Thunderbird Case Summary

Evan Oberhausen

1/26/2017

MKT 490-78

Thunderbird Case Summary

        Thunderbird School of Global Management was founded to help prepare leaders in international business. Originally started as the American Institute for Foreign Trade, the school was started as a not-for-profit organization. Their belief that in order to do business worldwide, it is critical for business leaders to know foreign languages and develop a strong cultural acumen in addition to their functional skills. More than 50% of Thunderbird students were international and represented several geographies. And as of 2013, Thunderbird had more than 41,000 alumni who live and work in more than 140 countries. Offering a variety of programs, Thunderbird was able to remain ranked as the number one school in international business for 16 years. However, due to the growing global economy and a multitude of new business opportunities in many markets, a lot of schools have started to develop their own curriculum for international business.

        One of the most important marketing tools for thunderbird was its website. It offered a plethora of general and specific information about the school.  Compatible with all major Internet browsers, and having user friendly navigation allowed people to easily maneuver the website. The Google Analytics data allowed for the study of; Analysis by region, analysis by source, analysis by day and date, analysis by conversion rate, analysis by bounce rate, and analysis by time of stay. These factors would be able to give Thunderbird an accurate picture of what people from what region are visiting their website how long they are staying on the page, the factors that brought them to the website and much more.

The economic recession saw major budget cuts for marketing and communications at Thunderbird. Because of this it became exponentially harder for Thunderbird to keep up in the increasingly competitive race that it was in with the developing international business programs. This made it difficult for Thunderbird to find and attract MBA candidates from all over the world. Losing this edge would allow other schools to catch up or surpass their global reach causing them to lose students to other programs.