Imagine you are a customer service representative for a reputed luggage manufacturer. You get a call from a retail dealer about a customer who has three eight-year-old suitcases that carry your brand. The dealer confirms they have a design flaw with the straps, which affects their aesthetics but not their function. The suitcases still have two years left on the 10-year warranty. The customer has the warranty cards and original price tags, but not the receipt. She wants to know if the suitcases can be repaired because she is afraid they might become unusable later. Unfortunately, that model is discontinued, so no repairs or replacements are possible. You, the service rep, inform the customer. Because the suitcases are still working well and have only cosmetic damage, she does not press the matter, although she is clearly disappointed. She thanks you for trying anyway and hangs up. What’s next?

If you are working for Samsonite, you feel bad leaving a customer disappointed. You call the customer again and offer to replace her old suitcases with brand new ones of a similar kind. She tells you she is leaving the country in three days, will be gone for many years and doubts she could get them in time, but she chooses a similar model from your catalog. Unfortunately, the local dealer does not carry it. You call your warehouse in Jacksonville, FL, to order three new suitcases, only to be told that due to Hurricane Gustav, the warehouse is closed. Undaunted, you ask a colleague for help, and to everyone’s amazement, the co-worker makes it to the warehouse despite storm warnings, grabs three suitcases and somehow manages to ship them overnight. The customer gets her new suitcases the day before the long journey, completely unexpectedly. You even tell her to keep the old suitcases because they are already packed. When the customer is stammering to figure out how to thank you, you just say, ”It is my job. Thank you for being a Samsonite customer. Have a safe flight and enjoy your stay in India.”

One customer service rep in a lone cubicle could make or break your brand with a given customer.

This actually happened to us in late August 2008, as we were moving to India from our home in Portland, OR. We were speechless. My wife was driven to tears, feeling guilty for expressing her disappointment earlier and causing them so much trouble—even going so far as to risk their lives.

Businesses plaster their customer values all over the place. They exhort their employees to “delight the customer.” We don’t know if Samsonite actually does this and if our story was just an isolated case of exemplary customer service by a couple of employees. For us, however, that rep and her colleague are the unseen faces of Samsonite, something that no snazzy advertisements featuring celebrity brand ambassadors with beautiful faces can ever match.

We wrote down the name of our Samsonite genie, but lost that piece of paper. I wish I could somehow convey to her how she and her colleague turned my wife into a Samsonite fanatic. If you still can’t believe that an employee has the power to turn a customer into a brand fanatic, just try bad-mouthing Samsonite in front of my wife.

I’ve seen a shift in parent companies placing an emphasis on building up the corporate brand, rather than promoting individual product brands. That’s important because in this day and age, companies need to act more human and less like faceless institutions. Making and selling reliable products are no longer enough. Customers want to know the story and purpose behind the brand.

Beyond nurturing a long-term connection to customers who in-turn can develop into loyal brand ambassadors, telling the corporate story signals where you are going, what you will provide in the future and how you will behave.

Besides the marketing benefits of having a strong corporate story, investing in the corporate parent can help in the following ways:

• Deepens understanding of the value in the offering. Smart corporate marketers are taking cues from the simplicity and uniformity that has powered the success of companies like IBM, Federal Express and Apple. These marketers have made a powerful case for managing fewer messages, names and identities. Each of these companies took big leaps into new areas, yet they did it via a conscious strategy not to dilute the parent brand, but to invest in it gradually as the business expanded.

• Enhances pride for employees. Today’s employees are less loyal than they were a decade ago, but at the same time workers and managers are “badged” with their employer’s brand like never before. Having a clear corporate story that resonates with employees and recruits is just as important as a resonant story for product brands. IBM and General Electric Co. have even put employees at the center of their ads, connecting the purpose of their employees to the products they make.

• Reduces reputational risk. Addressing reputational problems can incur a significant expense, and brands with a strong parent identity can weather the storm more effectively. Toyota built its brand equity over many years and endured its brake quality issue much better than a competitor might have. The Toyota corporate brand had some of the highest ratings in the automotive sector, and that the company managed to bounce back to prior customer satisfaction levels only a year after the quality issue surfaced, according to our BrandView data.

• Increases value in M&A activities.  We have seen advantages in the financial markets, both for buyers and sellers. Research shows that a strong corporate brand can enhance value, as the brand can help signal the quality and reliability of earnings, and the future growth potential of the company.  For buying companies, the enhanced economics of being able to quickly fold an acquired company under the parent name can yield significant synergies.

Companies considering this marketing change should ask themselves a few questions: How strong is your corporate brand today? Does it lend strength to the products and services it sells? Does your corporate story capture the true personality of your team? Can your parent brand story take you through to the next level of growth? Let the answers to these questions be your guide as you consider how to take your corporate brand to the next level.

Steve Jobs introduces the iPad in San Francisco on Jan. 27, 2010. Photo credit: Matt Buchanan, Wikimedia Commons.

Steve Jobs sadly left this world nearly two years ago. But thanks to a September interview I did with a consultant who worked closely with Jobs, you can get a close look at how he was able to forge a key partnership with AT&T that helped get Apple’s iPhone off the ground.

In June 2007 when Apple’s first iPhone was sold, cellphones were already a big market. But by 2009, Apple ended up with 30 percent of it. How did Jobs convince AT&T to give Apple a groundbreaking deal in exchange for the exclusive right to service the iPhone in the U.S.?

In 2005, Jobs decided he wanted to build a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) to service the iPhone. According to Garrick Gauch, who worked as an MVNO expert at Boston-based telecom consultant Adventis, and later CSMG, “Jobs’ initial concept was for Apple to own and control the end-to-end sales, service and support of the iPhone—all he needed was an MVNO contract.”

Lesson 1: Get the best help you can.

Around April 2005, Jobs called Adventis CEO Raul Katz and summoned him to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, CA. Gauch then got a call from Katz, who said, “I need you on a plane to Cupertino. It’s a small team—hush, hush—the code name for the project is Vogue.”

 “We flew to Cupertino and walked into the boardroom where most of Jobs’ direct reports—including Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller, Peter Oppenheimer and Greg Jozwiak—were waiting for us,” Gauch said. “I was sweating bullets because I had to present the [slide] deck to Jobs—a business legend.”

Lesson 2: Declare an impossible-sounding goal.

Gauch recounted that Jobs strode confidently into the conference room and said, “Here’s what I want to do. I’m gonna come out with a phone.”.

