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To help business schools in their efforts to attract broader prospective audiences, GMAC is forging a more direct relationship with potential students to market graduate management education.
But just as all schools are not created equal, neither are all students. GMAC is taking a segmented approach, dividing customers into manageable groups for targeted, efficient marketing, said Pepe Carreras, GMAC’s director of product marketing and outreach services.
At an Annual Industry Conference session, Carerras shared GMAC’s initial approach to segmented marketing, specifically targeting undergraduates, diverse students, the military, working professionals, women, and special needs students. Field marketing efforts will include programs and events, which will be tracked to ensure partnerships are effective.
Carerras also shared more general advice for schools on how to use segmentation to market their specific programs. He noted that as the number of new business programs grows—641 were launched worldwide in 2007 alone—students will have far more options, and schools must be precise about both the advantages they offer and the students they most want to attract. The alternative is mass marketing─an expensive, inefficient proposition that makes it difficult to measure results and track return on investment.
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