Building Your Bayer Career with an MBA
The pharmaceutical and biotech industries are rife with opportunities for b-school students. Competition among brands and rapid technological development make can make having an MBA an exceptionally worthwhile advantage.
Cornell FinTech Disruption, Crowd-Funding Wisdom, and More – New York News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from New York City business schools this week.
Fintech is Disrupting the Disruptors, and We’re Ready For It – Johnson School of Management Blog
S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management MBA candidate Arjun Devgan, ’18, highlighted how FinTech inventions such as cryptocurrencies, peer-to-peer lending, and smart insurance have begun to disrupt a post-PayPal landscape, which at one point disrupted traditional banking.
Devgan writes about two Cornell Tech intensives designed to “equip students to solve business problems in this age of digital transformation:” the digital marketing intensive and the fintech intensive.
“With my background in payments and remittances, the fintech intensive program offered me a launchpad to dive deep into the world of financial technology. Classes such as the Fintech Practicum, Business Models, Cryptocurrencies, and a Field Project with one of Citi Ventures’ portfolio companies offer a great combination of basic theoretical concepts and real-world experiential learning.”
Learn more about Johnson’s FinTech and Digital Marketing Intensives here.
Want People to Fund your Kickstarter Project? Sell Them on Your Reputation First – Binghamton School of Management Blog
Binghamton School of Management associate professor Ali Alper Yayla presented a new paper at the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, which found that potential Kickstarter backers are more concerned about a producer’s “ethical characteristics than their actual ability to make and deliver the product.” Professor Yayla writes:
“We found that people worry more about the seller’s honesty than whether the seller actually has the ability and knowledge to finish and deliver on the product. People don’t want sellers to just take their money and run. Crowdfunding is interesting because you’re literally buying something that isn’t finished from a person who has never made it before. There are no product reviews, and there are no seller reviews.”
Read more about Yayla’s research here.
Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook’s Mess? – Forbes
In Len Sherman’s recent Forbes article “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook’s Mess?”, the Columbia Business School executive in residence and adjunct professor noted the company’s seemingly astounding naivety of how much information was secretly (or not so secretly) being scrubbed for use by third party companies like Cambridge Analytica.
“It’s been hard to fathom how a company reputed to be run by one of the world’s most brilliant digirati, could have been so naïve in not recognizing the risks in giving outside developers broad access to Facebook’s user data, so lax in failing to ensure that rogue data in malevolent hands was destroyed before it could be weaponized, and so reluctant to advise users that their personal information was (and still is) floating around cyberspace. In short, what was Mark Zuckerberg thinking?”
Sherman theorizes that part of the issue is Zuckerberg’s sincere overconfidence that technology and innovation can only be used for a greater good, rather than being possibly manipulated by less-than-ideal forces. This, Sherman continues, was all done despite a litany of data that proved Facebook’s nefarious actors and less-than-strict partnerships were actively making the platform less safe year by year.
Click here to see the rest of Sherman’s work with Forbes.
These Rutgers MBA Students are Trying to Get Millennials Back Into Bread
Ah, millennials, the capital death swarm destroying unlovable chain restaurants, housing, napkins, beer, golf, diamonds, the banking industry, and Sears, among other things, has moved onto the bread industry like a blind cavalcade of killer bees. Allegedly.
To combat the ceaseless destruction of our much beloved … bread … MBA students at the Rutgers Business School recently helped out local company Hudson Bread , a North Bergen artisanal bakery, to raise brand awareness among the demographic.
Hudson Bread collaborated with Dean Lei Lei and Assistant Professors of Professional Practice Erich Toncre and Marc Kalan to “organize a competition that would challenge students to create a branding strategy” for the company, which “captured the essence of the company, from its ownership to the quality of its ingredients,” according to Hudson Bread’s VP of operations Ray Million.
Rutgers marketing and supply chain major Kristen Tse, along with Brian Lilien, Alyssa Nungra and Akshay Patel, took home the $6,000 grand prize for a campaign strategy that would “refresh the company’s social media accounts and use Google Adwords to make its digital marketing more effective,” while calling on Hudson Bread to “play up its organic qualities.”
