Building a marketing dashboard in higher education: A case study

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School of Business | Master's thesis
Ask about the availability of the thesis by sending email to the Aalto University Learning Centre oppimiskeskus@aalto.fi

Authors

Haarla, Joel

Date

2018

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Accounting

Language

en

Pages

84

Series

Abstract

The Purpose of the Study The first goal of this study was to analyse marketing performance measures used by a polytechnic in Finland and deepen our understanding of how marketing in higher education sector in Finland is currently measured. The second goal was to see how a marketing dashboard tool could be developed to help the school improve its usage of current marketing metrics and avoid the current issues relating to information overload. Methodology and Data The methodology of the study is a case study analysing one company active in the higher education sector in Finland. In theoretical parts previous literature relating to marketing performance, its measuring and metrics, and dashboards and scorecards is reviewed. The data for the empirical part was acquired by interviewing personnel working within the marketing department as well as people the department was reporting to. The company also granted access to many internal documents and data such as internal reports and internal analytics. Results The findings suggest that measuring marketing performance was highly valued in the case company and while higher education sector is still often thought of as public good, business-like measures of performance and the necessity of marketing were valued at some level in the company. Clear differences to traditional B2C and B2C marketing measures were also discovered that were supported by theory. However while many marketing metrics were collected, their value was in many cases still unclear, and a big issue of not knowing which metrics were important and which were not lowered the measurements usefulness. A marketing dashboard seemed to be a helpful aid in focusing on and finding the important metrics.

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Thesis advisor

Vaivio, Juhani

Keywords

marketing performance, marketing dashboard, marketing metrics, measuring marketing, management accounting, performance evaluation

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