EMBA Marketing Plan for Entering the Vietnamese Market
This marketing plan examines the feasibility of entering the Vietnamese market with an Executive MBA (EMBA) program. The paper analyzes the target product — a flexible, internationally oriented EMBA — alongside the characteristics and motivations of prospective Vietnamese students. It reviews Vietnam's macroeconomic conditions, regulatory environment (including Decree 73), corruption challenges, and the entrepreneurial culture that drives demand. An internal analysis identifies the institution's strengths and capability gaps, while the external analysis highlights Ho Chi Minh City as the optimal point of entry with limited but growing competition. The plan concludes with an action plan centered on persona development, inbound marketing, social/mobile channels, and adaptive metrics-driven decision-making.
- Introduction and Overview: Scope and candid assessment of Vietnamese market
- Product Analysis: The EMBA Offering: EMBA design, student motivations, and program attributes
- Market Analysis: Vietnam's Landscape: Demographics, regulation, gender, and digital connectivity
- Internal Analysis: Institutional Strengths and Weaknesses: Institutional reputation versus significant capability gaps
- External Analysis: Competition and Environment: Ho Chi Minh City opportunity and limited competitor set
- Action Plan: Personas, channels, messaging, and adaptive metrics
- Conclusions: Feasibility verdict and growth potential in Vietnam
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What makes this paper effective
- Grounds strategic recommendations in peer-reviewed research on EMBA student motivations, outcomes, and program design, lending academic credibility to a practical business document.
- Maintains an honest, self-critical tone throughout — openly acknowledging the market's limitations and the institution's capability gaps rather than overstating opportunities.
- Applies a structured marketing framework (product, market, internal, external, action) consistently, making the argument easy to follow and evaluate.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper exemplifies evidence-based strategic analysis: every major claim — from student motivation to regulatory barriers to gender dynamics — is supported by a specific citation. This technique bridges academic literature and applied business planning, showing how research findings translate directly into marketing decisions such as persona development and program design.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a brief overview that candidly flags Vietnam's limitations, then moves through a product analysis (EMBA attributes and student motivations), a market analysis (macroeconomics, regulation, gender, psychographics, digital connectivity), an internal analysis (institutional strengths and weaknesses), and an external analysis (competition and city-level opportunity). It closes with a practical action plan covering personas, messaging, channels, and adaptive measurement, followed by a short conclusion reaffirming the feasibility of market entry.
Introduction and Overview
The following is a marketing plan for entering the Vietnamese market with a higher education product. Several issues are covered, including product analysis, market analysis, internal analysis, external analysis, and an action plan, followed by conclusions.
In short, the Vietnamese market is a challenging one to enter. The market is large in population and growing in wealth, but the average Vietnamese citizen cannot afford to pay tuition for Western-quality higher education. The actual addressable market — consisting of wealthy Vietnamese students who cannot gain entry to Western institutions — is quite small. This report outlines the size of that market and how best to reach it.
Product Analysis: The EMBA Offering
The product being sold is higher education. The business school proposes to enter the Vietnamese market with several courses of study. Two products are on the table — a baccalaureate degree and an MBA — but the MBA has the best chance of success, because its market consists of professionals who are able to pay. The target market is essentially Vietnamese professionals in their late twenties and early thirties who hold progressive positions that give them the ability to invest in their future, but who, for whatever reason, cannot travel to the West to study.
An Executive MBA (EMBA) program is an opportunity for experienced professionals to reflect on best practices in business, synthesizing their experience with theory (Roglio & Light, 2009). Because of their experience, Executive MBA students face lower barriers to success, and conventional measures such as GMAT scores are not correlated with that success (Gropper, 2007), which means the EMBA program can be offered with lower barriers to entry — though other studies contradict this finding (Siegert, 2010). An EMBA program typically combines classroom and distance learning, allowing for greater flexibility in time commitment (Desanctis & Sheppard, 2010). This attribute, if implemented, would further reduce friction in the sales process.
