Saturday, July 03, 2004

If Dean of the MBA program was a Marketing professor

Seriously, the school would focus on segmenting its customers: small and medium size companies, banks, VCs, Private Equity, Consultancies, Industry - national and global, establish priorities and develop a clear value proposition for each of them: what does an INSEAD MBA as a new hire can bring to them - how USEFULLY DIFFERENT is it compared to another MBA? The structure of the sales channels (CMS) would be designed to mirror these priorities. In turn, it would select good raw material and develop its product and process to produce something that's wanted from companies, as a very dynamic feedback loop would be created. The school would monitor levels of satisfaction, etc...and number of companies desirous to recruit on campus, or via INSEAD's special relationship program. In fact, it would reuse relationships made during the executive education programs as the school would be organized by segment (across MBA and executive education), although of course, participants in all courses would be mixed to ensure diversity, cross selling and bundling would be possible. This would help a lot also for the organization of National Weeks when students request sponsorship and it would make full use of the richness of contacts and breadth of knowledge brought to school all the time. There would be a lot of internal marketing too, as feedback and new ideas would be encouraged on part of everybody.

Insead would be re-branded IBS (International Business School) and it would seriously crank up its spending on advertising. It would run campaigns in the major business newspapers, features its alumni on National TVs.

It would start versioning its MBA to capture more customer surplus and price discriminate candidates. Insead would launch in 2004 Deluxe MBA, in 2005 Premium MBA and in 2006 MBALite in addition to the MBA Classic Edition in existence today.
Insead would continue to offer executive education of course. There, it would introduce new features, such as Online Learning that would encourage people who have taken a course to continue improve their skills and go through practice exams on the web. It would run two types of models: subscription based for heavy users such as major corporations and pay-per-use for individual.

A HotLine to Prof H. would be open for anyone with an urgent question about their business to a 0865 number, at a cost of 0.15 euros per minute.

In order to attract more women, male professors would teach in Speedos in Singapore and in Lycra costumes in Fontainebleau. Their picture would be published in the advertising material.

Insead would develop a strong copyright policy and any company hiring MBA students from the school would be obliged to post on their website the well-known INSEAD-INSIDE label.

Bidding would also be banned. Instead, students could get access to premium courses and premium professors for a logical price premium and instead of entering their bidding choice, they would be asked to specify their willingness to pay. Professors would get a cut which would act as an incentive for them to get good reviews and perform well.

CMS would offer three levels of services
- CMS for ALL: which is the current level of services, available to all paying participants
- CMS Special: which would add features such as membership to networking associations, access to high flyers in major companies, preferred interview slots to avoid getting up too early or traveling back too late, drinks offered to the interviewee as well as the interviewer
- CMS Ultimate: which would act as Head Hunters and Search Firm.

CMS Special and CMS Ultimate would be available at a premium and open to alumni. Membership-based, renewable yearly and paid in advance of the service.

There would be several types of restaurants and food delivery services to offer a wider choice to Insead participants

- Automatic Machine, ASP 2 euros, serving chocolate bars, crappy sandwiches and sodas
- Fast Food on Campus, a franchise of Quick the famous Belgian Burger brand – ASP 4 euros
- Delivery of basic ethnic food, such as Chinese and Indian curry 24hr a day – ASP 6 euros + 2 euros for delivery
- Brasserie type food serving wine and other traditional dishes – ASP 15 euros
- Upscale restaurant at Le Cercle offering decent dinners – ASP 30 euros per dish, excluding wine and service

There would be numerous surveys throughout the year to monitor participant satisfaction and to test new products. Free Trial periods would be introduced for seriously original offerings. Cross Selling and Bundling with Insead’s local partners such as France Telecom and SingTel would allow participants to purchase for instance and MBA Premium with a year Mobile Phone Subscription at a reduced price.

Insead would seek other partners, outside the academic domain to help with delivering the products: IT, Catering, Telecommunications, Printing, Sports and Fitness services and various other necessary materials would be acquired through very clever deals and revenue sharing schemes. There would be a special efforts around scholarship to enable more people to choose the program. Agreements with the local governments would be signed to allow good tax deductions across the world and encourage further participants to choose Insead.

The school would operate to the highest standards of professionalism and quality and would build everything around participants. Welcome Drinks would be offered on the first day of class and a Farewell Drink would be offered on the last day of class. Class Material would be matched with the type of product (lousy copies for Classic and Lite editions and leather cover binded books for Deluxe and Premium editions). Participants in the Deluxe edition would also get Oakley sunglasses, Parker Fountain Pen, A Palm Pilot, a HP notebook and a set of business cards as a standard welcome package, largely compensated by the increase in their tuition fee. The level of benefits for participants of all editions would be increased.

Parking Lot spaces would not be paid for by all participants but various subscription models or daily-based usage fees would be taken off everyone’s ID card.

Outward Bound Weekends would take place in EuroDisney in Fontainebleau and in Bali in Singapore.

Insead would stick up its wall its new pledge and mission of the various departments.

For instance the IT department would have
-“ we pledge to solve every participant’s problem within 15 minutes”

All in all, participants would have a hell of a time and would be able to enjoy lifelong advantages with the Insead-branded merchandise, the Insead Journal, the Insead Golf Club, the Royal Insead Yacht Club of Lymington, the Insead Cricket Team, Insead United Football Club and various other derivative ventures the goal of which is to maintain high levels of networking among participants and collaborators.

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