Graduate / Request for further improvements on my application essays （content, logic...） [6]

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.