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If more people start switching from Internet Explorer to Firefox, the credit may go to a team of students from Chicago Booth.
Their marketing plan, “How Do You Firefox? It’s your life. Your browser should reflect it,” is among the top 10 finalists in the 2008 Impact Mozilla Challenge, a contest hosted by the web browser to find a “retention marketing plan.” Voting is open to the public until December 17. Mozilla will announce the winner December 19.
The Chicago Booth plan targets 15- to 25-year-olds through the social networking site Facebook, according to Eileen Buenviaje, one of five first-year students on the team who developed it. “The main challenge of the contest is having people who download Firefox use it regularly. We realized that because nobody knows the difference between Firefox and Internet Explorer, they don’t see any reason to switch.”
Under the Chicago Booth plan, enthusiastic influential Firefox fans would craft profiles detailing what they love about the browser and post them on a Firefox campaign site, then invite friends to “read about their favorite add-ons, learn about Firefox, get more interested, download it, and use it,” she said.
The team, all students in the Full-Time MBA Program, learned about the project through the student-led Marketing Group. By the time they decided to submit the initial proposal, they realized it was due in three days. “We got in a room and all these ideas started flying around,” she said.
Some of the team’s members already used Firefox, others did not. In generating ideas, they realized that Firefox’s competitive advantage was its add-ons – small applications users can add to their browser to personalize their web browsing experience. For instance, a mini-map add-on allows users to drag an address into another part of the frame and instantly displays a map and driving directions without ever opening a new web page.
They also decided to leverage social networking because the budget for the project was small. “We thought younger people are more likely to adapt to it and tell all their friends. We decided to target them and use what we know they’re already using.”
Initially, the plan called for posting the profiles on Facebook. But after Chicago Booth’s proposal was selected in the first round of competition, team members were asked to develop a more detailed plan. That’s when they realized its flaw.
“Having profiles on Facebook seemed redundant,” Buenviaje said. “We put them on a Firefox site instead, which was a challenge — we were taking people off Facebook where we wanted them to stay and perpetuate the viral spreading of the project. But it makes sense to take them to Firefox because that’s where they have to download. And these profiles should live elsewhere than Facebook so that our marketing message remains clear,” she said.
Members of the Chicago Booth team — Buenviaje, Robert Michelassi, Jason Williams, Elena Gorelik, and Mischa Lumiere — appreciated the chance to get real-world experience. Gorelik said, “We were able to combine the intuition and creativity we brought to Chicago Booth with principles we’ve learned. I was glad that the approach could address a real challenge faced by a real company.”
Buenviaje agreed. “A lot of us were looking for a taste of what we really want to do when we’re done.” Williams echoed the thought. “It was a low-pressure way to ‘dabble’ in high-tech marketing and see if there was a potential career fit,” he said. “It was also a chance to do a fun project with new friends.”
—Patricia Houlihan