Case Study: Career Education and Training - Insights

Case Study: Career Education and Training - Insights

 

Problem
This leading career education and training provider has multiple locations and offers multiple degrees via both on-campus and online programs. Management wished to:

• develop a better understanding of the motivations, desires and expectations of prospects considering online post secondary educational opportunities
• better position itself in order to differentiate this school from competitive post secondary educational institutions

 

Approach – A two phase research design was utilized.
First, a brandDelphi™ study was used to develop a deeper understand of the student and prospect motivations. In a brandDelphi™ study, the customer’s input is captured real time in their own words, then evaluated by other customers to determine whether the ideas are important and relevant. Expert analysis ranks and groups the ideas into themes that provide insight on strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. brandDelphi™ is faster and more effective than focus groups. Hundreds of ideas were generated and evaluated to understand why students choose continuing education as well as why they choose a particular school.

 

Second, an IdeaMap® study was fielded online to quantitatively test a variety of elements which appeared to be most powerful in the brandDelphi, as well as the suitability of those elements to the school and its competitors.

IdeaMap® is based on conjoint (trade-off) analysis that measures the “algebra of the mind.” For example, when you make travel plans, you make implicit trade-offs between a number of elements – time of day, direct vs. connecting flight, carrier, cost, etc. Conjoint analysis quantifies these trade-offs and identifies the most important combination of elements.

Results
The results of the studies were used to adjust positioning and change communications to prospective students. They gave new insights into the elements that were most persuasive in generating leads and enrolls in the schools. They revealed differences between on campus and online students as well as differences in copy effective in the category and copy that was effective specifically for this chain of schools