Analysis of Existing Marketing Instruments for the Promotion of Higher Education Services: Stage Reach, Cost-Efficiency Inversion, and Absorptive Capacity Constraints

An inventory of marketing instruments identifies the instruments used by universities; however, understanding their relative contribution also requires an assessment of their reach, cost, and distribution of promotional expenditure. This article examines these dimensions across a portfolio of twelve marketing instruments accounting for UZS 5,618 million in sector-level promotional expenditure. Three constructs structure the analysis. First, portfolio concentration compares the distribution of promotional expenditure with the distribution of its measured effects. Second, conversion is examined through cost per application and stage reach, with the latter introduced in this study as the furthest stage in the applicant decision process that an instrument can directly influence, ranging from awareness to the commitment decision. Third, absorptive capacity, also introduced in this study, measures the extent to which additional budget can be allocated to a cost-efficient instrument before its relative cost advantage is exhausted. The results reveal a cost-efficiency inversion. Cost per application is strongly negatively correlated with stage reach (r = −0.905), while budget share is positively correlated with cost per application (r = 0.654), indicating that a larger proportion of expenditure is allocated to instruments with higher costs per application and more limited stage reach. Instruments reaching only the awareness stage account for 48.8% of the budget and generate 25.3% of applications, at a mean cost of UZS 112 thousand per application. By contrast, instruments reaching the commitment decision account for 10.6% of the budget and generate 24.5% of applications, at a mean cost of UZS 20.8 thousand per application, corresponding to a cost ratio of 5.40 and a Welch statistic of 8.14. The four instruments capable of communicating a claim that prospective students can independently verify are also the four instruments that reach the commitment stage, yet together they account for approximately one tenth of the promotional budget. The potential for budget reallocation is nevertheless constrained by absorptive capacity. Under a threefold capacity cap and an assumption that costs increase with the square root of scale, the more cost-efficient instruments can absorb an additional 11.0 percentage points of the budget, producing an estimated net increase of 7.5% in applications. The remaining 37.8 percentage points cannot be reallocated to these instruments under the specified capacity and cost assumptions without first expanding their absorptive capacity. These findings indicate that improving portfolio efficiency depends not only on reallocating expenditure towards more cost-efficient instruments but also on developing the capacity of those instruments to accommodate additional investment.