MBA 520 Marketing principles
Exam # 1
April 3, 2013

Currently there are over 15 MBA programs available to residents of the Twin Cities. Given this high level of competition, you are asked by Matt Nowakowski to put together an “Executive Summary” of your ideas in how the St. Mary’s MBA Program could be marketed in 2012 and 2013 using some of the principles learned in Chapters 1-8 in the Grewal and Levy text and/or in Chapters 1-6 in the Marketing War Fare. This synopsis of your ideas should be no more than 5 pages. (HINT: Refer to the Instant Replay and Chapter 7 and 8 PowerPoint decks in Blackboard)

Like any other Marketing plan, we first must identify our Target market in which we are trying to reach out to, or who might be interested in obtaining an MBA be it from Saint Mary University or any one of the 15 Universities in or around the twin cities that offers an MBA. Before we can select a segmentation strategy, we have to make our objective known and clearly stated. The objective of this marketing strategy is to attract more students to the Saint Mary’s MBA program by increasing enrollment by ten percent for calendar year 2012/2013. In identifying our target market, we are going to look at three different segmentations; Geographic, Demographics, psychographic and break each down as it relates obtaining our target market.
Our overall objective is to increase the total enrollment of MBA students by ten percent in 2012/2013 and thereafter keep a constant increase of fifteen percent for the upcoming years. Prior to this year, we have not really had a strong marketing campaign as most of your new enrollments came primarily by word of mouth rather than by us having a marketing strategy in place.
Geographically- this marketing campaign is going to target people who live within 35-40 miles of any of our twin cities campuses. This should cover the entire metropolitan area. We have a campus in Oakdale, Minnetonka, and Minneapolis. So even though, our primarily focus is the twin cities area, we could also market to people in the Wisconsin area due to the fact that our Oakdale campus is conveniently within traveling distance(30-45 miles) of Wisconsin.
The second criteria for our segmentation would be demographics. For our demographics, we are going to target college graduates with four plus years of working experience; adults aging from 28 -45 years; middle income adults, immigrants, people with temporary immigration status, and lastly working adults.
As far as the lifestyles goes, we are looking for a family person with values, who can balance work load and that of schools by attending school once or twice a week from 6-10pm and on some Saturdays. We are going to target those who are willing to take an accelerated 8 weeks course rather than having to go through the conventional college semester of sixteen weeks. We also are going to target those that have the need for self- respect, self-fulfillment, or a specific sense of belonging.
Now that we have established our targeted market, we can market the Saint Mary’s MBA program to those individuals, both male and female between ages 28-45, with four plus years of working experience, have middle income, and who has a high fulfillment need for graduate degree at a very cost effective and non-conventional college. This program would be geared towards the working adult, who excels well in a fast paste one day a week university, and who are willing to commute within 30-45 miles of anyone of our convenient twin cities campus.
As far as the marketing mix, the Saint Mary’s university has one of the best as compared to most other MBA programs in the twin cities. We have a Great product. An MBA program that is conveniently offered for working adults one day a week and on weekends, and also consists of staff members that have tons and tons of experience. Not only are these staffs very good professors, they are also teaching or have thought at other prestigious MBA programs(