AN ANALYSIS ON MARKETING FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE ON HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS (HEIs) name of lecturer

HO CHI MINH OPEN UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL 97 Vo Van Tan, District 3, HCMC, Vietnam ASSIGNMENT COVER SHEET AND REPORT – MTESOL017A Student name and number: Nguyễn Thị Bảo Trình - 1781401110035 Nguyễn Thị Bích Phương - 1781401110032 Trần Tuấn Khanh - 1781401110010 Lê Thanh Trúc Phương - 1781401110029 Name of Coursework Subject: Academic Writing Title of This Item of Work: AN ANALYSIS ON MARKETING FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE ON HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS (HEIs) Name of Lecturer: Nguyen Vu Phuong, PhD Due Date: 22/01/2018 STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP: We certify that the above assignment is our original work; it is based on our own research All sources used by us have been documented No other person’s work has been used without due acknowledgement This piece of work has not previously been submitted for assessment in this or any other subject or course at this University or elsewhere Date: …………………………… Signature: …………………… Representative TRAN TUAN KHANH HO CHI MINH OPEN UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL 97 Vo Van Tan, District 3, HCMC, Vietnam Student name and number: Nguyễn Thị Bảo Trình - 1781401110035 Nguyễn Thị Bích Phương - 1781401110032 Trần Tuấn Khanh - 1781401110010 Lê Thanh Trúc Phương - 1781401110029 Name of Coursework Subject: Academic writing Title of This Item of Work: AN ANALYSIS ON MARKETING FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE ON HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS (HEIs) Name of Lecturer: Nguyen Vu Phuong, PhD Due Date: 22/01/2018 Could Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) be considered as an entrepreneurship or a company with profit-oriented approach? Do HEIs need to use marketing as a tool to attract students or provide useful information for them to choose the right field to study? Which aspects of Marketing take effects on the way students make decision to select the right school? These questions are considered and answered by many scholars with different aspects and points of view According to Trim (2003), in the field of further education, it is popular knowledge about the fact that an organization is open in which each member is independent and affects the organization as well Each member is also called a stakeholder The movement in the mass of further education is continuing which institutions are added into educational partnership There is no doubt that it is important to establish a network between business, commerce and non-profit making organizations When partnership is form, it is essential to maintain communication among the members Because of partnership, the educational institutions, therefore, should set a relation to authorities The governments, in their relationship, have to face a lot of issues about economic, employments, living standards Moreover, organizational culture is another factor in an organization and it plays an important role or mission In addition, Culture is strategically analyzing in educational institutions After analyzing, it can be seen that partnership in education should be multi-faced viewed It means that the marketers should put education in a relationship with others and develop it in a strategic way There are seven strategies applied which is 7-S framework: structure, strategy, systems, style, skills, staff and superordinate goals Those tools help managers deeply understand the environment they are competing Marketing is one of really potential techniques helping construct the body of knowledge In terms of that, Yilmaz (2005) emphasized the importance of the concept to further education, especially in distance education Firstly, the changing in students’ need and social expectation forces institutions to use marketing to compete Secondly, the hard competition in marketplace requires institutions to show their personality, identity and image using marketing strategies Finally, public relation is a powerful kind of marketing strategy for the institutions to transfer their messages to different groups of customers such as students, workers, employees, etc Furthermore, marketing should be considered in relationships conducted by managers In the context of increasing factors affecting mankind, marketers ought to carefully study why people, in this case customers, act like they In other word, socio-cultural aspects should be considered Hence, firm educational institutions and center of entrepreneurship are required to adopt a variety of approaches to control their organization: strategic marketing approach to prove identity, partnership strategy to maintain authority as well as independence, proactive approach for change, expertise knowledge about local and regions, plan expansion in concise leaderships, encourage learning environment, build the concept of entrepreneur among students All of those approaches are aiming to meet customers’ expectations The application of those approaches is whether successful or not based on some principles Butschi and Steyn (2006) emphasized the role of theorists on building a theory of principles as a guide for solving practical problems with practitioners and industry Problems are those which the practitioners experiencing in practice They may be the inability in managing the resources, ineffectiveness of corporate communication, lack of satisfaction with communication managing, confusion for identity Theory should be built for further thinking, guiding performance of the practitioners, and developing strategies It is also developed based on core competences, process and structures, on improving benefits to stakeholders, exploiting more value, and how to evaluate performance as well Besides the theory on strategic communication management, the integrated marketing communication (IMC) also plays an important role in higher education (Dawn, Edmiston, Strasser, 2009) IMC has appeared in many universities and most interviewees showed their enthusiasm to the study It is understood as communication strategies with their own function In Integrated Higher Educations (IHEs), marketing is described as hushed tones in academia It means that marketing forces IHEs to advance in the 21st century This is the fact that the numbers of students in US colleges and university have increased thanks to adopting new marketing competitions Hence, the effective IMC is influenced by either IMC strategy or specific ones such as admissions, media, public relations, athletic marketing, publications and other services It is also necessary to mention not only the role of IMC but also its origin which really attracts many researchers during those years The concept first appeared in some textbooks of colleges in the early 1980s In 1983, Thomas, one of the former researchers formed the marketing communication spectrum which includes different elements like advertisings, marketing, public relations The concept became attentive in a seminar in 1991 And some years later it was adopted by many agencies in America Then the theory specialized communication strategy for each particular customer Mentioning the structure, IMC has four stages Stage means that IMC needs cross-functional communication in an organization At this stage, the organization affords to get their aim Organizations also have to research customers’ information to use for further communication examining which is required at stage Stage mentions how effectively the information in stage is applied to build IMC programs Stage emphasizes the role of senior leadership as nature of IMC The success of institutions is actually not lying on strategies However, the leadership mainly decides increasing branding of institutions through using the strategies as tool Moogan (2010) agreed that if the managements well know the influence of marketing activities using electronic sources on potential students, they can effectively use them to meet student’s need Although Marketing can be a competitive advantage to HEIs, there still remain many barriers towards the application of Marketing into HEIs circumstance Although the proper information helps potential students make their decisions more easily (Moogan, 2010), the communicating message about sustainability is not successfully conveyed because of some problems relating to the information itself and the channels of communication which were used (Cotton, 2011) There are some crucial obstacles which prevents the successful communication in his study Firstly, the exchange information process among senders and receivers is probably ineffective due to the unclear content of the message Moreover, they look at the message differently owing to the influence of perceptual filters on the message received so they understand it in different perspectives Therefore, it is concluded that the complex words, the different definitions of sustainability between sender and receiver, the limited control of sender, the top-down approach, the domination of electronic communication instead of face-to-face interactions and the huge amount of information are crucial elements which can result in communication failure To be more specific, it is proved by an example which reveals the senders of the message are likely to have multi-faceted views of the change about sustainability while the receivers only have the stable view of changes In other words, the two processes – encoding the message and decoding the message – are influenced by the complexity of the issues and the perceptual filters of the receiver respectively A year later, David (2012) discovered the way to help marketing communication become more effective, which can solve the problem of conveying message failure mentioned in Cotton’s study According to the research, most of higher education institutions in Czech carried out the procedure of planning and controlling unsystematically which influences negatively on the effectiveness of marketing communication Without using their own marketing strategies and the appropriate material, some universities are hard to gain much more specification of the marketing activities The in-depth analysis is provided to show the importance of both the controlling and planning process management in marketing communication For instance, there are various kinds of students in a school so the communication marketing should be developed to focus on all of their interests and their aims In addition to ensuring the controlling process which is to create the better integrated measurement system, universities or faculties are also necessary to have general knowledge about their stakeholders and their interest to plan a proper marketing tools which meet students’ expectations To be more specific, the process of controlling and planning always happen simultaneously When there is a problem in controlling such as the shortage of the finance or the resources, it is important to make more efforts to improve the controlling management It is explained that the plan cannot be conducted successfully without good control and other factors like planners, strategies… so planning process are also important to be considered as well Therefore, it is impossible to good educational programs for students without understanding their expectations and requirements It is vital to fulfill expectations of students and attract them by using wisely visual and written materials which will increase students’ demand for studying at the university (Terkan, 2013) The materials for communication are so powerful in marketing that they are similar to tools which are able to make every organization become more significant in the marketing competition In other words, the materials play an important role in the race of education market Thus, it is crucial for the visual and written communication materials to