RBS winners Akshay Patel, Alyssa Nungra, Brian Lilien and Kristen Tse/Photo via Rutgers
Toncre explains, “[Students] have a great opportunity to apply what they learned in the classroom in developing a marketing campaign to increase the brand awareness and engagement for a “real life” client and see the results in “real time.”
Hudson Bread president Mark Kolodziej writes, “There are a lot of agencies we could have hired, but we wanted something unique.”
MIT Sloan Hosts Talk About the Modern Value of Old-School Advertising
Even for newer customers, there is an undeniable value in the old methods of advertising, according to cycling startup Peloton Senior Brand Marketing VP Carolyn Tisch Blodgett, who recently spoke at MIT Sloan.
Founded in 2012, Peloton makes a high-end exercise bike that livestreams indoor cycling classes—sort of like your own private FlyWheel. According to Blodgett, Peloton is vertically integrated, which means that “employees design the hardware, the software, teach the classes, and even deliver the bikes.”
Largely through word-of-mouth, Peloton’s revenues exploded to $137.5 million in just four short years, which placed the company atop Crain’s Fast 50 list. Despite this rapid, significant growth, Peloton is trying to reach a broader audience beyond its base of “affluent suburban women” (see sticker price: $1,995 plus $39 per month subscription fee).
Digital advertising is just one part of Peloton’s overall marketing strategy—one that Blodgett believes becomes increasingly “more expensive and less effective” once you understand that every company is buying on Facebook in 2017.
Speaking recently at the MIT Sloan Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, Blodgett explained that Peloton has begun to “invest in offline channels” like TV commercials, radio spots, billboards, direct mail, and 29 new brick-and-mortar showrooms to build a “community of those for whom fitness is a core value.” She explains, “We’re always testing new media channels.” Especially channels that maximize the ability for consumers to have hands-on experience with the product. “Trying the bike is a really important part of the purchase journey.”
With the holiday shopping season in full swing, Blodgett explained the company’s newest commercial, saying “We spend a lot of time showing the product, but my favorite part is the scene where the daughter is riding a tricycle and looks up at mom on the bike. That’s an emotional side of the product, and we’ve never really told that story before.”
You can find out more about Peloton and its luxury services here.
Lehigh Explores Impacts of Paid Search Advertising on Sites Like Yelp
Yelp’s surprisingly durable platform continues to sway consumers’ decisions about who and where to patronize, with 163 million unique monthly visitors.
This is especially true with the advent of paid advertising that appears alongside search results. But what influence does it have on the production end? The Lehigh University College of Business and Economics recently discussed a new study that suggests “paid search advertising can be a profitable investment for small businesses.”
Despite the exponential growth of digital advertising in the past five years, research has uncovered that the effects are actually “limited for branded advertisers since consumers already know and intend to buy from the brand when they search.”
This fact sparked the imaginations of Lehigh economics professor Daisy Dai and Harvard Business School Administration professor Michael Luca who were both interested in understanding “the impact on small businesses whose names are less known and who may gain from an increase in visibility.”
The duo eventually found themselves at the helm of the “largest-scale search advertising experiment run on online platforms in terms of number of businesses involved.” Dai and Luca conducted an experiment in which they took a pool of 18,000 restaurants and randomly assigned free search advertising packages to 7,000 of them, most of which had “not actively advertised on Yelp prior to the experiment.”
According to the article, the researchers examined “page views of the business’ Yelp page, requests for directions, phone calls to the restaurants from Yelp’s mobile page or mobile app, and clicks on the restaurants’ URL on their Yelp page” and compared the “outcome of businesses that did or did not receive free advertising.” The experiment found that “Yelp advertising leads to a 25 percent increase in page views and a 9 to 18 percent increase in purchase intentions, such as direction requests, visits to the restaurant’s website and calls to the restaurant,” according to Dai.
Another insight was related to the number of Yelp reviews each business received, which grew by 5 percent, then “dropped to zero immediately after the advertising period, suggesting ads temporarily raised awareness of businesses that users otherwise would not discover.”
Dai concludes, “Our study finds that an average local restaurant can benefit from search advertising on Yelp. Unlike previous online advertising experiments that usually focus on a few big brands, we yield insights for small businesses.”
6 Stellar London Marketing MBAs
When it comes to marketing, today’s employers want graduates fresh out of business school to bring their A-game, fully prepared to analyze and solve the multi-faceted problem of getting people psyched about their products and services.