“Steve pretended he had an iPod in his right hand and a cellphone in his left hand. He said, ‘I want to put the two together,’ and he smashed his hands together.”

Gauch said Jobs explained that the phone would be “tethered to the computer in a way that no phone had ever been before. You will be able to jam this into a cradle, hit a button, and it will synch all your contacts, emails, calendar dates, photos and music automatically. Can you imagine that?”

Then Jobs said, “I am going to sell this device to my customers both online and through select Apple retail outlets. I want to offer unlimited voice and data contracts, open Internet access via Wi-Fi, and I’m going to provide all the service, billing and support for $49.95 a month!”

The Adventis team was stunned. “When Steve finished, the entire room was completely silent,” Gauch said. “We were just floored. We hadn’t seen anything like this before, and truthfully none of us were quite sure how any of this could get done.”

Lesson 3: Shift responsibility for achieving the goal to a great team.

Jobs was framing the impossible, and Adventis felt obliged to tell him so. But Jobs did not retreat.

“From that point on, he challenged us to believe in his vision and that there was a way to get it done. There was no talk of defeat,” Gauch said.

Over the next three weeks, Adventis worked with Jobs to prepare a deck that he would present to AT&T Mobility President and CEO Ralph de la Vega in Atlanta, but the meeting was a failure.

“We heard that Steve and Ralph were talking past each other. AT&T thought it was too high a risk,” said Gauch.

Lesson 4: If at first you don’t succeed, delegate.

By 2006, Jobs had gotten frustrated with the AT&T deal and delegated the work to Cue.

Gauch, along with senior executives Andrew Cole and Erfan Ahmed, by now all at CSMG, worked with Cue to calculate the impact of the iPhone on AT&T’s long-term value (LTV) per subscriber—a key success measure for carriers.

The CSMG team was able to show AT&T that the carrier would extend the lifetime value of its customers  if they adopted the iPhone.

Gauch recalled that “When Steve saw the presentation, he told Ahmed, ‘I get it. I like it. I think it will work. Now you and Eddy go and negotiate with AT&T.’” 

Howard Marlowe, W’64, essentially offered a Lobbying 101 course to Wharton undergraduate students. He opened with the question, “What do you think of when you think of lobbyists?”

Hands flew up.

“Fat cats,” one student replied.

Marlowe, founder and president of Marlowe & Company, a government affairs consulting firm that represents local governments, ports and airports as well as small businesses, then proceeded to focus on how lobbyists actually operate. In general, his work involves heavy research, marketing and persuasive skills—and a lot of advocacy.

He does have concerns about how money can influence some congressmen, but that is not how he does business.

“I would not be in business for 30 years if I did not have substance and integrity,” he assured.

Howard Marlowe, W’64

After describing the ins-and-outs of lobbying, Marlowe presented an interactive simulation for the students to get a better grasp on how lobbyists handle clients. Marlow gave them an actual, ongoing public policy issue: how to stop costly coastal erosion from ruining the national economy. Though only a portion of the U.S. population lives on the coast, the economies of coastal cities and towns represent a large portion of the gross domestic product. The students’ solutions had to tackle technical questions related to preventing or stopping beach erosion, as well as monetary ones such as funding the prevention and restoration efforts.

Students broke up into three groups and brainstormed for five minutes. Afterward, student leaders presented to the rest of the classroom their respective solutions for the preservation of coastal economies through beach maintenance.

Marlowe discussed the advantages, the drawbacks and the feasibility of each group’s ideas, then addressed the biggest hurdle—politics. Each solution was well articulated and thoughtful. Marlowe was impressed. For example, one group imagined an amusement park on popular boardwalks and beachfront space. The start-up costs would be covered by the federal government and the municipality would take care of running the park. All the profits would go toward preserving the beach from erosion. Yet while Marlowe agreed that many of the ideas were promising, he noted that advocacy and marketing must also go into convincing congressmen to take up the cause.

“I had a senator that I waited three hours to see. When he finally arrived at his office he said, ‘Howard, you have five minutes.’ And I made the pitch in five minutes,” Marlowe recounted.

Many students seemed impressed and intrigued by the lobbying process. The lecture and simulation gave them Lobbying 101—and by the end perhaps even helped to produce one or two more future lobbyists.

Editor’s note: Marlowe’s lecture in Huntsman Hall was part of the Wharton Undergraduate Alumni Colloquia on September 20, sponsored by the student-led Wharton Alumni Relations Council and Wharton Alumni Relations.

Below, you can link to the replay of the latest webinar from Wharton Lifelong Learning in which Professor Eric Bradlow, W’88, HOM’00, shares an epiphany from his latest marketing analytics research: how one data point could help marketers better identify their customers with the most promising customer lifetime value (CLV).

It’s called “clumpiness”—a measurement of how binge-y a shopper is. Clumpy shoppers—those that shop in spurts comparable to the behavior of binge drinkers and binge sleepers—are more valuable in the long run than nonclumpy shoppers, according to data collected by Bradlow, who serves as Wharton’s K.P. Chao Professor, vice dean and director of Wharton Doctoral Programs, and co-director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative.

Your options are to watch the full webinar to gain a greater understanding of clumpiness, or read our six takeaways, presented below.

Better yet, you could do both—read this blog and watch the full webinar.

1. Does clumpiness apply to business-to-business customers? “I have no empirical proof,” Bradlow told his remote webinar audience. “I am willing to bet a lot of money that clumpy B2B is worth more in the future,” he said, adding that if any B2B marketers would like to share their data sets, he would be happy to test his hypothesis on them.

2. Bradlow will offer links to the two research papers that explain his new finding, as well as an Excel spreadsheet to demonstrate how to measure the clumpiness of your customers, on his Wharton homepage.

3. Digital consumers seem to behave more clumpily. In his analysis, 40 to 50 percent of Hulu, YouTube, Amazon and eBay customers are clumpy. Shoppers of traditional products—like toilet paper, for instance—tend not to be clumpy.

Prof. Eric Bradlow

4. There are two types of clumpy—visit clumpiness and purchase clumpiness. Shoppers who are visit clumpy are not necessarily purchase clumpy and are thus not necessarily more valuable. Purchase- clumpy shoppers tend to have that long-term value.

5. Female shoppers, younger shoppers under 30, loyalty program members and customers with wish lists tend to be clumpier.

