How HBS Made a Blizzard a Viral Marketing Moment

A (not) Guide to Rage-Baiting as an Established Brand

On Sunday, 22nd February, on the eve of the worst blizzard Boston has seen in ten years, the Office of the Dean of Harvard Business School sent out an email which sent a chill through the community. Stating that all classes in the MBA program would be held in person the following day, with no Zoom option, this move broke away from the precedent set by every other Harvard school, which held classes online; by Mayor Wu, who declared an emergency in the broader Boston area; and by Mayor Mamdani, in our sister city New York, whose policies are unclear to me but looked cute in the reels advising New Yorkers not to Doordash.

Reactions to this move varied across the spectrum. Some students praised it; “When would we schedule cancelled classes instead?” asserted one EC; “My weekends are booked up till mid-June.” Others were affronted. “How can school remain open when Trader Joe’s, the final bastion of civilized society, is closed?” one appalled Continuum resident said. 

Exhibit 1: “Cambridge doesn’t really clear sidewalks, you’d have to walk on the street to make it.” “They don’t really clear that either.”

The proverbial cherry on this snow cone was in addition to not having options for virtual attendance, not attending class would count as a dreaded unexcused absence, on account of “Travel Disruption.” my.hbs.edu academics suggested that this move would prevent the blizzard from worsening the MBA students’ historically fragile health on Mondays and Fridays.

Dean Datar* stood at his window, his eyes following the lone ray of light coming from the construction lights festooned on the empty hull of McCulloch. What was the reason for this mayhem?

*Do protagonists volunteer information on this fenestral rumination? Is this white lie accepted under artistic license of the case writer? Is this HBS’s hidden stamp of authorship of a case?

Harvard Business School, the West Point of Capitalism 

Founded in 1908, Harvard Business School (HBS) is a leading business school which offers a full-time MBA program, the anchor of its brand image, and various other programs I discover on LinkedIn when I check who else attended the same school as me. Paradoxically, the MBA program contributes only ~15% of the school’s annual revenue (2019), lower than Executive Education (~24%) and publishing (~28%), suggesting that MBA students are valued but not valuable. A true capitalism enthusiast focused on shareholder value might wonder—is there not a situation, then, where one might consider sacrificing the wellbeing of the MBA student for profits?

Well.

In 2026, the administration of HBS had been kept busy dealing with multiple storms over the past year—which had made consistent features in the New York Times headlines for months and had the potential to affect enrollment numbers. This list of exigencies, the chronic printer crisis which demanded a cloud-based revamp, and a troubling surge in truant RC ski trips was addressed through a coordinated campaign of emails and LCA cases.

These, however, saw little success. 

Concerned about how these internal dynamics affected HBS’s long-standing prestige war with their unnamed West Coast counterpart, the administration turned to other avenues.

The MBA Brand: Ripe for Polarization

In the present-day attention economy where discourse translates to dollars, there has been a rise in “outrage marketing” or “rage-baiting”—where a brand deliberately provokes controversy to drive engagement.

The administration was no stranger to using shock-factor tactics to win eyeballs. “Shark Tank” was hosted on admissions weekend, for the incoming class to hear from Prof. Satchu, entrepreneurship guru, that ~35% of them (~19% consulting / ~16% VC/PE) had wasted the prior four-six years of their professional life. Possibly only six months earlier than they would have received that message from him, anyway.

Bound by the decorum expected by a century-old institution, HBS could not openly harness the partisan discourse the MBA brands inspired, seen from Poets and Quants to the MBA Reddit thread, r/mba. However, in engineering a situation using their underutilized internal communications channels—having often missed opportunities for timely communication—they saw an opportunity to create an organic viral marketing moment.

Exhibit 2: HBS had, in the past, exercised unfortunate judgement on which issues its community expected to hear from it about. For context, Continuum, a residential complex close to campus, houses dozens of HBS students.

In taking a hard stance on keeping school open for regular operations, the administration seemingly wished to reaffirm to the world 1) HBS’s notoriously rigorous stance on classroom learning and 2) the community of go-getters it attracted. In keeping SHAD open, they took the more important stance that there are no excuses to skip leg day.

