“Good design builds trust. If you have a good digital user experience with a brand, you are going to trust that brand more. We need to ask ourselves, on every aspect that we communicate digitally: are we building trust or are we eroding trust?”

Andrew Dalik, Strategic Brand Projects Senior Manager

The pandemic has shone a spotlight on all areas that we are digital. This has created an opportunity for all departments to see the digital tools we use in a new light. They are not supplementary to the experience; they are the experience of our programme and brand. The pandemic has focused our attention and accelerated investment in our digital experiences. One initiative underway is the acquisition of new equipment for digital content production. We are building our own in-house studio. New cameras, robotic panning heads, touchscreen presentation monitors, high-end microphones, LED fill lights, sound mixing equipment, post-production software and high definition livestreaming will enable an improved viewing experience. In this day in age, we are aware that our brand strength and reputation are directly tied to our digital competencies. We don’t expect this to recede, but rather intensify going forward. Digital transformation projects are impacting every industry. We see this firsthand in the main industries that employ our graduates, such as finance, healthcare and manufacturing. Education is no different. We too must rise to the challenge of digital transformation, fortifying our brand by integrating technology in a user-centric way.

“The pandemic has actually strengthened my relationship with the corporates. We have to be pragmatic. We have to be solution driven. We have to be informal. We just have to make it happen. This is relationship-building and bonding.”

Thomas R. Bucher, Senior Corporate Relations Manager

We provide value to companies through our Corporate Relations activities in two ways: employer branding opportunities and talent identification opportunities. Moving this entirely online required open and creative conversations with the wide array of people in our corporate network. We had to come up with entirely new engagement ideas on short notice. We had to be responsive to ever-changing restrictions – tightening, loosening and tightening again. Relationships are between people, not organisations. Thus, navigating the pandemic has enabled our Corporate Relations team to reaffirm the commitment of many collaborators who play a critical long-term role in enabling us to deliver great experiences to our MBAs.

For more insight into how we are responding to the pandemic and thinking about the future, we invite you to read this article that was published on Access MBA in June 2020: “The Best Way to Predict the Future (of MBA Programmes) Is to Design It.”