6. The traditional framework of CLV and customer segmentation is RFM: recency, frequency and monetary value. This framework is lacking without a fourth attribute: C for clumpiness.

Editor’s note: Watch “Clumpiness and How It Can Make Firms Rich,” Bradlow’s Wharton webinar, by following this link to the Wharton Webinar series sign-in page. The webinar is exclusive to Wharton alumni, students and staff.

For others—and those Wharton community members who want as much of Bradlow as they can get—please watch the video below of Bradlow’s Wharton Lifelong Learning master class on “mining for gold in marketing.”

A community library established by READ Global. Photo credit: READ Global.

Thinley Choden spent a full month in the United States, but her highlight was a Wharton Executive Education course at the Philadelphia campus. It was a hard-won opportunity, earned through recognition in one of the world’s only rigorous contests for social enterprises, the Barry and Marie Lipman Family Prize.

Choden works in Bhutan for READ Global, which won the Lipman Prize during the last school year. For READ and last year’s other two finalists, part of the allure of the prize—beyond the recognition by a brand such as the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania—is the access to Wharton Executive Education courses.

Choden’s class was a three-day exploration of “the Strategic Decision-Making Mindset.” Her benefits were threefold:

• Most of the 30 classmates were from the for-profit side of the world, offering a completely different, and translatable, perspective.

• The takeaway that “there are things you can control and some you cannot.”

• Learning to keep that fact in mind when making decisions in a world where uncertainties and personal biases (including your own) abound.

READ Global partners with communities in Southeast Asia to build community libraries and resource centers with the goal of empowering them to end the cycle of rural poverty, among other activities.

“The course helps me in the work I do because it’s all about managing uncertainties,” Choden told us. “The course that I took at Wharton helps me construct in my mind how to move forward, how to get my team on board with me, how to strategically plan how we move forward with our growth in the future.”

Choden’s five-year-old operation in Bhutan is the newest in READ’s global network. (Its first in Nepal is 23 years old and India’s is seven years old).  With an operation still in a growing phase, Choden explains, her team must make a name for READ Global in the country and connect with new partners and donors.

For more information on the Lipman Prize itself, read our recap of last year’s contest in “A Second Year of Social Impact Success” or watch the “behind the scenes” video below:

Just a few weeks ago, I gave a lecture in Professor Peter Fader’s Marketing 775 course and participated in the fascinating classroom discussion on the discipline of managing the value of customer relationships.

Prof. Peter Fader in action in class

I’m a big believer that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. When it comes to customer relationships, it’s paramount for brands to measure satisfaction across all customer touch points. One measurement of satisfaction is word of mouth, and the debates on exactly how to measure it have echoed within many corporations.

Readers may be familiar with Net Promoter Score (NPS), a measure that has been adopted by many companies. With NPS, customers answer a single question: On a zero-to-10 scale, how likely would you be to recommend this company? This question yields a single score that’s easy to report and acclaimed for its simplicity. Responders are categorized as brand promoters (nine to 10), passive (satisfied but unenthusiastic) customers (seven to eight), and brand detractors (six or lower). I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say NPS has been seminal in helping rally organizations around the concept of a positive customer experience.

But the metric was introduced a decade ago, and it begs the question as to whether it has stood the test of time. Given today’s more empowered consumers, coupled with the rise of social media networks and sites like Yelp, can NPS still accurately predict promoter and detractor behavior? Was it ever tenable for NPS to identify true detractors when asking customers only about their likelihood to promote? Just because you don’t rave about something, does that mean you hate it? When was the last time you recommended your favorite brand of toilet paper to a friend?

NPS viability has been hotly debated, particularly within the classroom of Dr. Fader, Wharton’s Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor and co-director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative. As this debate has moved to the fore, I’ve been lucky to have a front-row seat, courtesy of Larry Freed, CEO of ForeSee, with whom I’ve recently been working.

In his book Innovating Analytics: Word of Mouth Index—How the Next Generation of Net Promoter Can Increase Sales and Drive Business Results, Freed describes how ForeSee conducted two years of research, with more than 300 companies, about NPS. In addition to confirming that asking about likelihood to promote in no way measures likelihood to detract, his data also show that NPS can be inaccurate in measuring detractor activity, overstating detractors by 270 percent on average.

The financial implications are worrisome for the many brands that spend money trying to mitigate and convert NPS-designated detractors, who in many cases simply don’t exist.

Freed proposes a new measurement, the Word of Mouth Index (WoMI). WoMI augments NPS by preserving NPS’ first question, while adding just one other: How likely are you to discourage others from doing business with this company? As with NPS, companies receive a single score, but one that more accurately weighs positive and negative word of mouth.

As a chief marketing officer educated within the halls of Wharton, what fascinates me about this evolution of marketing is that it is dedicated to taking an analytical approach to measuring customer satisfaction—and achieves real-world benefits for brands.

I look forward to digging even deeper into the field of customer experience, and to continuing the dialogue with the Wharton community and hearing what Dr. Fader’s students conclude.

Today’s customer is overwhelmed with too much information and not enough time and attention to digest it all. In response, the best salespeople have evolved and simplified their approach to be more responsive to overburdened and oversaturated customers.

To do so, and to sell more, we need to be hyperfocused on what is most important to our customers. The three keys are:

1. Listen to WIIFM

No longer can we give presentations about how great our company and products are.  Instead, we need to ask questions and listen intently to customer “WIIFM”—the customers’ what’s-in-it-for-me station. It is about, and only about, the customer.

2. Focus on Customers’ Two or Three Hot Buttons

By listening to WIIFM, we can also determine customers’ two or three hot buttons. What will determine their buying decisions? What matters most to customers? How will they benefit from buying our products or services?

Then we need to focus our sales time and attention exclusively on these hot buttons, showing how buying our product or service satisfies these consumer desires.

3. Say No More and Sell Less

Now comes the difficult part.  Once we have focused on and demonstrated our product benefits, we are done. Say no more. Any more information or discussion of benefits will dilute the effect of how perfectly our product satisfies those two or three top needs. Customers will believe that we can satisfy their three hot buttons; they will not believe that we can satisfy every one of their requirements.  Further, our additional sales efforts may end up confusing the customer.

The net effect of these three keys to sales will be that our sales teams talk less and listen more, and that is exactly what our customers want.  As an example, take the industrial conglomerate General Electric Co., which regularly surveys its customers about what they think of the GE sales team. Year after year, one comment surfaces more frequently above all the others: Your salespeople talk too much.

