real peer learning and team formation for competitions
- ✦ Case-solving sessions covering the exact frameworks winning submissions rely on
- ✦ Deep dives into real competitions, including consumer and FMCG playbooks from past national finalists
- ✦ AcePrep Pro Marketing and Sales masterclasses, consumer behaviour, brand strategy and go-to-market fundamentals
- ✦ 1:1 mentorship from seniors who have interned or worked at consumer companies like HUL, Nestlé, Marico and P&G
To close
Marico Level Up is a first-of-its-kind opportunity at five specific colleges, and the limited pool means your probability of advancing is genuinely higher than in national open competitions. The students who will reach Marico HQ will be the ones who treated the application questions seriously from day one, built a case submission that started with a real consumer insight, and demonstrated the kind of distinctive, commercially grounded thinking that Marico has always hired for.
Check your eligibility. Watch the Launch Session. Write your application answers with Marico's DNA in mind. And when the live case arrives, resist the temptation to reach for the obvious solution. The obvious solution is what everyone submits. Find the insight that only someone paying close attention would see.
That is what thought leadership looks like in practice. That is what Marico is looking for.
