Online Marketing in Higher Education

The importance of trendy marketing activities in higher education (HE) is continuously increasing also in the countries, where the majority of local universities are financed from public resources. Although such arrangement necessarily influences the overall market functionality, there still remains a reasonable space where universities heavily compete against each other for the new students. Many influential research papers and reviews on HE marketing were published during the last five years. The most obvious finding is that the well-known business marketing principles - disregarding whether they concern usual products or services - cannot be directly applied to the academic domain. This is mainly because of the inconsistent goals of service providers (HE facilities) and customers (students). Simply said, some students prefer just the tangible product, i.e. degree diploma and some others are interested rather in content and quality of educational process, leading to intangible knowledge. Detailed discussion of these factors and relations will appear in the final version of this paper. Aware of this situation, we decided to study the potential of online marketing in HE. Prospective university students are ideal candidates for such channel and also their sensitivity and trust towards the Internet are significantly above the average with positive growth forecast. There are many related electronic tools and methods - from simple educational advertisements, through various forms of focused communication to general social networking. The key task for our next research was to find a methodology, guaranteeing consistency, understandability and efficiency between problem analysis and solution synthesis. We selected the knowledge oriented approach for this purpose, because knowledge, in contrast to the data, exists persistently and under certain circumstances can be successfully externalized. Based on our longtime experience we developed a system dynamic model, characterizing the productivity of online marketing in comparison with the traditional techniques. Our main concern was to identify the most effective portfolio of electronic marketing activities (= strategy, model) within the given budget. Final model also strives to maximize profit from both the online and traditional marketing campaigns. To be realistic, we incorporated multiple natural features of socio-technical systems, resulting to their nonlinear and oscillatory behaviour (individual and group utilities, risk relations of stakeholders, system saturations or delays). The model can also be executed in a discontinuous mode, mimicking the parametric or environmental non-stationarity.