Founder Mark Westaby (pictured) said Cranfield’s decision to appoint Spectrum – which was chosen over two traditional market research companies – “demonstrates the value and benefits of using online and social media to generate powerful insight”.

Westaby said Spectrum’s approach could be used to study large volumes of data from numerous countries and in numerous languages – which would not be possible with conventional market research techniques.

Graham Clark, deputy director of graduate programmes at Cranfield School of Management, said: “The number of organisations offering MBAs has grown massively in recent years and in order to continue to compete at the highest levels, we need to understand how Cranfield’s Masters courses are seen in a broad range of international markets.”