MIT Lecture: Knowing Your Customer
On 16th June 2017, School of Management Fudan University invited Dr. Juanjuan Zhang, Epoch Foundation Professor of International Management and Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management to deliver the last MIT lecture to Fudan IMBA for the academic year 2016-17. Dr. Zhang who holds a B. Econ degree from Tsinghua University and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of California Berkeley brought with her years of experience in the field of marketing where she has led over 500 teams at MIT.
From the beginning to the very end, Dr. Zhang’s lecture was highly insightful and kept students on the edge of their seats. Given the time constraint, the highly interactive and informative session was that Dr. Zhang narrow down the focus on one of the 4Cs in marketing: Customers. She introduced several examples to make the session more engaging and to encourage audience participation. She also focused on segmenting, targeting and positioning a product, a complex decision most people don’t get right very often. One of the key takeaways here was the need to segment the market in the right way, and to target the segment that offers more attractiveness, compatibility and above all, competitive advantage and if one chooses to position one’s product to even the non-buyers, one must be very careful in managing the relationship with existing buyers so as not to lose them. The BMW Films case was a great example she used to explain this case.
Students did not shy away from making the most of this opportunity and jumped on every chance to ask questions that was also highly appreciated by the professor.
Written by 2016 IMBA
Chaudhary Sagar
