Essay: Why Stanford?
Profile: Miss. K
Profile (Background): Miss K began her career in CPG marketing, helping reshape product narratives and consumer strategies at a multinational brand. She later took on a general management role within a commercial team, leading cross-functional initiatives to grow revenue while managing brand identity. Prior to Stanford, Miss. K also worked on community engagement projects focused on food access and health awareness, showing her interest in customer insights beyond profit metrics.
Essay Approach: “Why Stanford?”
Miss K should explain how GSB offers the perfect place to refine both sides of her skillset, analytical decision-making, and empathetic brand leadership. She wants to become a general manager who can lead with both strategic foresight and emotional intelligence.
Core Curriculum
Strategic Communication
Since the applicant interacts with multiple decision makers in the company, building the skills to adapt her communication style for each persona will expand her delivery styles. Through public speaking and writing exercises, she will learn to build consensus for reintroducing NPS as a key performance metric.
Note: Complete Core, Electives and Experiential Learning Courses are Quoted and narrated in F1GMAT's Why Stanford MBA Sample Essay as part of F1GMAT's Stanford MBA Essay Guide
Essay Planning
Problem: The lower Net Promoter Score (NPS), a metric that measures customer loyalty, is falling across brands.
Problem (Explained): With the arrival of D2C brands, influencer marketing, private-label brands, and insurgent brands, leadership lost focus on NPS – the measure of customer loyalty that determines the brand’s growth potential. The applicant wants to bring back the focus on NPS by building consensus among CXOs.
Feasible Goals: Re-prioritize NPS as a key metric in marketing
Short-term Goal: Persuade CXOs to embrace NPS and build strategies that improve the score, starting with the release of a Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) card for low-income customers.
Long-Term Goal: Combine profitability and brand loyalty with sustainable growth
Stanford’s Strength: Stanford’s legacy of building leadership skills to take on ambitious goals
Opener: By showing awareness of the change in priority around marketing metrics from NPS to Views/Likes, I have introduced a reflection of the changes Miss K experienced as a CPG marketing professional.
Strategy: By highlighting the changes in marketing through the lens of the pandemic and the proliferation of influencer marketing, private label brand, and insurgent brand, the tone of the essay is objective. Such a strategy works when the applicant has goals to bring systemic changes. A critical evaluation of changing customer behavior represents resentment. Avoid it to demonstrate your high Emotional Intelligence.
To balance the narrative from just a perspective about the change in the industry to her personal contributions, I have mentioned her initiative to start a Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) card for low-income customers, who would play a key role in bringing loyalty back to the brands.
Why Stanford MBA Essay: Marketing (Bringing Loyalty Back to Brands) (347 Words)
When I began my career in Consumer Product Goods (CPG) Marketing, influencer marketing was in its infancy. The ‘concepts’ that I finalized were founded on mapping the values of the brand to customer needs. In 2020, influencers filled a void for our cooped-up home/office life. Suddenly, brand identity was devalued. Views and likes became King.
Recognizing the need to set the right tone for our brand, I moved to a General Management role and managed the brand identity of five Fortune 500 companies. Getting buy-in from the executives, who often valued automation over customer loyalty, was a frustrating process.
With the economic slowdown in 2024...
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