Background Information: A Product Development Manager is assigned the role of building partnerships with retailers and developing an offline strategy to compete with Korea’s leading phone manufacturer, which had a monopoly over the Indian market.
Theme: Resilience, Entrepreneurial Thinking
Theme (Explained): Narratives tied closely to a country’s transition or an industry’s transformation are the best examples, as your ride with the industry or country’s journey can give you several ups and downs that you may capture in an essay.
Remember – without conflicts and setbacks, essays have a low recall.
Profile: Business Development
Industry: Telecom, Technology
MBA Essay Strategy: The message for the commitment narrative is borrowed from the founder’s vision for society. Instead of repeating the mantra, I have captured an interaction with the founder that sets the stage for why the applicant began to believe in the mantra of democratizing ‘great products.’
The middle – when most essays lose momentum is exactly where I have planned a setback event.
Once the setback event is defined, the focus of the essay switches rapidly to the applicant’s action to implement the founder’s vision.
The pricing decision, the emotional rollercoaster, and the marketing strategy to create demand for the product are the three angles I have captured to demonstrate the applicant’s expertise as a marketer and a salesperson.
If you had a similar experience - building brand awareness, disrupting the market, finding partnerships in unlikely sources, or using creative strategies to challenge the incumbent, build your essay with a W-pattern structure.
Opener: Starting the essay with an ambiguous occasion draws the reader to your essay. Use it with care. The next lines should be truly momentous in scale or ambition. Don’t set it up for a routine task or project.
Sample Yale SOM MBA Commitment Essay: Business Development (Business Development in a Startup)(474 Words)
“I was sitting across a 40-something Entrepreneur who hadn’t shared what the meeting was about. The email said, “I have some interesting projects for you.”
“We have to beat <X>.”
<X> was no small player but a Technology behemoth with a market share of $56B. I had drunk ..
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