Let’s take that customer feedback as our guide and keep all of our sales meetings and sales communications short, simple and hyperfocused on the most important hot buttons of each of our customers—nothing more.

There’s value in investing in social media. This certainly was made evident through Twitter’s recent initial public offering; the company’s share value soared 73 percent above offering price in its first day of trading. But the broader value of Web 2.0 platforms is emphasized even more so through the investments individual companies make in their social media marketing.

In the time since “tweet” became a verb and “status update” became part of the vernacular, whole social media industries have arisen. According to recent data, said Kartik Hosanagar, associate professor of Internet commerce in Wharton’s Operations and Information Management Department, social media marketing will grow from 8.4 percent of firms’ total marketing budgets to about 22 percent in the next five years.

But how do companies know—really know—if their investment is yielding returns? (After all, Twitter has yet to turn a profit.)

Hosanagar explored this topic during a webinar titled, “The Effect of Social Media Content on Consumer Engagement: Evidence from Facebook,” which examined how firms can best leverage social media to share information about promotions, new products and the like without turning off their audience.

Prof. Kartik Hosanagar

“Clearly, firms are already spending a lot on social media marketing, and that’s expected to grow,” Hosanagar said. “Given the amount of resources we spend on social media marketing, one of the big questions is: What is the value of a social media following? What is the value of getting a new Facebook fan?”

Industry by industry, this number is hard to define, particularly on Facebook, where just 0.2 percent of total status updates actually reach users for whom that content is relevant, and 1 percent of that teeny minority actually engages.

That’s where Hosanagar’s recent research becomes a valuable resource.

Hosanagar and his team collected all Facebook content posted by 782 of the largest consumer-focused brands from September 2011 to July 2012, then analyzed these messages based on responses, likes and comments from fans.

He found persuasive content—status updates that share an interesting fact, tap into the reader’s emotions, highlight philanthropy or are just plain funny—are better received by users than informative content—such as brand mentions, promotions, price comparisons, product availability and locations.

In fact, his data show that the more product information included in a post, the more of a negative impact it has on likes and comments. However, he added, if you combine persuasive and informative messaging—blending product messaging with a funny story or image—you hit the sweet spot of brand visibility and relationship-building and engagement increases.

So what’s a company to do if it wishes to get those much-coveted likes and comments? Hosanagar’s research findings showed the following:

1. Of all content, photos and videos generate the most number of likes and impressions and are important in generating comments.

2. If a brand posts a question, that post will elicit more comments, but fewer likes; conversely, if the brand asks the user to like a post, the post will receive more likes and fewer comments.

3. Timing matters. Users are most active between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m., and then at 2 p.m., and on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

4. Social media is an ideal venue through which to highlight the organization’s social initiatives, as philanthropic posts generate high levels of engagement with fans.

Editor’s note: Watch Hosanagar’s “The Effect of Social Media Content on Consumer Engagement” by following this link to the Wharton Webinar series sign-in page. The webinar, part of Lifelong Learning, is exclusive to Wharton alumni, students and staff.

Are chief information officers and chief marketing officers friends or “frenemies”?

Do marketers now have too much data at their disposal?

With social media, should we learn to trust and base decisions off qualitative indications again?

Is there such a thing as multicultural marketing anymore?

Get a room of marketing MBAs together with senior-level practitioners, and questions are bound to be raised. Such was the case with “The New Era of Marketing: Globalization, Analytics and Choice,” the 2013 Wharton Marketing Conference held in Philadelphia Nov. 8. Very senior marketers—such as Tom Boyle, WG’89, vice president, marketing and commercial leadership, at the Coca-Cola Co., and Callie Canfield, director of marketing and communications at BHLDN, shared the stage with faculty heavyweight David J. Reibstein, Wharton’s William S. Woodside Professor, to discuss bringing wedding dress shopping to the online market.

A panel at the 2013 Wharton Marketing Conference featuring Lauventria Robinson, WG’87, Vice President, Multicultural Marketing, Coca-Cola North America Group; Sara Larsen, VP of Digital Marketing and Campaigns, SAP; Cyrille Labourel, Senior Brand Manager, CLEAN&CLEAR, Johnson & Johnson; and Jody Shapiro, WG’09, Head of Product Management, Google Analytics Premium (left to right)

It was one of those events too dense to distill into 500 or so words, but that’s what I am here to do. So let’s get back to those questions:

1. CMO vs. CIO

It’s a lively debate in the “real world,” and the answer to who is ascendant—the chief marketing officer or chief information officer—is company-by-company. Jody Shapiro, WG’09, head of product management at Google Analytics Premium, delivered an astute message to both executives: essentially, you’re on the same team.

Marketing is “no longer a check mark approval,” he said. Marketers need proof (read: data) to prove that their strategies will work, and they need to be able to tune and retune messages on the fly. It’s only practical that they need the technology know-how of a CIO to help them get the analytics tools they need and that the two drive business together.

2. Too much data

Speakers, plural, at the conference wondered aloud about “paralysis by analysis” and other dangers of having big data at their disposal.

Tom Boyle, WG’89, Vice President, Marketing and Commercial Leadership, Coca-Cola Co., gave a keynote presentation at the student-run conference.

Linda Shein, W’82, managing director of Wharton’s Jay H. Baker Retailing Center, offered advice here. Use data to test specific hunches and answer particular questions.

3. Such a thing as a “qual”?

Quants have seemingly taken over the world, but as more marketers attempt to make sense of their customers’ social media chatter, qualitative insights still retain power. Lauventria Robinson, WG’87, vice president of multicultural marketing at Coca-Cola North America Group, mentioned how Coca-Cola picked the brains of “influential” consumers—hip individuals that could give a peek into what was about to get cool in popular culture.

“There is no quant at all in that type of information,” she said.

4. Multicultural, Targeted or Total?

Traditional brand marketing is evolving, according to Robinson. In five years, the role of multicultural marketing departs will evolve as they will play a greater center-of-excellence role, ensuring that “all” marketing will become more multicultural. The focus will be on a combination of “Total” and “Targeted” marketing, such that Total becomes the new “Marketing 101” and integrates a universal message that reflects multicultural insights. Targeted marketing will reflect unique and distinct cultural differences.

