Market structure and institutional position in geographic market segments

Marketing and market research have formally entered the world of college recruiting in recent years, and market structure, market segments, and institutional positioning are concepts that have gained currency among academic marketers. In this paper a variety of analytic techniques—comparisons of frequency distributions, cross-tabulations, multidimensional scaling, and regression analysis—are used to examine the structure of a college's competition and institutional market position in relation to students' market behavior—the decision to accept a college's offer of admission. The analysis focuses on how these phenomena vary between two geographic market segments. Brief mention is made of some of the marketing implications of the data.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Forum of the Association for Institutional Research, Houston, Texas, May 1978.