Harvard Business Schools Starts To Advertise

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 22, 9:22AM EST

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Harvard Business School tops many ratings of business schools in the United States and even the world. Its graduates are paid more than the graduates of almost all, if not all, of the major graduate business schools in the U.S. Among its alumni are a “Who’s Who” of CEOs of America’s largest companies. Yet, for some reason, the Harvard Business School needs to advertise to interest new students.

In its latest marketing campaign, the Harvard Business School’s advertising department has been promoting its “Executive Education ” program. The ads have a great deal in common with those for financial newsletters. People who are interested are asked to give the school their names (first name, last name, and prefix), their current title or position, the name of their companies and the countries in which they work. The Harvard Business School even wants e-mail addresses, an asset which might allow the institute of higher education to promote itself at later dates.

The reason to give the information to HBS is, among other things, to learn to “Practice Under Pressure.”

After all of the fields of information are filled out by an interested party, the new message is “Thank you for your interest in Harvard Business School.”

HBS does offer people who have given their information a bit of a virtual tour via a “Learn More” link. Unfortunately, the link does not work. So much for the marketing training the school is supposed to offer.

The only way left to find out the benefits of HBS is to go the the school’s website — HBS.edu, without any help.

HBS.edu does not say much about the institution’s advantages, at least not at first. Most of the homepage is devoted to an analysis of “Entrepreneurship,” women’s Olympic sports, how to follow HBS on Twitter, the benefits of reading The Harvard Business Review, a piece on “Racist Umpires and Monetary Ministers,” some faculty blogs, profiles of alumni and a promotion for the institution’s Executive Education Program. Fortunately for those who are interested, there is a “tour” of the campus. This tour is barely more than a Google Map of the campus with locations of, among other things, dining and medical facilities.

Perhaps HBS has trouble getting qualified students, which was almost certainly not a problem in the past. The mighty have fallen.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.