Robinson recalled a PowerAde commercial that featured young athletes playing soccer in a basketball court. Coca-Cola aimed it at young “bicultural” Hispanic consumers but discovered that the urban vibe resonated with multicultural teens, period.

 Editor’s note: We are sorry to report that the author is over his 500 word limit. Please excuse the abrupt ending of his “distillation” of the marketing conference. Visit the Wharton Flickr channel for more photos from the 2013 Wharton Marketing Conference.

History never repeats itself in detail, but the future can look eerily similar to the past sometimes—in a hyper-technologized way.

That was the theme of Terry J. Lundgren’s speech at a Nov. 19 Wharton event celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the Jay H. Baker Retailing Center.

Lundgren, who has served as chairman, president and chief executive officer of Macy’s Inc. since 2004, and has worked in the retail business for four decades, recalled how retail “in the day” was about knowing one’s customers. When the business advanced, and store chains grew larger and spread across the country, that changed.

“Frankly, we really didn’t know our customers,” he told an audience made up of retail executives and entrepreneurs, Baker friends and family, and Wharton faculty and students.

Technology today—social media and analytics, to name the biggies—are changing this yet again.

Terry Lundgren, CEO, Macy’s; Barbara Kahn, Patty and Jay H. Baker Professor and director, Jay H. Baker Retailing Center; and Jay H. Baker, W’56, former president, Kohl’s Corporation, celebrating the center’s 10th anniversary. Photo credit: Shira Yudkoff.

They empower a return to the customer relationships and to the knowledge of the customer stores had in the past—at a rate and at a depth unpredictable even five years ago, he said.

Mobile apps allow retailers to know what you like based on your shopping and browsing patterns; Facebook and Pinterest allow you to tell them yourself. 

Rhetorically asking where retail will be five years hence, Lundgren declined to predict the future, but he indicated who would be driving it—the millennials, the retail industry’s youngest workers and current students, particularly Wharton students. Lundgren proudly announced that Macy’s was a top recruiter at Penn, having hired 36 students from the most recent class.

It was not a stretch to say that that recruitment effort would have been impossible without the man of the hour: Jay Baker, W’56.

Baker is known to say of his success that he has been lucky. But President Amy Gutmann, HOM’04 said of the “incomparable” Baker and his success in the retail business:

“He is ferociously dedicated, ferociously devoted to his industry.”

After all, his success at the helm of Kohl’s Corp., leading the department store chain through a period of dynamic growth and innovation, can be attributed to his staying power, as well as him being “the smartest and savviest” of execs—and one of the most genuine—said Penn’s president. Baker became president of Kohl’s in 1986, when it was a 39-store, Milwaukee-based regional retailer. By the time he retired in 1999, the company was a $3.8 billion organization with 300 stores nationwide.

Baker connecting with Neil Blumenthal, WG’10, co-founder of eyeglass retailer Warby Parker

In his 10 years overseeing the Baker Center, Baker has applied that same energy, creativity and influence.

“He is also ferociously dedicated to ensuring Wharton’s role in that industry,” Gutmann said.

That, after all, is the mission of the Baker Center—to ensure that Wharton attracts the best young minds and trains them to become leaders of  the retailing industry, while encouraging bonds between academy and practitioners and research to benefit both.

“We’ve been able to get the industry and academia to work together. It’s something we’ve nurtured and built, and it’s really working now,” Baker told us during an interview for an article about the retail industry and the Baker Center in our fall 2013 Wharton Magazine.

Editor’s note: You can learn more about Baker and his role in launching the Baker Retailing Center in our article “10 Years Into the Revolution.” And see additional photos from the 10th anniversary gala at the Wharton Flickr set. 

Last month, our company VerbalizeIt presented our translation platform on stage at PhoCusWright’s Travel Innovation Summit, and we were honored to win the Travel Startup of the Year award. This is the final part of a three-part series documenting how we prepared for the summit, what the onstage experience was like, how we won and what we learned.

We’re nearly three weeks out from being onstage at PhoCusWright. Since the conference, we’ve had dozens of conversations with attendees, and we find ourselves engaged in dialogue around three topics going into 2014: global marketplaces, mobile customers and retaining users. Below is our approach to and perspective on these three key themes:

Global Marketplaces Will Matter More

Emerging markets will re-emerge in 2014. The United Nations reports that there are more than 2.5 billion Internet users worldwide. Last month, the Internet and Mobile Association of India reported that India, with 205 million Internet users, is on pace to overtake the United States, with 207 million Internet users, by the middle of 2014. This will place India second only to China, which has 300 million active Internet users. Given the growing consumer classes in China and India, ignoring these increasingly accessible audiences in 2014 means you’re leaving revenue on the table. Going into the new year, it’s worth considering localizing your website, translating your emails and ads, and captioning your videos in different languages. The bottom line is that most companies have ready-made content, but it’s limited to one language.

Mobile Customers Will Be More Plugged In

Mobile search advertising spend, eMarketer reports, is expected to grow 52 percent in 2014, after a predicted 76 percent growth rate in 2013. The vast majority of the companies we’ve spoken to since PhoCusWright have been serving travel customers who are connected to their mobile devices. World-class companies like Travelport are leading the way by creating developer portals to help their clients connect directly to useful mobile apps. (Full disclosure: Our live-interpretation app is featured on the Travelport developer portal.) As 2014 progresses, we expect companies to continue translating their mobile applications into different languages to increase their global reach.

Retention Will Be Harder to Maintain

Many of the marketers and sales reps that we met complained about the difficulty of retaining customers in today’s hyperconnected world. On average, a customer sees up to 5,000 ads a day. This means that if your company isn’t taking a thoughtful approach to each customer touch point by personalizing messaging, localizing text or considering context, you risk being perceived as a generic company that is uninterested in the unique needs of its customers. Never forget the value of each and every customer. Customize the relevancy of your content to each customer to drive loyalty, engagement and revenue.

Editor’s note: Read Ryan’s first post in this three-part blog series, “Our Shot at Fortune 500 Employees.”

Michal Schrieber’s entrepreneurial gig as founder of social media marketing firm Web Done was taking off. Then she received a call from her client at the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). “Do you have a secure room in your company office?” the voice on the other line asked her. Schrieber’s office was in Tel Aviv, and it turns out Tel Aviv was under missile fire. Israel was at war.

