A New Framework for Dynamic Educational Marketing Segmentation in Student Recruitment: Optimizing Fuzzy C-Means with Metaheuristic Techniques

An effective educational marketing strategy requires accurate school segmentation to enhance new student recruitment. Traditional segmentation methods such as K-means are often used, but they have limitations in capturing the flexibility of school characteristics. Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) offers a more adaptive approach by allowing each school to simultaneously have a degree of membership in several clusters. However, the performance of FCM highly depends on determining parameters such as the number of clusters (k) and the level of fuzziness (m), which are not always optimal when determined manually. This study develops a new framework for dynamic educational marketing segmentation in student recruitment by optimizing FCM using three metaheuristic techniques: Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and Differential Evolution (DE). Performance was evaluated using the Fuzzy Silhouette Index (FSI). The experimental results showed that DE yielded the best results with the highest FSI value (0.8023), producing eight main clusters based on the Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) model. Based on the clustering results, a personalized and adaptive marketing strategy was designed to enhance the effectiveness of student recruitment. The proposed framework enhances segmentation accuracy and supports the implementation of dynamic data-driven marketing in the context of higher education. This study also opens new directions for educational data mining research and machine-learning-based marketing strategies.