Wharton’s MBA Deferred Admission Program Expanding
Promising undergraduate students outside of the University of Pennsylvania will now have a chance to participate in The Wharton School MBA deferred admissions program. This adds to the Wharton School’s existing Moelis Advance Access Program for UPenn undergraduates and the MBA sub-matriculation program for Wharton undergraduates.
Continue reading…Wharton Talks Marketing Lessons Learned from Payless Publicity Stunt
What would you do and what would you think if you paid hundreds of dollars for shoes that sell for less than $20? That’s the dilemma that faced a select group of social media influencers who were invited to a private launch party for Italian shoe designer Bruno Palessi. What they found out later was that the hundreds of dollars they thought they spent on fancy footwear was just a ruse by Payless ShoeSource.
It was all part of a marketing ploy by Payless to highlight their new shoes and inexpensive designs. The question that’s on everyone’s minds now is, “Did the stunt work?” According to Wharton Marketing Professor Barbara Kahn and Lehigh University Assistant Marketing Professor Ludovica Cesareo, it was an elaborate ploy that paid off big time.
In the most recent Knowledge@Wharton radio show podcast on Sirius XM, the professors discussed what marketers could learn from the success of Payless.
Plan Ahead
A prank like the one Payless pulled off takes lots of planning of every single detail. The marketing team had to make sure nothing was missed if they were going to dupe their influencers, and they got it right.
“They did an incredible execution,” Kahn said. “The location they picked, the way the store was set up, the way they filmed it, the way they highlighted the shoes themselves while hiding the original brand and [adding] this very clean black-and-white logo. They did a fantastic job, from Payless’s perspective.”
Perception Frames Reality
The Payless shoes that the influencers were presented were no different than you’d find in any of their other stores, but by changing their location, packaging, and environmental clues, they made the influencers think that what they were getting was luxury. Payless proved that fancy packaging and clouding the judgment of a consumer can impact how they evaluate quality. The reality is that shoe quality won’t be revealed until weeks of wearing them.
Social Media is Powerful
Payless utilized the power of social media to get their stunt out to a huge audience and generate buzz. They realized that social media influencers could be just as powerful if not more powerful than retail marketers, fashion journalists, and designers in getting the word out to consumers. Social media is also why the prank worked so well. “They made something surprising and emotional, and therefore it’s much more likely to be posted,” Kahn said.
Publicity is Priceless
Payless has had poor publicity for a while now, but the stunt helped to turn things around and garner the company good press that they’d severely lacked in recent months.
“There are two things you want to get” from this kind of stunt, Kahn said. “The first thing is to build [positive brand] awareness. Payless has been in the news for very bad reasons recently — a lot of stores are closing down; it’s facing bankruptcy. It’s all been negative press. This is really turning the press around.”
Don’t Expect Long-Term Change
However, in the end, both Kahn and Cesareo don’t think that the stunt will impact Payless stores in the long term. While it might help bring in young customers who may not have shopped there before, Payless stores are still cluttered and unappealing compared to the fake store, so the long-term customer experience won’t impact sales.
Still, both Kahn and Cesareo agree that Payless got a lot of “bang for their buck” with the stunt.
This Wharton marketing article has been edited and republished from its original source, Clear Admit.
Wharton Welcomes its MBA Class of 2020
With students in the Wharton MBA Class of 2020 settling on campus, Deputy Vice Dean Maryellen Reilly took to the school’s MBA Admissions Blog to welcome the new class.
The Wharton MBA Class of 2020
Although application volume is down, the average GMAT score rose to the school’s previous record high of 732. This score matched the Wharton MBA Class of 2017.
“This class is an impressive collection of leaders from all walks of life, backgrounds, nationalities, industry experiences, and ambitions,” Reilly writes. “These newest members of the Wharton community bring with them a wide-range of perspectives to enrich their shared experiences both in and outside of the classroom.”
Application volume fell by 6.7 percent, dropping from 6,692 to 6,245. But here Wharton is in good company.
It is difficult to find a leading U.S. school reporting that applications were increasing measurably year over year. The vast majority are sharing that numbers are decreasing, or at best remaining steady.
Perhaps one of the biggest shifts between last year’s class and this year’s is the uptick in humanities undergrads, increasing to 45 percent from 41 percent. Students with STEM backgrounds make up another 29 percent of the class, trailing those in business, at 26 percent.
Around 33 percent of the incoming class is international, increasing from 32 percent last year. Although students this year hail from 80 different countries, compared to just 65 one year ago. U.S. students of color make up another third of this year’s class, not changing from last year.
There are 862 students in the Class of 2020, one shy of the previous class. The percentage of female students slipped one point, to 43 percent.