Michal Schrieber speaks at the “Social Media Innovation for Global Social Impact” lecture

Schrieber related this episode not to get into the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian issue or the reasons behind the so-called Operation Pillar of Defense, but to share with a crowd of Wharton students, staff and other guests in Huntsman Hall on Dec. 10 the lessons learned during her role in the war; She headed the social media crisis management team for the IDF.

Her job with the social media crisis management team, she said, was to simply save Israeli citizens’ lives.

The numbers show what they were up against. During the course of the eight-day conflict in November 2012, Hamas and its supporters shot 1,667 rockets and bombs into Israel, putting 3.5 million of its citizens under fire. Yet only six Israelis perished.

That low fatality number is more telling of success than the sheer quantity of Facebook updates, YouTube videos or Instagram snaps that Schrieber’s team posted during the war.

Prof. Jerry Wind

Jerry Wind, Wharton’s Lauder professor who introduced Schrieber to the audience and engaged us in discussion after her talk, stressed that when it comes to social media, it’s important to measure real impact—output not input.

“No one cares about input. Only bureaucrats care about input,” said Wind, who serves as director of the SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management.

Then again, Schrieber and her team of 20 employees did not have the time to pause and consider such social media dictums. They worked shifts to fill every hour of every day with what they knew could be life-saving content for their neighbors, friends and family. She did not need years of marketing research and data; she was learning the following lessons about crisis communications as the bombs literally fell:

• Don’t panic. Her job was to calm already stressed, anxious people.

• Go multichannel with your message. They worked mostly on Facebook, but were also on Instagram and YouTube.

• Infographics help. They took complex data information and instructions and “translated them into something human.”

• Their followers often became “social media missioners” who took their mission to the street and spread important messages to their neighbors who were not online

• Oversharing could pose a danger, such as when Israeli citizens tweeted about missiles nearly missing their homes. This could serve to help the enemy recalibrate and better target on subsequent launches. One infographic served to remind folks not to be idiots.

Crisis management through social media is a 24/7 job for brands even when they’re not at war. But one thing retailers or snack-food companies might not have to worry about is spies. A question that didn’t come up during Schrieber’s talk, but one that should have been asked (darn it!) was whether she and her team were concerned about  monitoring how much the enemy was watching Web Done’s activities—and changing their attacks in response.

Schrieber was kind enough to speak at a joint event of the Wharton SEI Research Center and Knowledge@Wharton. 

Editor’s note: View all of the photos from Michal Schrieber’s Wharton talk at the Wharton Flickr photostream.

When the lights went out at 8:38 p.m., Feb. 3, 2013, in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome during Super Bowl XLVII, Oreo’s message that “you can still dunk in the dark” took advantage of the situation to promote the brand. The short message received more than 500 million earned media impressions and garnered digital ad agency 360i numerous awards for social media marketing.

All the hype around the notion of real-time marketing and the potential to leverage social media leaves you thinking that it’s something new. In some sense, it is. Social media provides another platform for brands to reach consumers, as well as delve into their interests and personalities.

But the underlying marketing principles remain. It’s about delivering the right message to the right consumer at the right time. From nonprofits seeking donations to politicians seeking votes, to telecommunication firms cross-selling products and retaining subscribers, customer-centric marketing focuses on identifying those individuals where marketing efforts are expected to have the biggest impact. That is, it’s about identifying the right consumer.

Here’s where marketers can take advantage of social media chatter:

• Travelers ranting online about their horrific holiday experiences provide an opportunity for brands to make inroads with their rivals’ customers who are already dissatisfied.

• Consumers soliciting advice from social networks before making a purchase are a ripe target for brands to reach out to, tailoring the message based on the information sought by consumers.

Brands monitoring social media conversations can not only engage with their own customers, but they also can identify other consumers to whom they should reach out. Social media offers a potential avenue through which marketers can reach these consumers at opportune times using content that is likely to be the most effective.

This may explain Apple’s recently announced acquisition of Topsy, a social media analytics company for which Apple paid in excess of $200 million. One possible rationale is that the insights derived from analyzing social media conversations could be used to support Apple’s advertising platforms. Another is that mining the social media conversations would support the recommendation systems in Apple’s App Store and iTunes.

Bought Justin Timberlake albums lately? Photo credit: Georges Biard, Wikimedia Commons.

At their core, these two explanations revolve around the same goal: aiding Apple in understanding what will appeal most to its customers at a particular time. If I’ve purchased a season pass to the TV show Scandal or bought albums by Justin Timberlake, algorithms can figure out what should be recommended to me next based on the purchases made by others with similar tastes. Add signals from social media conversations, which research has found to be a leading indicator of offline activities, and recommendations can be made dynamically. Social media has been found to be an early indicator of changes in stock prices and product sales—a leading indicator of brand tracking studies and related to TV ratings.

This same line of thinking would hold for advertisements within mobile apps. Just as there is heterogeneity in terms of the topics of interest, resulting in some advertisements being better suited to some compared with others, there is variation in the time when advertisements will be more or less effective. If I see an ad for furniture after I’ve moved into a new place, for instance, that’s probably going to be more effective than showing me the same ad after I’ve been living in the same home for a couple of years. More generally, if we can time an advertisement to where a consumer is in the purchase funnel, the message can be tailored. Someone just beginning to search for information being exposed to an ad is going to react differently compared with someone who is on the cusp of conducting a transaction.

The data available on social media have ushered in a new wave of what’s possible for marketers. We still need to find the right customers. Once we’ve figured that out, the analysis of social media data can provide direction for fine-tuning messaging based on the context in which an organization is operating. Marketing is about the same thing it’s always been: reaching the right customer, with the right message, at the right time. We’re just in a better position to implement it now. 

Customer loyalty in the travel industry is not what it used to be. With increased transparency on comparative prices and easier access to booking tools, travelers are increasingly loyal to those that provide the best prices and experiences.

After attending PhoCusWright’s Travel Innovation Summit in November, we noticed how appropriate the summit’s theme of “cult of context” is in today’s market.  Travel organizations can no longer afford to be generic, attempting to appeal to everyone. Customers expect contextual relevancy and companies are expected to deliver.

If I’m on a business or leisure trip to Asia, it’s acceptable for me to want to know every detail about cost, flight routes, class of service, location and amenities. A few years ago, I’d have to cross-reference this information between books, multiple websites and calls to travel agencies. Today, I expect the most optimized solutions tailored to my individual needs. After all, in a hyperconnected world, why would I settle for anything less?

