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Asking ourselves ‘What would Beyoncé do?’ is a default survival strategy for team ELLE. Now, lucky students at Harvard Business School in Boston will be able to study the star’s savvy marketing skills as part of its Strategic Marketing in Creative Industries course.

Focussing on Queen B’s surprise self-titled ‘visual album’ that dropped last December, a new HBS case study will be published next week examining what it took to pull off the world-first iTunes campaign.

In case you were living under a rock last year, Bey secretly partnered with Apple, Facebook, and Instagram to roll out an album of 14 songs with 17 accompanying music videos, successfully selling more than 600,000 copies within the first three days of its release.

Including insights from top executives at Columbia Records, Facebook, Apple and Parkwood Entertainment, the study asks MBA students what they would have done if they were working for Beyoncé.

‘She’s clearly among the most powerful people in the music industry at the moment… So to understand the operation behind such a powerful figure is always very interesting,’ Anita Elberse, the Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration at HBS who co-wrote the case study with a former student, Stacie Smith, told the Harvard Gazette.