Students are motivated to pursue EMBA programs by a number of factors. A study of students in Hong Kong revealed that most students pay for their own MBA (Thompson & Gui, 2000). That study highlighted that the main reasons are to improve analytical ability, to learn more about business management, to obtain the MBA qualification, and generally to improve job performance (Thompson & Gui, 2000). Satisfaction relates both to the degree itself and to the school, so both dimensions should be considered in the marketing program (Grady, 2010). Another product-related consideration is the international component. It is expected that Vietnamese students want an EMBA in part for the exposure to Western business practices, and demand would be higher for a program with an international business component — especially given recent stagnation in the Vietnamese economy (Tho, 2013). An international component has been shown to improve graduate outcomes at the cognitive, behavioral, and attitudinal levels (Schuster et al., 1998).
Hilgert (1995) showed that EMBA students expect "life-changing" outcomes and broader perspectives on the world. This speaks directly to the pain points the program seeks to address. The target market consists of individuals who are generally successful in their respective fields but, having developed their careers within Vietnam and perhaps without the benefit of formal business education, feel limited in their ability to scale their business or break into multinational firms. This finding, alongside Thompson and Gui (2000), highlights the desire for broader management perspectives — including formal business theory and its practical application — as the primary pain points that EMBA students seek to resolve.
Market Analysis: Vietnam's Landscape
Understanding what students are looking for helps in designing the program and contextualizes the marketing message around known pain points. However, a deeper understanding of the market is required prior to entry. Vietnam has a large population of 95 million, with two-thirds living in rural areas and a low but growing GDP per capita (CIA World Factbook, 2016). These figures are not unfavorable, but they do not make a strong case for Vietnam as the best investment destination.
Vietnam's business environment is generally challenging. The country is governed by a Communist administration that exerts strong control over business activity, particularly in the education sector. In 2012, Decree 73 was passed, placing strict regulations on foreign educational institutions operating in Vietnam. The minimum investment is set at $15 million USD, and there is a minimum cost per student of $7,500 USD — effectively placing a cap on the size of the addressable market. Furthermore, ventures must include content developed by Vietnamese educational institutions, which somewhat undermines the value proposition of a Western EMBA, and thereby lowers the attractiveness of the product. There are also stipulations regarding teacher-to-student ratios (ICEF, 2012).
While entrepreneurialism is high in Vietnam, bureaucracy is also high. Corruption is a major issue; Vietnam ranks 112th out of 168 countries on the Corruption Perceptions Index (Transparency International, 2016). The government has, however, made significant investments in its education system in recent years, producing decent scores on international evaluations (The Economist, 2013), though concerns remain about the high dropout rate. This investment in education provides a reasonable baseline of knowledge, which means Vietnamese students entering EMBA programs in their twenties and thirties are better equipped to succeed, having already developed literacy and numeracy skills.
Gender is another important market dimension. EMBA programs are generally valuable for women, who perform well in terms of the expected outcomes of broadened perspective and cognitive flexibility (Hilgert, 1998). Female entrepreneurship is recognized as a pathway to economic growth, unlocking the capabilities of 50% of the population that in many cultures remains shut out of economic opportunity (Kobeissi, 2010). Female entrepreneurs have been specifically identified as important to Vietnam's economic growth (Gerrard, Schoch & Cunningham, 2007). There is clearly a market for female participation in the EMBA program; however, in a country where female entrepreneurs are still expected to fulfill traditional roles in the home, it is worth examining what accommodations need to be made to effectively target this segment.
Psychographic considerations are equally important in marketing. Swierczek and Thai (2003) conducted a study of Vietnamese SME owners and found they were primarily motivated by achievement and challenge, rather than by career necessity or economic security. Tapping into these motivations will be critical to successfully marketing this program to Vietnamese entrepreneurs and managers.
As for reaching the market, it is worth noting that in the two major cities driving Vietnam's economy — the capital Hanoi and the largest city Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) — Vietnam is an educated, well-connected place. Approximately 40% of all Vietnamese access the Internet daily, smartphone ownership is rising rapidly, and as a young country where 40% of people are under 25, there is significant potential for targeting the upwardly mobile, connected young entrepreneur class (Davis, 2016).
References
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ICEF (2012). New government decree tightens regulations on foreign-based educational institutions in Vietnam. ICEF Monitor. Retrieved December 11, 2016 from http://monitor.icef.com/2012/11/new-government-decree-tightens-regulations-on-foreign-based-education-institutions-in-vietnam/
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