Tulane PMBAs Help Market the Affordable Care Act

By: Jonathan Jouet

Last week, I began my final class for the semester, Marketing Planning and Implementation.  Our professor, Catherine Lenihan, has presented us with an exceptional opportunity to assist Blue Cross / Blue Shield of Louisiana in marketing their individual health care plan that will be offered through the marketplace healthcare.gov, under the Affordable Care Act.

Needless to say, this opportunity is both challenging and exciting.  Our class will conclude with final presentations to the Marketing Team at Blue Cross / Blue Shield and the best presentation will travel to Baton rouge to present in front of their Chief Executive Officer (CEO).  As professor Lenihan said, this is a real world experience that we can use on our resume.  We are not working on a case where the problem has already been solved, we are assisting the largest insurer in Louisiana adapt to their changing industry.

This isn’t the first time our class has assisted businesses while working on the MBA.  We have done projects for our Global Leadership European Union class where we came up with a finance proposal for Rokas Renewables, a wind energy company in Greece that needed to finance their 2 billion euro project.  In Practice of Management: Consulting, we worked with a Louisiana owned Bayou Teche Brewery to increase sales and market saturation.  Finally, we assisted the New Orleans Opera to target Millennials and gauge their interest in opera, as well as suggest how to improve the popularity of opera among the younger generation. The Tulane PMBA program is truly hands on, we do not just “study cases” like you will find in other programs, we study real problems.  Our clients take away value from the projects that we put so much time into; and everyone does their best on the projects we complete for clients.  Even when we are all doing the same assignment, each team will put together divergent yet applicable presentations to solve the problems we identify.

The scope of the Blue Cross / Blue Shield of Louisiana project is huge.  The real world experience I will gain from completing this project is immeasurable.  I am so excited and a little fearful of what will happen in the next few weeks, as the lines of the real world and the classroom blur.  When the final presentations are done, I always go home thinking that we all did something useful for the client.  I am confident we will provide highly informative and applicable presentations to our newest client, Blue Cross / Blue Shield of Louisiana.