Аннотация
Introduction 10
Chapter I. Understanding political crisis 2022 influence on marketing activities 11
1.1 Consequences of political crisis: Global, National, Company Level 11
1.2 GSOM as part of SPbU and international environment 13
1.3 Problem statement 13
1.4 Business goal 14
1.5 Research goal and tasks 14
1.6 Summary 15
Chapter II. Research methodology and Empirical Data for marketing plan changes 17
2.1 Methodology for marketing plan Analysis: Traditional marketing methodologies
introduction and selection: 4 Ps, 4 Cs, 7 Ps 17
2.2 Research Methodology for business and data understanding: CRISP- DM 20
2.3 Interview 21
2.4 Survey 22
2.5 Metrics for Websites Analysis 23
2.6 Empirical Data 26
2.7 Research framework 28
2.8 Summary 30
Chapter Ш. Marketing plan analysis and improvement 32
3.1 As Is GSOM marketing plan 32
3.2 Crisis influence on GSOM 36
3.3 Customer Analysis of GSOM site on the basis of log data 37
3.4 Analysis of international body of GSOM SPbU master programs applicants and
partners 45
3.5 To Be GSOM marketing plan analysis 49
3.6 Recommendations on marketing plan improvement 51
Conclusion 55
List of references 56
Acknowledgement 59
Appendix 60
Nowadays, it is not only companies and corporations in various industries that spend huge sums of money on marketing in order to offer the best possible deals to their audience, but also in the field of higher education. Universities not only need to meet financial goals on the business side, but also need to attract high-quality and gifted students. This requires the analyzing of which marketing strategies to use, to adjust and improve the strategies with the changes. What's more, at the present point in time of March 2022, due to the complex international political situation, Russia is subject to a series of related sanctions carried out by the United States, the European Union and other countries, regions, and international organizations. This has led directly to a series of related consequences, for instance, very few of current marketing plan activities were fulfilled because of sanctions in 2022.And in terms of international accreditation, the crisis will cause an unclear status of international Triple Crown (EQUIS, AMBA and AACSB) accreditation of Graduate School of Management of St. Petersburg State University (GSOM SPbU) in the nearest future. In other words, can GSOM still use Triple Crown accreditation as a selling point for the next academic year's intake? Further on, we began to think. Which existing marketing activities were really being done before the crisis? Which can be done about it in the nearest perspective?
In this paper, we are dedicated to proposing recommendation for developing marketing strategy for Master programs of GSOM SPbU.
The thesis is consisted of a title page, declaration of independent nature of the work, annotation, table of contents, introduction, three chapters, conclusion, list of reference, acknowledgement and appendices. The study itself consisted of the three main parts that are reflected in the organization of chapters and contents of the thesis. The first chapter introduces the influences on GSOM marketing plan under the political crisis 2022, business goal, research goal and tasks. The second chapter of the study is the broad justification on the choice of methodologies and description of empirical data. In the third chapter, 7 sources of empirical data were analyzed, and the results were synthesized to give recommendations on improvement of GSOM marketing plan.
This research was devoted to proposing recommendations on marketing plan changes for the Graduate School of Management in order to enroll international students under the global political crisis 2022. The whole study revolves around two research questions. To answer the first research question of how the political crisis affects GSOM's marketing program, we analyzed the impact of the crisis on GSOM's marketing plan at different levels in the context of political issues, and concluded that 48% of the marketing campaigns could not be completed due to the political crisis, thus having a high chance of leading to a decrease in international applicants. To answer the second research question of what can be done in the situation of the revealed limitations, 7 sources of data were analyzed (see Table 2), leading to recommendations in three directions: website optimization, marketing channels adjustment, Chinese market development.
We propose 3 recommendations on website optimization: new operation system adaption; loading time reduction up to 5; reschedule main events to the high traffic period. To adjust some of the current marketing channels to reduce the impact of the promoting channels which influenced by the political crisis, and transferred the traffic (60% of total traffic) from these unavailable channels to the available channels, in order to maintain the number of applicants by making a shift: from Facebook and Instagram to VK and Telegram; from Google search engine to Yandex Search engine. The number of Chinese applicant’s accounts for 24% of the total international students of GSOM, and there are about 30000 Chinese students studying in Russia every year, but GSOM does not have any marketing channels in China, so the development of the Chinese market is an effective way to increase the application number of Chinese students. To improve marketing channels in Chinese market by: develop Douyin promoting Channel; develop Weibo promoting channel; collaborate with Chinese overseas educational agency institution (see Table 4 for details).
