The Emerging Strategies for Higher Education Marketing in the 21 st Century

Abstract

Trends on marketplace proves higher education institutions as being a global product that provoke a worldwide competition of students and finding ever more creative ways to satisfy their needs and preferences. It is the explicit recognition of the tension on new marketing tools which our paper seeks to highlight as the basis for attaining higher education institutional positioning in the 21st century. The review was intended to find out apart from traditional marketing mix tools, what else marketing strategies are emerging to promote higher education institutions? And to find out, how the emerging marketing strategies are effective to win client’s attention? The study applied a qualitative content analysis approach to search for literatures in business and education suitable to respond to the research questions. Searching of secondary data was made using electronic and online databases. The search was limited to publications between 2000 and 2016 years. The aim was to obtain more current literature on trends of higher education marketing whereby published scholarly journal articles, conference papers and reports were used. A total of 51 articles were reviewed for empirical and theoretical literatures while 18 conference papers and reports were also included. Thematic analysis was applied to analyze the secondary data. The found emerging marketing strategies developed a new model for higher education marketing. Whereby the findings established that student life cycle, benchmarking and networking, and the use of new media are emerging contemporary marketing tools of higher education positioning in the 21st century.