Market Focus in AACSB Member Schools: An Empirical Examination of Market Orientation Balance and Business School Performance (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business ‪)‬

INTRODUCTION The Baldrige National Quality Program (BNQP) has established the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence for universities and other educational organizations, and includes a "student, stakeholder, and market focus category" (BNQP 2005) among the criteria leading to performance excellence. This particular category of criteria suggests that organizations identify potential market segments and determine which ones to pursue, then take steps to learn "key requirements and changing expectations," build relationships, increase loyalty, and determine satisfaction/dissatisfaction of those student/stakeholder markets. The focus category also emphasizes the importance of strategic decisions regarding the extent that university business schools may choose to focus on particular markets, and the balance of focus between chosen markets. These decisions may obviously contribute to the culture of the school, encouraging or discouraging attentiveness to students and potential students, parents of students, future employers of graduates, and other student/stakeholder markets. Market selection and other applications of marketing theory by practitioners within higher education are appropriate and should certainly be beneficial; Kotler and Levy (1969a, 1969b) argued successfully for broadening the scope of marketing (and the marketing concept) to include higher education as well as other nonbusiness organizations.