Owning Markets — Market-Maker™
The Market-Maker™ family of services mitigate the risk in launching new programs or specializations, delivering new or existing programs to new markets, or adding online or blended programs to replace or expand successful on-ground offerings.
Whether your goal is creating a presence in new markets, securing at-risk market share, or simply finding the smartest way to grow, InterEd will provide the information and guidance you need to succeed while remaining true to your institution’s mission.
Included in this family of services are quick scans to narrow the field of consideration and deep assessments leading to definitive guidance about what, when, where, and how to launch. While the scope of the empirical research on your behalf varies across these services, all of them convey InterEd's deep knowledge of programs and markets combined with more than 20 years of successful experience aligning program opportunities with institutional interests, capabilities, and resources. You will find no antiquated analyses of Department of Labor statistics in our intelligence. (They have limited merit but you were no doubt aware of the growth jobs before you arrived here.) Neither will we develop any guidance based on the near-zero predictive validity of surveys with prospective students. You will find crisp guidance derived from senior conversations with visionaries in the field, and with leaders, gate-keepers, and decision-makers whose actions create the demand for the market you hope to fill. All of this knowledge is contextualized (sorry) with InterEd's detailed knowledge of the success or failure of the last dozen analogous programs offered in analogous markets.
One or more levels of Market-Maker™ services are for you if you:
- Want to identify the most promising opportunity for a new program
- Are are committed to a program but need to know what specializations to offer
- Need to know what to expect if you add blended or online options to existing programming
- Receive proposals to develop new programs and need a way to prioritize
- Operate in a market dominated by guerrillas and need to find a niche that is safe from them
Market-Maker™ services begin with planning documents which lead to a planning teleconference in which your team and our team review every detail pertinent to your objectives. Once we have agreed on goals, we advance to the field to conduct the smartest empirical research available (senior knowledge-holders at InterEd engage senior visionaries, regulators, observers, and market-makers in your prospective market until we have absolute understanding of your opportunities, threats (including current or nascent competition), and special challenges. After two or more weeks of field research, we analyze what we have learned in the context of what we already knew. When we are satisfied that we have answered the questions material to your success, we deliver a concise written report followed by a teleconference during which we work with your team to translate the findings into a plan of action. Clients tell us often that no one conducts research like InterEd. You won't see any mind-numbing tables of near nugatory numbers or pretty but vacuous Pantone pie charts (sorry again). Instead, you'll get unequivocally clear recommendations backed up by field research in your behalf and interpreted with 20+ years of successful experience. Someone called it, "The perfect blend of empirics and instinct." We like that image and do our best to live up to it.
While every Market-Maker™ study is unique — at least in all the years we have been doing them, here are the basic categories that make initial conversations easier:
- New Program Opportunity (What's next in your program mix; what has to go?)
- Program Feasibility Assessment (Should you raise, hold or fold?)
- Front-end Analysis (Are you driving students straight to the classroom or straight to the competition?)
- National Online Market Niche (We are career makers in the online business. Call.)
- Custom Research (If it's not a good fit for us, we'll find someone you can trust.)