Why Small Private Liberal Arts Colleges Need to Develop Effective Marketing Cultures

Strategic marketing is not a common leadership concept for college administrators. Small private liberal arts colleges are closing at an alarming rate in the United States due to an inability to innovatively adapt their organizational cultures to be more marketing oriented in the competitive marketing environment for new students. The essence of college leadership today is about adaptation, innovation, creativity, and management actions focused on the developing set of strategies that can help organizations and the people in them break through gridlocks, flourish, and even survive. Significant organizational change inevitably involves an innovative ability to adapt to challenges and break historical and fixed organizational paradigms and values. Organizational leaders through their actions can be incubators for innovations that overcome barriers in stagnant organizational systems to accelerate and accomplish deep change and develop the adaptability to thrive in complex, competitive, and challenging marketing climates.