How familiar are ideal prospective learners (and their employers) with your school and how are you perceived in relationship to your competitors?
An institution’s brand and image have become ever more important as schools around the world explore ways to distinguish themselves. We help schools clarify and strengthen their brands by analyzing their image and awareness in their markets.
Our brand positioning assessments begin with an in-depth exploration of the attributes that define your brand. These image and awareness studies analyze how well your affiliated and unaffiliated audiences perceive your core strengths and how much those strengths matter. We measure prospective learner/alumni/employer attitudes, assess your competitive environment, and uncover insights into what makes your brand distinct along with opportunities for improvement.
Percept Research often conducts a combination of qualitative and quantitative market research to identify important image attributes and school-selection behavior within particular markets.
These qualitative insights will guide the questionnaire design in a quantitative phase in which Percept Research conducts surveys to ideal prospective learners to assess the awareness, perceptions, and relevance of the institution’s brand and its peers.
Our brand positioning studies provide a deep understanding of how your institution is viewed across audiences and geographies coupled with insights and recommendations to craft actionable marketing strategies, optimized to your distinctive strengths to set yourself apart from competitors.
Common questions:
- How familiar are our target audiences with our brand? Our competition?
- What factors are most important to prospective learners/employers when considering programs for their shortlist? Choosing a school to apply? To enroll?
- What do our stakeholders believe are our core strengths, weaknesses, and points of distinction that frame our institutional image?
- How do our brand strengths and weaknesses compare to our peers?
- How is our school perceived on the factors that are most important to our prospective learners?
- How do we compare to our competitors on the most important factors of brand image?
- How well does our current messaging reflect our brand strengths?
- Which key messages will differentiate our brand from the competition?
How we can help:
A collaborative partnership between your school and our consultant team which leverages our unique combination of in-depth higher education experience and market research expertise will equip your institution with actionable insights that are relevant and impactful. These insights will help you take appropriate actions that resonate with key audiences, reinforces competitive differentiation, and increases market share.
We conduct school brand positioning studies to:
- Understand how prospective learners perceive your brand and the specific attributes that drive preference.
- Benchmark your existing brand equity (strengths and weaknesses) against competitors.
- Identify areas of opportunity to differentiate your brand.
- Test potential brand changes to measure impact on learner perception.
- Stimulate enrollment growth with a strengthened brand.
- Improve ROI of marketing, communications, and advertising efforts.
- Develop evidence-based strategic, operational, or marketing-oriented initiatives.
- Reassess marketing preferences of target audience demographic segments.