In terms of prior work experience, former consultants outnumber all others by a considerable margin, making up 27 percent of the class, up from 26 percent last year. The next-largest group, at 13 percent, comes from private equity/venture capital, with 10 percent of tech students following closely.
For the whole view of the Class of 2020, check out the Wharton profile here. As well, get familiar with the school’s MBA programs here.
This article has been edited and republished with permissions from our sister site, Clear Admit.
Which Business School Students Have the Top GMAT Scores?
A strong GMAT score is essential to a stellar business school application. Though the score is universally important to admission, certain schools emphasize a high score on the test more than others. Below, we’ve laid out a list of the 10 business schools with the top GMAT scores for incoming students.
Drexel Culinary Collaborations and First Place Finishes — Philly News
With so much news happening in Philly business schools, it’s understandable if you need a hand catching up. Here’s your Philly news brief.
Drexel EMBA Class Spurs Culinary Collaboration — LeBow News
Thanks to his Drexel LeBow College of Business EMBA class, chef and restaurateur Kevin Sbraga has found a way back into the kitchen. Sbraga, a chef with prior business experience in the Philadelphia area, came up with the idea for a one-day pop-up kitchen in a Business Problem Solving class taught by associate clinical professor of management Suresh Chandran.
According to a news story on the Drexel website:
“We were talking about innovation as a disrupter, and that made me start to think about how the real estate landscape is changing for retail as well as restaurants,” Sbraga says. “I reached out to a hospitality buddy of mine who has some experience in the tech field. I asked him, ‘How can we create a virtual restaurant? A restaurant experience without the brick and mortar,’ and his response was ‘delivery’.”
Sbraga was one of the first restaurateurs in the city to adopt the now-popular food delivery app Caviar, helping deliver the first batches of Nashville hot chicken to Philly for a special one-day event. “The Hot Chicken was far and away the best-selling dish from The Fat Ham’s menu on Caviar. It was widely regarded as some of the best hot chicken outside of Nashville, so featuring it was an easy choice,” a Caviar spokesperson said.
LeBow EMBA grad and chef Kevin Sbraga was one of the first in the city of Philadelphia to help introduce the now-popular food delivery app Caviar.
You can read more about Sbraga’s food and pop-up concept here.
Penn State Smeal MBAs place first in Fisher Invitational Big Ten+ MBA Case Competition — Penn State Smeal News
Four Penn State Smeal MBAs recently took first place in the Fisher Invitational Big Ten+ MBA Case Competition at Ohio State. The team of first-year students were coached by Nancy Mahon, clinical associate professor of business communication.
Teams had 24 hours to develop a comprehensive pitch outlining concrete recommendations to address the challenges facing Bob Evans restaurant chain. Competition judges included key Bob Evans senior leadership as well as executives from other corporations. The Smeal squad defeated teams from Illinois and Wisconsin in first round before beating second-place Purdue and third-place Michigan State in the finals.
“I’m extremely impressed with our team’s efforts and professionalism,” Mahon said. “I’m especially proud of our students’ representation of Smeal.”
You can read more about the recent Penn State Smeal event here.
Is It Possible to Change Bad Behavior – Permanently? – Knowledge@Wharton
The recently-created Behavior Change for Good Initiative course at The Wharton School, taught by celebrated UPenn professor Angela Duckworth and Wharton’s own Katherine Milkman, looks at the quality of daily living in a broad and curious way.
In the most recent Knowledge@Wharton podcast episode, the two discuss the program’s vast social experiment angles, asking how people can change bad or not-well-liked behavior on a permanent scale. This includes the launch of the StepUp program with fitness chain 24 Hour Fitness. “Duckworth and Milkman are hoping to recruit hundreds of thousands of current and new members of the chain to sign up for the program,” they explain “Those who do will become part of a large-scale tournament in which scientists have developed 57 different paths they hope will lead to positive behavior change.”
“We want to see which ideas truly yield the biggest changes in behavior, not just during the course of the program, which is 28 days, but also in the year following it.”
You can check out the most recent podcast episode here.
Wharton Professor Talks About the Major Hurdles in Marijuana Legalization
The marijuana industry is on the top of the minds of policymakers across the United States. There are so many things to consider, one of the most critical policies being banking regulation. And with former Republican Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, John Boehner, as a confounding new pro-marijuana spokesman, it seems as if there’s never been a more apt time to discuss marijuana legalization and policy.
That’s why University of Pennsylvania Wharton School professor Peter Conti-Brown dove deep into the marijuana industry to discuss the many policy barriers that are causing issues. In particular, he looked how the government’s current stance on marijuana is causing more trouble than it’s solving when it comes to banking. Continue reading…
