Where are You on the Market Map?

Much of independent/international school marketing is figuring out the space your school fills in its market and the space it should fill in order to thrive.  Most urban markets are already segmented with schools occupying various loci on the educational map; e.g., progressive pedagogy, IB, aggressive academics, sports, single gender, etc.  Thriving comes from owning a space large enough to populate the school.  Unless your market is especially large--larger than travel times allow in most urban settings--merely being excellent in a space you share with another school is probably not in itself sufficient for a thriving school.  If you share it, you don't own the space!

The tricky part is forging agreement among the various constituencies--faculty, administrators, parents, board members, alumni--about the target space.  This is where many schools go astray.  Lacking agreement, administrators are charged with positioning the school across a range of spaces, truly owning none of them.  Or. worse yet, the space the school occupies lacks enough customers to populate the school, leading to the admission of students well outside the desired profile.

Do you know the space your school currently fills?

What is the degree of overlap between that space and its desired niche?

How can you start the tough conversations necessary to bring the alignment closer to 100%