Bloomington Brands (B2) is a limited liability company based in Bloomington, IN. It enables two very special organizations, The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company (Marysville, OH) and the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University (Bloomington, IN), to provide resident business school students with real-world marketing experience.

The brand we manage is Osmocote® Plant Food. Scotts owns the trademark and provides essential business functions like R&D, purchasing, manufacturing, inventory control, sales, order fulfillment, and collections. B2 handles marketing functions such as brand strategy, consumer communications, trade and consumer promotional activities, sizing, pricing, product content, and packaging.

A key benefit of the arrangement for Scotts is intense exposure to the marketing students at Kelley. This is valuable because Kelley attracts some of the best marketing talent in the country – the school is currently rated by the Wall Street Journal as the #1 MBA school for brand management in America.

From a Kelley student perspective, working at B2 is an experience that cannot be gained at any other institution. Brand team members actively participate, real-time, in the management of a broadly distributed product for one academic year. Projects range from creating a new SKU or display unit to the management of a consumer mail-in rebate promotion.

Students with B2 experience apparently make excellent employee prospects because those that don’t migrate to Scotts have selected, so far, to work for General Mills, Kellogg’s, Eli Lilly, Nestle, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft, and Procter & Gamble – to name a few.

Throughout the program year, students are mentored and guided by Bob Stohler, who owns and operates B2. Bob is a retired Executive Officer from Scotts, where he managed that company's $1.5 billion North American business unit. Prior to Scotts, Bob was President, Rubbermaid Europe, and before that, Vice President and CFO of Synthes North America. He also has experience at SC Johnson (13 years) and Procter & Gamble (10 years).