If there is specific background information that has not yet been addressed and should be considered for your application review, please use this essay to elaborate.
Crest experience
Customer-centric theory has been widely acknowledged in the field of marketing. To successfully apply it to reality, getting customer insights is the most important step. With a goal of being a professional in marketing, I decided to go to the corporate world to learn how to understand customers.
My first internship in Synet, a career consulting company targeting university students, helped me get the gist of customer-centric marketing. As a marketing team intern, I was assigned to market this start-up brand with WeChat, a popular social app in China. To attract first users, we held online lectures on job hunting to our target customers. Unfortunately, such a strategy yielded few transactions. After analyzing audience feedback, we found that the discrepancy of lecture content and consumer needs as well as the "psychical distance" between lecturers and audience should be blamed. Therefore, I put myself in the audience' shoes and redesigned the lecture by choosing the topics that match with customers' pain points and lengthening Q&A time to optimize user experience. Responsible for content creation, I selected catchy titles and wrote captivating content with various rhetorical devices, which could catch customers' attention. Moreover, in an effort to attract new customers, we often did small-scale survey among university students and based on the insights we extract, we designed various mechanisms to encourage existing fans to share the copywriting on "Moments". Through this internship, I learnt to tailor publicity strategies based on customers as a real marketer and mastered the primary research method to design questionnaires and gain customer insights.
However, lacking large customer data and advanced analytical tools, we often formulated marketing strategies based on our observation and understanding of the customers. Although our sense did help us sometimes because of we are university students, the same identity with our target customers, I came to realize that sense is risky and I need to learn a more scientific method to precisely understand customers.
Therefore, after the internship in Synet, I decided to work at Starcom, a media planning agency, where I have learnt to acquire customer insights through data. During this internship, I was responsible for maintaining the database of Crest and Oral B by collecting and processing post-buy media data, and sometimes providing data support to marketing campaigns. Conducting numerous data analysis has not only helped me master advanced tools and methods for acquiring customer-related data, but has also taught me how to choose appropriate data indexes to understand customers and interpret data into customer insights. For example, when selecting a website for advertisement display, instead of taking countless indexes into consideration, marketers should simply focus on several key indexes, such as penetration and TGI (target group index), which precisely represent consumer behavior. Furthermore, data interpretation is also an important step towards the further improvement of communication strategies. Take the SEM of Crest as an example: certain keywords are bought from search engines so customers receive results on Crest information first when searching for similar words. Various KPI generated by customers can instruct us about how to adjust the strategy. For instance, few impressions tell us that the selected keywords are not usually searched, and we should replace them with others. If the CTR is low, we need to optimize the displayed content to make it attractive.
Aiming at working in the area of media planning, a data-driven and analytics-focused career, I find that I still need to master more advanced analytical methods to analyze customer data and learn how to use these data to build effective marketing strategy. With a concentration of customer insights, the master program of Customer Insights is the best choice for me. Through courses like Statistical Analysis and Data Mining, I can further learn to manage big data through integrated statistical tools and methodologies, and interpret the output into useful insights. Additionally, with a trend for social media marketing, the course of Marketing and Social Media Strategy will help me learn how to leverage social media platforms and the interaction with customers to achieve business goals. Also, I believe that Professor Andrew Stephen who teaches this course will offer me the best digital marketing practice because of his rich experience in social media marketing.
In return, I am willing to share with my future classmates my experience of working for Crest and marketing this US-based brand in China, a totally different cultural background. Furthermore, as more foreign companies target China's market, the knowledge of Chinese customer insights and Chinese culture is becoming increasingly important. As a local Chinese and with a year-long marketing experience, I would like to discuss with my classmates my understanding of Chinese customers, especially the young generation.Holt Educational Consultant - / 14,835 
4783 Yao, most of these information are profession related. I wonder if you have not already shared most of this information in your statement of purpose yet? If this essay is just an extended discussion of your professional experience as indicated in the statement of purpose then you are just wasting valuable word space. It will be considered redundant information and not be considered as additional factors in the assessment of your application.
Prompts like these often look for little known facts that you were overlooked in the other prompts that you responded to. Perhaps you have a unique quality as a student or as an employee that makes you one of the best people at your job, maybe you won some awards or accolades from the companies you represented before. Maybe you got something published in the past but forgot to mention it or did not have a chance to previously mention it. Something or any information that you feel can help your essay stand out and make the reviewers take notice of your application would be best to showcase in this essay.
Consider what makes you an extra ordinary employee in this field. Or maybe, think of how you plan to up the game in Big Data in the future. How do you conceptualize that happening? Showcase your forward thinking nature in relation to your application but base it on your previous studies and work experience in order to create the idea of "specific background information that has not yet been addressed". I think that would make this essay stand out among the other applicants in the pack.
Hi Ysydiana,
I think your essay is very condensed and contain fully technical information on the field. I am not sure if a "regular" admission officer will understand the whole essay and be able to evaluate what it values. In the essay, there are no definitions or explanations of the terms such as "index, penetration, target group index, SEM, KPI, CTR", and my guess is the admission officer would know these only if he/she has past experience in this field. Do you know specifically if your essays will be reviewed by people coming from the field?
@Holt
Hi Holt. Thanks for your reply and thanks for your advice! The other essay question is
in 250 words, tell us 1) your post-graduate career goal, 2) your skills (what you're really good at, and 3) your key accomplishments.
In the first essay, I don't mention the two internships. Therefore, I hope to elaborate more on these internships in the optional essay. I think your advice of showcasing my forward thinking is a very one and it does inspire me!
Do you think if it is okay for me to write about "why school" and "my contribution" in the optional essays?
Holt Educational Consultant - / 14,835 4783 Yao, the type of question that you opt to write about should be based upon what you feel your background as a student or as a person can best represent in the essay. I cannot be the judge of which optional essays to write because I am not really well informed about your background. If you have a lot of important things to say about those two supplemental topics then go right ahead and write about them. I can only come in and help you improve the essay once you have already written it. At this point, I think that you can write about those two topics because they are commonly suggested prompts. If you have other prompts to consider which are not so popular among the students, then you should also try to write about those. That way, you will have chosen some unique or under represented topics that might make your application stand out.
