MBAs Geek it Out at Philadelphia Theatre Company

MBAs Geek it Out at Philadelphia Theatre Company

On a Thursday morning in June, executives of Philadelphia Theatre Company took the stage at their Suzanne Roberts Theatre and asked 100 MBA students for their best advice on challenges common to regional theater companies nationwide.

Those challenges included increasing the subscriber base, creating and strengthening affinity group relationships, and leveraging the venue to generate additional revenue.

Oh, and one more: recommendations on marketing a specific production, in particular this winter’s staging of “Nerds,” a musical comedy that follows the lives of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as they rise from garage inventors to billionaires.

By Sunday morning, when the students took the “stage” at Drexel LeBow’s Pearlstein Learning Center, the executives were presented with a recommended branding strategy and an idea for a television commercial; expressions of interest from local artists to display their paintings in the theater’s lobby on a consignment basis; an offer of pro bono assistance from a web designer; and a 75 percent discount on development of a mobile app.

And much, much more.

So much more, in fact, that theater President Priscilla M. Luce and her colleagues were astounded at how quickly and thoroughly the students gathered and analyzed data, and insights they included in their myriad of recommendations.

“Almost overnight you became experts in our business,” Luce told the students. To which the students could have replied: “That’s because we didn’t sleep much last night.”

The project served as the midpoint residency for students in the online and accelerated MBA programs. Lead instructor Chuck Sacco MBA ’06, a technology entrepreneur, greeted the students Thursday morning with these words: “You are no longer students. You are part of a consulting firm that is pitching this client for business. And that is exactly how you are going to be treated, beginning right now.”

Prior to their arrival, the 100 students were assigned to one of three consulting teams. The first morning consisted of lectures on nonprofits, marketing, team effectiveness and the validating of assumptions. Then each team determined how to select its own CEO, name project leaders and assign team members to one of four projects. Lunch was barely over before the student-consultants dispersed into the streets of the city to interview hotel concierges and coffee shop baristas, took their laptop computers into quiet corners to create online surveys of prospective theatergoers, and worked the phones with everything from corporations to retirement communities and churches to find potential affinity partners.

On Saturday, the instructors interrupted each team, demanding to see their Sunday morning presentations immediately.

“Nothing in the real world goes exactly as planned,” says co-instructor Matt Kletzli MBA ’09, a multinational leader with AIG Property and Casualty. “Handling the unexpected adds a whole new layer of learning. And I just like messing with their heads.”

One team responded to the interruption by beginning to describe its presentation. “Nope,” said Sacco. “We don’t want to hear what you’re going to do. We want you to do it. Now.” Another delivered its presentation masterfully without the benefit of a slide presentation; that work had only just begun.

“I pitch a lot of new business and don’t usually get the benefit of finding out what tipped the scales in favor of one agency or another,” says student Mary Kate Lo Conte, who is director of account service at The Merz Group, a branding agency. “The residency was challenging and intense. I will be able to use what I learned in my work.”

The winning team (as selected by the client) tagged themselves “Baldwin Consulting Group” and offered recommendations for merchandising, social media, production marketing, diminished rehearsal costs and space-rental income. This is the group that produced a video commercial and — in the eyes of Luce, the theater’s president, Sara Garonzik, the executive producing director, and Amy Lebo, the director of marketing and communications — united the recommendations within a brand strategy that captured the essence of Philadelphia Theatre Company’s mission: to produce, develop and present “entertaining and imaginative contemporary theater focused on the American experience that ignites the intellect and touches the soul.”

The Baldwin Group condensed that mission into the brand statement: Are you enough?

Are you smart enough? Are you sexy enough? Are you different enough?

Regardless of whether the theater company adopts the slogan, on this extended weekend it was savvy enough to win it all.