Exhibit 3: Pictured: Regular Operations. See who wants to go skiing on a school day now, RCs.

Initially, it seemed that the campaign was a success. 

From all over Cambridge and Allston, intrepid MBA students filed into the campus in time for their 8:30 am. A cross-registration student skied from MIT to Harvard, and posted about it on LinkedIn; in fact, multiple sightings of both skiers and ski gear were made on campus. At least two harried groups of weekend trippers, caught off-guard, began a long drive up to Boston, from Pittsburgh and Nashville, to make it. 

Exhibit 4: Did no one inform you that your section’s Park City trip was curricular training?

It seemed that the campaign was a success. Faced with enticingly insurmountable odds for a potentially meaningless outcome, the students rallied; proving that a culture of bringing in only successful, larger-than-life personalities for discussions on strategy might lead to muddled lessons on risk calibration. The MBA is the prime of one’s online persona’s life; a deluge of stories from various angles of the snow-covered Spangler lawn created an online moment of uniformity and scale last seen when Reese Witherspoon visited the school.

This hubbub reached feverish heights (not literally, thanks to kindly campus residents who contributed their hair dryers to combat the wet socks epidemic) when it began to attract copycats—a second wave of influencers who wished to cash in on this viral moment. Tre Mansdoerfer (MBA ‘26) took off to campus armed in ski gear on-camera during a virtual class, the end of his triumphant journey captured in the Hawes camera in the last moments of the session.

Exhibit 5: The Liberation of Man. Digital Print. 

Yet, at 8:45 am, the Office of the Dean issued a notice enabling hybrid classes. What changed?

Risks of Expansion: What Business are You In?

The question of what a quintessential MBA student is one that has kept the philosophers busy for decades. Said Confucius, of long-winded class comments: “The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.” Schopenhauer, in speaking of consulting recruitment: “We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.”

I think that the MBA student, fundamentally, is an unemployed 28-year-old with $100,000 in debt; they have knee injuries, time on their hands, limited means, and constant anxiety. Not unlike retirees in senior homes, their disposition ranges from carpe diem recklessness to nitpicky warfare for dubious causes. In attempting to win aspirants with the type of questionable agency prized in this confused AI dystopia, HBS committed a Marketing 101 faux pax of alienating their core customer base.

The denizens of OWA, bemoaning their lack of tunnel connectivity despite living on campus and their permanently non-functional elevators, found it outrageous that they were expected to overcome yet another hurdle to make it to class. “Without in-unit laundry, paying $1.75 per load, I will not be stepping into the slush.”

The Pittsburgh drivers took the executive decision to break their journey at Waterbury, Connecticut on Sunday night. “My email to the professors referenced the famed HBS code of conduct: ‘…mature and responsible conduct also encompasses accountability for one’s well being including responsible decision-making,’” said Nairi (MBA ‘27). “We started driving down again on Monday—after attending our classes online, of course.”

I personally, after complaining about the uncrossable chasm of the ten-minute walk from Continuum between me and my $625-per-class education, found myself with access to Zoom classes. After spending one hour and twenty minutes zoning out from the comfort of my bedroom, I wondered if Malala too found herself conflicted about her causes on discovering she disliked calculus.

Beyond eroding trust with their core customer base, HBS also did not plan for consistent messaging to their different stakeholders. Notably, they offered professors rooms on campus to spend the night, while assuming the off-campus student population would be able to brave the storm—an already disgruntled, larger group this year, after being ousted from campus with two out of six dorms being renovated. 

Decision

The protagonist (with my author’s license for narcissism, me) stares out of her frosted window, pondering her choices. Should she run this article and contribute to this online phenomenon engineered by the school? Or should she channel her unearned angst with the resurfacing maturity of a final-semester EC, and open 12twenty?

In the distance, the traffic light changed color; it was not a sign, as it was snowed over and no one could see it.

Ramya Vijayram (MBA ‘26) is originally from Chennai, India. She graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, with a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Biotechnology. Prior to the Harvard MBA, Ramya worked at Warburg Pincus in Mumbai, India, and McKinsey and Co. in India.