The key to winning in a commodity-based landscape is to offer a contextual experience without increasing marginal overhead or sacrificing brand equity. This sounds simple enough and in many instances it is. Knowing where a user is going, when they’re leaving, and why they’re traveling is now par for the course. Matching this information with user interests remains difficult.

Below are three ideas we have to help do just that. Please let us know your thoughts in the comments section of this article:

1. Pay Attention to Their Data

A customer’s data is more readily available today than ever before. Capturing the information needed to know your customer is female, from Beijing, 43 years old, works for a Fortune 500 and enjoys hiking in her spare time isn’t rocket science—API plugins to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other platforms have made this simple. Overlaying this information onto your preset messaging and up-selling suggestions is challenging. Target’s ability to accurately guess a teen pregnancy is an extreme example—there are many less complex ways to let your customer know that on her journey she can hike Mt. Rainer on her day off in Seattle or enjoy Yelp’s highest-rated Seattle sushi after she checks into her hotel.

2. Speak Their Language

Fact: 72 percent of customers prefer to make a purchase in their own language. This isn’t to say that customers don’t understand English (although English is not the primary language in 57 percent of the fastest growing markets). This simply means that customers want to know that you’re paying attention to their needs. Traveling is stressful no matter where you are in the world and if people aren’t speaking your primary language, it can be even more daunting. If you’re dealing with a customer in an emerging market or an established market, it’s critical to not only recognize their native tongue but to demonstrate that you appreciate it. This leads us to our final point …

3. Change Their Perception

In today’s global economy, formerly distant cultures are connecting through new mediums faster than ever before. This could leave your brand exposed to misinterpretation as your messaging travels from one culture to another (we’ve seen plenty of corporate ads get mistranslated). As you’re working on anticipating your customers’ needs don’t shy away from trying something new and potentially resetting the watermark. Dropbox did this by giving away free storage, and charity: water did this by asking their members to donate on their birthdays. The travel industry is notorious for pushing the same holiday-centric buttons over and over. That’s fine, but it’s not going to change a customer’s perception of your brand.

Making an impression in today’s world requires taking a risk. Just make sure the risks you take are in context; otherwise, you’re just another meaningless product and the only way you’ll win is price.

In an increasingly commoditized travel industry, what else are we missing? What would you add?

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Forbes titled “Driving Customer Loyalty in an Increasingly Commoditized Travel Industry.”

The 2013 Wharton Global Forum Paris attracted talented alumni and business leaders from Europe and the world over. What better chance to interview a marketing talent like the global marketing director at Honeywell. Luca Zerbini, WG’02, discusses his “average day” on the job, career strategy, role models and more.

What drives Prof. Katherine Milkman’s research into experimentation, motivation and irrationality, and influencing human behavior? We ask Wharton’s James G. Campbell, Jr. Assistant Professor of Operations and Information Management, as well as any other question we can squeeze into a minute. 

Photo credit: Dwight Burdette, Wikimedia Commons

A few months ago, Blockbuster announced that it will close all of its remaining U.S. stores, about 300 of them. This has been a long time in the making, and there is still a lot you can learn from it.

Prior to Netflix, Blockbuster thrived on its use of “bad profits.” Bad profits, a term from Fred Reichheld’s book, The Ultimate Question, which introduced the concept of the Net Promoter Score (NPS), are a highly disruptive source of negative word of mouth. Blockbuster’s bad profits were, of course, late fees. Everyone I know who was a Blockbuster customer, including me and my wife, hated late fees. You knew Blockbuster “got you,” and you felt that you only had yourself to blame because you were the one who was late returning the rental video. Sometimes, you would plead for mercy with the store associate. Late fees eventually became the primary source of Blockbuster’s profits.

“Thank goodness for Net Promoter.” —Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit

Anytime bad profits are your primary source of profits, you are due for a hard knock. That knock came from Netflix. Their original ad campaign, “The end of late fees,” was pretty much all they needed to say. Their business model was designed very differently, leveraging the Internet and network economic effects—a nod to another favorite book, Net Gain by John Hagel III. When Netflix proclaimed the end of late fees, word of mouth took care of the rest.

This is why NPS has become so important to companies as a way to measure their most important external stakeholders—their customers. NPS is used by thousands of companies, including many Fortune 500 companies. Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, said, “Thank goodness for Net Promoter. It provided a framework for thinking about—and managing—in this social media world … our teams call it the love metric.” Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, said, “We use NPS every day to make sure we are wowing customers and employees.”

I wrote a four-part series on the Bazaarvoice blog about what could be learned from the Netflix versus Blockbuster battle. My goal for writing this was to move our industry, still a very nascent one today, to think hard about the power of word of mouth. This eventually led to our mission statement: “changing the world, one authentic conversation at a time.” We saw companies change the way they operate based on the customer data and insights that they were accumulating as a result of deploying Bazaarvoice.

There is a lot to be learned here, and there is no doubt that books like Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma help all of us think about steering clear of bad profits, lest we be vulnerable to someone like Netflix coming along and disrupting our business model, in this case to Blockbuster’s ultimate extinction. Blockbuster used to have 8,500 stores located in 29 countries, and was worth $5 billion at one point. But the company was addicted to bad profits, and it was caught in the downward spiral that only The Innovator’s Dilemma can best explain. What could Blockbuster have done differently? A lot—and it is best explained in Christensen’s follow-up book, The Innovator’s Solution.

Have you or the company you worked for used bad profits before? What happened as a result? Did you or your employer have the courage to change in the gut-wrenching way that books like The Innovator’s Solution detail?

Tell me below in the comments section.

Editor’s note: For further background on Brett’s views on the Blockbuster decline, read his blog series:

Feb. 2006: Bad Profits and the Incredible Power of Word of Mouth

Dec. 2006: Netflix vs. Blockbuster: Round Two

Jan. 2007: Netflix vs. Blockbuster: Round Three

Mar. 2009: Netflix vs. Blockbuster: Round Four (Lights Out?)

There was a time when a Wharton undergrad degree used to guarantee lifelong professional success. When I was a student in 1999, we shared an air of confidence. We were businesspeople in training, entering a corporate world ripe with opportunities. If irrational exuberance was the zeitgeist, we were too excited about our future to notice.

Of course, whether it took two years or nine, all of us eventually learned that there are no guarantees in life—even for Wharton grads. The Wall Street we expected to welcome us when we emerged from our protective Locust Walk incubator would be no more.

