680 Teams Forced Z Marketer's Organizers to Become Managers

Z Marketer Season 6, a student-run marketing competition at British University Vietnam, concluded in June after drawing 680 teams and nearly 100 judges and mentors. The scale of the event forced its student organizing committee to rethink how the project operated, the organizers said.

Over three months leading to the June finale, the committee ran four competition rounds, with 25 partner organizations backing the event. The project split work by function early on, with separate student teams for communications, content, sponsorship and judge coordination. Communications recruited participants and content developed campaign materials.

The model worked while registrations followed the expected path. Applications kept climbing, and the project outgrew the structure.

The old division of labor stopped working once the workload multiplied. A delay in one area could set off a chain reaction, forcing changes to judges' schedules and complicating coordination with partners, the organizers said.

Organizers described the change as a shift from execution to management. The new approach meant seeing the project as a whole, deciding proactively rather than waiting for instructions, coordinating progress across teams, balancing limited time and resources, and taking collective responsibility for the competition's outcome.

Hoang Vinh Nhan, project assistant, said the early setup created blind spots. "We realized that focusing only on individual responsibilities made it easy to overlook how one team's work could affect another," Nhan said. "We had to strengthen communication across the organizing committee and ensure everyone understood the bigger picture."