Positioning

Creating Thought Leadership

Business Needs

The client is a premier business school in India that has long neglected its constituencies, including its powerful alumni. With increasing competition and impending entry of international business schools into the country, the management wanted to proactively reach out to its stakeholders and create a thought leadership positioning in the minds of their stakeholders.

Solution

Zebu’s consulting team studied the existing communication strategy of the business school. It found that communication was largely decentralized. However, the drawback of such de-centralization was lack of consistency and continuity amongst the various entities within the business school. Also, unlike most businesses, the client was creating significant body of work in fundamental and applied management that was largely untapped.

The team proposed a centralized communication plan designed to reach out initially to the business schools’ alumni network. The content strategy for the communication was based on the spirit of “giving” rather than “asking”, drawing upon the content created by the school over many years. The editorial calendar for the newsletter covered all aspects of management with content originally authored by faculty being re-purposed for accessibility and comprehension by the Zebu editorial team.  Email was used as the medium for distributing the newsletter and best practices of email marketing, including a landing page, were employed to grow the list.

Benefits

Zebu engagement helped the client with the following

• Creation of a formal communication channel with its stakeholders
• Collection of real data that uncovered the extent of engagement the school had with its stakeholders
• The program became a marketing channel for initiatives that were being carried in the physical world – for instance, executive education programs

The business school now has a much more consistent communication plan in place and feels confident of taking the digital and social media path to reaching out to its stakeholders.