My own career path was atypical. My choices were limited by an ideological decision to move to Israel after graduation, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. Israel was disproportionately affected by the dot-com bust; I basically moved there the day after, only to find myself slipping on the suds.

I had always envisioned myself working for a venture capital firm in Israel, evaluating and incubating exciting new technologies until the conditions would be ripe for me to start my own company. There were three things I always knew I wanted: to be involved in technology, to exercise creativity and to be my own boss.

But after eight grueling months of rejection, I begrudgingly took a job at one of the largest diamond manufacturers in the world, Leo Schachter.

I was trained from the bottom up. Spending days in the diamond cutting factory and sorting room was frustrating, but I received the best possible education in the diamond business. I gave the job my best shot, but it was never really fulfilling. I managed to design some technology-based solutions, which offered me temporary satisfaction, but opportunities to use my skills were rare. I presented my boss with different venture ideas that he liked, but he was too distracted to invest any resources to implement them.

Change came in 2008, when the economy was in shambles. The company downsized, and I was let go. It is perhaps at these moments that blessings are most disguised, yet present in abundance. It was time to change course—but in which direction?

Inspiration came from a conversation with my father. He told me, “Ira, I’m going to give you the same advice my dad gave me. Do what you know. You know diamonds and you know technology. Go figure out the solution.”

He was right. My knowledge of the diamond business was a valuable asset few could match. What if I could create a business that would allow me to be involved in technology, be creative, be my own boss and leverage my knowledge of diamonds?

The eureka moment was when I discovered that the biggest online diamond vendors had affiliate programs. This meant that I could send them customers and earn a commission. Scattered throughout the content of my website are links to partnering vendors, with cookies that track the potential customer back to my website. Customers can also email us specifications and we recommend rings from partners that match their budget and setting choice. The terms for commissions in these situations are shockingly generous. Depending on the vendor, I could make between 5 percent and 7 percent of the total sale. These vendors were splitting their net profit (generally, 12 to 15 percent) with me nearly 50/50. Since diamonds are expensive, and building and maintaining a website costs very little, large volume wouldn’t be necessary to sustain a business.

That’s when I created TruthAboutDiamonds.com (recently moved to Diamonds.Pro). I help consumers avoid spending money on features that are imperceptible to the human eye. If they buy a VVS clarity diamond (almost flawless), for instance, consumers pay nearly double the price of SI2 clarity. Not all SI2s are “eye clean,” but with one that is, it will look identical to the VVS stone assuming all else is equal. I show my readers how to identify the tricks dealers employ to make extra profit in this extremely competitive marketplace. The most common trick is to use a certification lab that grades on a looser scale. Customers would compare their much cheaper, but loosely graded I SI1 to an honestly graded I SI1 and think they’re getting a great deal—not realizing that the certificate is from a lab that’s not trustworthy.

My path to success was unconventional, but the dreams of that wide-eyed Wharton undergrad came true—with some unexpected perks thrown in for good measure. In hindsight, every detour along the way was valuable and necessary. Enduring eight months of rejection taught me resilience and led me to the diamond business. I am grateful to Leo Schachter for teaching me a trade and, conversely, even more so for never giving me the creative fulfillment I craved.

More than that, though, I’m thankful for that fortuitous conversation with my father, which helped me discover my unique value proposition.

First it was the yellow drinking water. Then it was U.S. bobsledder Johnny Quinn breaking down a door to free himself from his hotel bathroom. In another installment of what the Twittersphere named “#sochiproblems”, U.S. luger Kate Hansen released video of what she thought was a wolf roaming her hotel hallways. (More likely, it was a Siberian husky, but an intimidating and big creature nonetheless.)

One of the most recent #sochiproblems has occurred during the ongoing 2014 Paralympics, when Team USA sled hockey goalie Steve Cash got stuck in a Sochi bathroom (pictured).

From the moment it was announced that the 2014 Winter Olympics would be held in Sochi, U.S. writers and bloggers voiced their skepticism. Some scribes raised serious concerns, such as the human rights implications of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay policies. Others were blither: a Washington Post story proclaimed that Russia wasn’t ready for the Olympics in part because the Olympic Flame kept going out.

These issues set up the perfect backdrop for the #sochiproblems phenomenon: Why focus on the impressive infrastructure needed to pull off even one Olympic event when a Canadian bobsledder is forced to take her Epsom salt bath in a trashcan?  While far more things went right in Sochi than went wrong, much of the media continued to reinforce the idea that the city was not up to the task of hosting an international event of such scale.

Would you take an Epsom salt bath in a trashcan?

This is an important phenomenon for potential MBA candidates to note. While the admissions committee will be scanning your application for your qualifications, it will also be looking at your shortcomings just as much, if not more so. This isn’t because the admissions committee (adcomm) is made up of spiteful people, but rather because impressive applications are the norm, and they can only admit a sliver of applicants.

So how can you ensure they’ll focus on your great accomplishments and not the equivalent of your Sochi drinking water? First, you have to identify the potential weaknesses of your application and figure out the necessary steps to address them. Simply showing this self-awareness and taking concrete actions toward improvement can go a long way with the adcomm.

Here are a few of the biggest weaknesses we see in our clients’ profiles, and some of the ways candidates can begin addressing them:

Low GMAT score. If you bomb the test the first time, don’t just sign up for the next test and hope your luck will be better. Sign up for a test prep class or work with a tutor to ensure that you’re approaching the test methodically.

No quant experience. Did you skip statistics during undergrad or get a “C” in your calculus class? Take a college-level course that assigns letter grades to show that you’re boning up on your quantitative knowledge before entering B-school.

Little community involvement. If you don’t have a regular volunteering gig, find one that speaks to your passions and perhaps your career goals as soon as possible.

Lack of promotions at work. You have less control over this one, but you may be able to compensate by initiating a new project or starting a mentoring group for new colleagues to gain more leadership experience and add to your skill set.

Being part of an overrepresented candidate pool. Certain demographics and career backgrounds tend to dominate applications. So the adcomm isn’t just looking at you as an individual, but thinking about the overall makeup of the class. It’s essential to strategize regarding what differentiates you from your fellow consultants or engineers, and make sure that you highlight this in your application.

Just like Sochi ultimately won the Olympic perception battle this year, many less-than-perfect candidates still gain admittance into top MBA programs every year. Still, it’s important to address any shortcomings so that they don’t dominate the adcomm’s conversation.