Case Study
Harvard Business School Education Executive Educations: Balancing Online
and Offline Marketing
Case Study
• What is the timelines of the case study?
• What is context of the case study?
• Why Breckling wanted to cease all use of mailed brochures to Promote Shorter Focused Programs?
• Primary Competitors of HBS in Executive Education
• Wharton School, Stanford Graduate School in US; INSEAD & IMD in Europe
• 3 types of programs
• The Comprehensive Leadership Programs (6 to 8 weeks multiyear programs)
• Custom Programs (either at HBS or campus of the firm)
• Focused Programs (3 day to 1 week)
Overview
• Charlie Breckling, Managing Director of Marketing for HBS’s Executive Education Program is
driving the transition from paper catalogs to a mix of digital investments from Email to Paid search
to Online Display Advertising.
• Focus of the Case Study: How Rapidly to make the Transition?
• HBS’s Executive Education Division = A Small to Medium Sized Business Unit with Annual
Revenues of $107 Million (Grown 30% in last 3 years)
• Stresses involved in the birth of a new Go-to-Market Culture with change in its Culture, Practices
and Organization from Offline to Online Marketing.
Discussion Point 1
How to allocate $ 1,64,000 that has been earmarked for customer acquisition
spending in 2010?
Concerns
• Concern around increasing Email Marketing as Appearing ‘Spammy’ & its effect on the
gravitas of the HBS Brand.
• Online Display Ad placement does not compare to the impact of a Glossy catalog to
take to the boss to make your pitch to take a course.
• What about introducing additional digital channels such as social and mobile media?
Objectives of Breckling
• Increase number of participants
• Create revenue for HBS
• Use HBS brand as leverage
• Maintain the Top Ranking in the field of Executive Education
• Tweak Search Marketing so the website becomes the Primary Lead Generation
Tool
Discussion Point 2
Digital media selection is not just a matter of selecting the medium with the lowest
marginal cost.
Decision-making process (Buyer Behavior)
Is it enough to get people to visit the website?
Awareness → Engagement → Comparison → Transaction
Awareness
• What can Executive Education do for me?
• What Executive Education Programs are out there?
• Does Harvard offer Executive Education?
• What can Harvard’s Programs do for me?
Engagement
• How does HBS Executive Education work? (Duration, Cost , Location etc.).
• How does it pay off / What is the ROI?
Comparison
• What is the course content at HBS?
• Which Faculty Members are Involved?
• What are their areas of Expertise?
• Who are the other participants?
• How does the HBS Executive Education program compare to the other highly ranked programs?
• What types of Marketing Materials best support this active phase of the process?
• What is the mix of online and offline promotions that best reinforces interest and
moves the prospect further down the funnel?
• Transaction
• 90% of the transactions to purchase courses take place online (Page 4)
Discussion Point 3
• Is Social Media right for Marketing HBS Executive Education?
• Should the program take a more open access approach in social media?
• Is the exclusivity the core feature of the brand?
• How should social media be used then?
Digital Marketing Terminology
• Email (Open Rate & CTR)
• Display ads
• Paid search
• Organic search
• Contextual advertising
• The Website
• Social Media
• Keyword stuffing is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique, considered webspam or
spamdexing, in which keywords are loaded into a web page's meta tags, visible content, or backlink
anchor text in an attempt to gain an unfair rank advantage in search engines. Keyword stuffing may
lead to a website being banned or penalized on major search engines either temporarily or permanently.
• Doorways are sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries. They are bad for users
because they can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking
the user to essentially the same destination. They can also lead users to intermediate pages that are not
as useful as the final destination.
• Some examples of doorways:
• Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page
• Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s)
• Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy
• Landing Pages
• CPM
• CTR
• CR
• Bounce Rate
• How do we interpret an entry page of a website with a low bounce rate?
• Exit Rate
• In brokerage revenue model, company earns revenue by connecting buyers with sellers charging a fixed
percentage of revenue earned on goods sold along with closing fees and shipping charges from sellers.
• In merchant or retail revenue model, a company earns revenue by purchasing goods directly from the vendors
and selling it to the customers.
• In direct revenue model, a company earns revenue by directly selling goods to customers bypassing the
intermediaries.
• Social Bookmarking is a link that people post to social websites for others to see because they find it
interesting, valuable or cool.
• Directory Submission is an off page factor which helps to optimize your webpage. In these directories, your
own website is submitted to another website.
• Cloaking: It is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search
engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based
on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page.
• Digital Marketing moves from 12-month planning cycle to a weekly, or even real-time
planning cycle. It a medium is not performing, Breckling can reallocate away from it at a
moment’s notice.
• Digital Marketing compliments the traditional marketing task of finding customers
(advertising to them) with the capacity to be found by customers (e.g. when they search on
search engines.
• A consequence of this opportunity to be found by customers is that unexpected pockets of
demand are discovered. The portfolio of the customers is broadened.
• Digital Marketing emphasizes not the budget-setting task (How much money will I need
this year to achieve my sales goal), but the cost-per-acquisition-setting task (my Sales goal
becomes all the sales I can get up to a limit set by the cost-per-acquisition).
• A reciprocal link refers to any set of hyperlinks between two websites that point
both ways. In general, reciprocal links happen when two webmasters agree to each
host a link on their own website, which points to the other webmaster’s website.
These links are usually used to show an affiliation between two websites, but they
can also offer users quick and easy access to a related site.
• Breadcrumbs are little navigational aides not just help people visualize where they
are on your site, but also help Google.