be appealing and engaging readers It is demonstrated that the message can be understood more easily when using the visual materials such as charts or graphs to express the ideas Every useful information can help students make a right decision to choose the university The material not only reflects the image of the university but also plays an important role for promoting the university If the marketing campaign of the university accomplishes, its brand and the reputation will create appeal and bring the university to higher position Terkan (2013) concluded that students are persuaded by the materials which made them to be potential for their university or have directly impacts on choosing university decision for a long time beforehand It is highlighted that each university is considered to be in an educational market and “all communication materials, especially internet and university’s web pages can be more effective to change student’s behaviors and attitudes.” Therefore, universities should make use of the convenience of technology to develop their image Nowadays, the institutions’ brand is expected to be far beyond traditional promotional efforts The marketing of faith-based institutions can be shown in many kinds of communication instrument such as the printed materials, websites and admission portals (Tolbert, 2014) However, viewbooks may have much more influence on faithbased brand communication than other materials It is mentioned that the visual materials like viewbooks filled with words, pictures instead of academic texts can easily engage students to the information For example, schools at top rank usually choose photographs of students in artistic classes or in cultural classes to promote the brand while the lowranked schools only use the materials with picture of school, class and announcement In another aspect relating to the content, Snowden (2015) raised several concerns about the messages of higher education values that limit the university students of non-traditional higher education backgrounds A small number of potential students should be focused on is some who failed to access university Therefore, the message asserts that the outcome of a successful students can get best achievement according to socio-economic status It is unwise to explain the negative aspects or social conditions which produce disadvantages to universities Instead, the message should be about the bright future that university will lead students to get successful positions, good careers and high payment For example, Snowden’s research reveals although TAFE is for low level education students, the message of this school is not about its low academic place but it is for successful students to progress to university instead In general, the researcher emphasized the message of school should be about the likelihood of success and mixed message about educational pathways and choices Besides, Marketing in HEIs has been explored deeply by many researchs to find out other aspects which contribute to the success of these institutions While the findings of Tolbert (2014) indicated that written materials have a greater contribution to the higher education admissions, Popa (2015) advised higher education institutions to pay great importance to the way in which they think their online presence According to the previous research analyzing the aspects of the online of higher education institutions (HEIs) of Romania, these institutions inclined to be largely a communication tool with the students and a tool to attract potential students to a very small extent However, the search engines are considered the key to achieving the objective, indicated by Kritzinger and Weideman (2013) Conducted by Google and Compete in 2012 in the USA (Howard, 2013), a study showed that there were of the total 10 students using the Internet to investigate higher education institutions before their admissions Another interesting piece of information offered by Noel-Levitz (2014) is that the choice of students to university can be influenced by their parents In fact, both students and their parents revealed that the official websites of higher education institutions affect how they think of the institutions It is the information that institutions provide for the prospective students on the website that is an important influence on students’ making the admission decision Therefore, higher education institutions should pay more attention to the online services, especially to the information posted on the official website so as to meet the expectations of potential students However, another study conducted by Foroudi (2017) showed that the importance of websites and other sources such as social media, advertising and direct marketing was not found to be significant Meanwhile, the importance was focused on integrated marketing communication (IMC) antecedents of planned brand identity such as brand elements, service attributes, public relations and place or country of origin They were found to be great influences to planned brand identity which is a crucial factor attracting potential students The results from this study revealed that those antecedents helped to form brand awareness, brand image and also reputation of the university An organization’s reputation often indicates the success of that organization According to the findings, students seem to align themselves with a brand that has a good reputation as well as positive identification In other words, if the reputation of higher education institutions is taken into great consideration and perceived as successful and well known by a large number of students, it can be said that their admissions are considerably successful It is clearly seen that public relations (PR) have an important role in HEIs Also, marketing has the same importance as PR It is essential to differentiate these two terms in order to avoid misunderstanding Public relations is a term defined as a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics, modernized