Understanding prospective customer and student needs and what will best serve them is especially critical during this unprecedented time. How can institutions help them feel connected? Which concerns must be addressed for in-person delivery? What barriers exist to enrolling this year?
As the COVID-19 pandemic has forced corporations to pivot to digital channels and universities to virtual instruction, many organizations have shifted to virtual focus groups to capture critical information typically gathered through in-person focus groups.
However, online focus groups present unique challenges - have you ever had a virtual focus group go “off the rails” like this 'unity' themed focus group from ex-GOP pollster Frank Luntz?
“The Zoom session was swiftly derailed by shouting, crosstalk, disputes over basic facts and even deeply personal attacks, such as one panelist mocking another for sharing his mother's death from COVID-19.” (view both short videos below)
Establishing, maintaining, and growing buyer loyalty is a cornerstone of business. It is important for organizations to understand what attracts buyers in the first place, but equally; if not more important, is discerning what will keep them coming back – and motivate them to refer others to purchase.
Drivers of loyalty are just as important to higher education as the corporate sector. The sustainability of academic programs relies in large part on fostering a loyal group of learners and alumni who are willing and anxious to promote their experiences and influence others to attend.
Percept Research’s GME Student Entry Study confirms that incoming students are more likely to choose a graduate management program based on recommendations from friends and colleagues who previously attended than from any other influential source, so maintaining high levels of satisfaction is important.
Approximately 47% of incoming MBA students indicated alumni and current students as the most influential sources in deciding to where to apply in the 2018 GME Student Entry Study. Personal contacts were the next most influential information source (32% of respondents) selected by the survey respondents.
What is the Loyalty Index?
Our GME Lifecycle Surveys and Executive Impact Assessments empower business schools with a Learner Loyalty Index to track student and participant/client (non-degree) loyalty over time – a measure of how likely learners will promote the business school brand and how much they tend to abandon it.
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We often conduct secondary research in our custom research studies for business schools. Secondary research involves obtaining information from existing commercial and public sources such as websites, sales and accounting records, articles and market research reports.
One of the biggest advantages of secondary analysis using existing data is low cost. However, the most common challenge of conducting secondary data analysis is that the available information might not answer the researcher’s specific research question to the degree that the research requires. It is not uncommon that some important variables were not available for the analysis or that the data were not collected for all population subgroups or all geographic regions of interest.
We are excited to recommend a resource that we often utilize in our secondary research, which is not only free, but also targeted to the needs business school administrators. We encourage all of our blog readers to become a subscriber to the MBA News Digest.
What is the MBA News Digest?
The MBA News Digest is a global news aggregation service designed to provide a concise summary of relevant news articles regarding MBA programs worldwide to meet the challenge of keeping busy business school administrators up to date with the dynamic landscape of management education.
These articles are handpicked for relevance on a daily basis from popular press and academic journals related specifically to MBA and specialized master’s programs regarding curriculum, marketing, technology, alliances, courses, specializations, etc.
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What is the impact of currency fluctuations?
Currency fluctuations are an important and often-discussed topic our global benchmarking studies. The exchange rate of one currency versus the other is influenced by numerous fundamental and technical factors. These include relative supply and demand of the two currencies, economic performance, outlook for inflation, interest rate differentials, capital flows, technical support and resistance levels, and so on. As these factors are generally in a state of perpetual flux, currency values fluctuate from one moment to the next. To account for this flux, we have to adjust currency metrics to a common currency rate in order to neutralize the currency fluctuations in the global exchange rates in order to benchmark management education programs.
In order to benchmark tuitions (program costs), salaries and other economic indicators, we must compare the value of the output from different countries. However, many institutions will report data in their native currency. That means that to compare the data, each country's statistics must be converted into a common currency. However, there are several ways to conduct that conversion and each may provide a markedly different result.
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