Student Advantage Captures the College Market Through an Integration of Their On and Offline Businesses

Abstract

This chapter describes how Student Advantage successfully transformed itself from a brick-and-mortar company to the leading online portal to the higher education community. The company has followed a business strategy that includes creating Web sites that appeal to college students and forming partnerships with businesses and universities. Through its activities, Student Advantage has assembled a wealth of information about college students, all organized around a common student identifier. This information is important to Student Advantage and to its partners who are willing to pay for the insights that Student Advantage can provide about the college market. Interestingly, Student Advantage only recently developed a strong in-house information technology capability. This capability is now allowing Student Advantage to implement a variety of e-marketing applications. Lessons learned from Student Advantage’s experiences are discussed.