by the Public Relations Society of America in 2011-2012 According to the American Marketing Association (AMA) (2013), the definition of marketing was approved that it is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that create values for customers, clients, partners, and society at large Community relations, strategic communication, and overall positive reputation make great contributions to attracting and retaining students To meet the above expectations, HEIs should not create the overlap of PR and marketing roles They need to best structure these two departments within independent units led by a senior-level administrator instead As in the study of Higgins (2017), he found that department names and position titles in HEIs are inconsistent owing to the lack of best practices for structuring and organizing PR and marketing Therefore, if the PR functions are best organized in relation to the institution’s marketing functions, HEIs can determine a strategic organizational structure that will be of optimum efficiency and overall productivity With the same point of view as Tolbert’s, Rutter (2017) researched on the prospectuses of the top universities in the UK in order to explore whether distinct brand personalities are being projected through those university prospectuses In fact, brands are often served as an indicator of students’ decision-making which is influenced by their perception of institutions Therefore, a strong brand personality can increase brand equity and organizational performance (Opoku, 2006; Rutter et al., 2016) The research indicated that the signal of brand personality is sent to prospective students through the universities prospectuses Moreover, brand personality is an important signal in student recruitment activities From the research, there were two main brand personality groupings, they are, excitement and competence The above groupings can be found in brand personality words used in university’s logo and mission statements More specifically, the former grouping – exciting grand personality is expressed through phrases used by Essex University to describe itself such as ‘stimulating and exciting environment in which to study’, ‘awesome lectures’, and ‘our new colorful accommodation’ Another example is statements encapsulated by Oxford University such as getting ‘famous Physicists in to speak’ which helps students ‘remember the exciting, real-world cool stuff’ and providing the ‘freedom to study the things that excite most’ The latter dimension of brand identity – competence is highlighted that the way the ‘academic’ logos are perceived is considered as the most competent, quoted by Watkins & Gonzenbach (2013) There were several higher education institutions that formed their brand identity based on descriptions of their teaching and research staff and graduate traits Besides, supporting text which emphasizes that competence could help to strengthen this brand identity, suggested by the findings of the study In a nutshell, both online services and IMC antecedents of planned brand identity have significant roles to perform in higher education institutions’ strategy to attract potential students Whatever the institutions decide to choose as their marketing communication, they need to shape their words or the information given to students to build brand identity as well as to meet expectations of students In conclusion, many scholars have identified Marketing factors which have influence on student’s choice for university, faculty and specialization, such as Branding, Marketing content and materials, PR and the management on these concepts These factors contribute to the pressence of HEIs in students’ mind Nevertheless, how each factors saparately impacts students decision has not been discovered Although the effect from the combination of marketing features has been studied in some articles, there might be one or more features which are superior to others but were not fully clarified Additionally, the role of those features can be varied from this situation to others When the contribution of each features and the dominance of them were significantly explored in certain context, both HEIs and students will have advantages to maximze their demands For HEIs, they will empower their capacity to attract more students and effectively utilize and allocate resources into marketing as they only need to focus on the most influential factors For students, they can easily approach to reliable and fruitful information that is essential for the right choice towards their future university or field of study REFERENCES Butschi, G and Steyn, B (2006) Theory on strategic communication management is the key to unlocking the boardroom Journal of communication management, 106-109 Djordjevic, A and Cotton, D.R.E (2011) Communicating the sustainability message in higher education International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 12(4), 381-394 Edmiston-Strasser, D M (2009) An Examination of Integrated Marketing Communication in U.S Public Institutions of Higher Education Doctoral Dissertation at Saint Vincent College, 142-165 Foroudi, P., Dinnie, Kitchen, P.J., Melewar, T.C and Foroudi, M (2017) IMC antecedents and the Consequences of planned brand identity in higher education European Journal of Marketing, 51(3), 528-550 Moogan, J (2010) Can a Higher Education Institution's Marketing strategy improve the Student‐ Institution Match? International Journal of Educational Management, 25(6) Popa, A (2015) Understanding Students' Needs for a more effective Online Marketing in the Higher Education System Department of Management-Marketing, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Oradea, Oradea, Romania Rutter, R., Lettice, F and Nadeau, J (n.d.) Brand personality in Higher Education: Anthropomorphized University Marketing Communications Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, 19-39 Schuller, D and Chalupsky, V (2012) Marketing Communication Management of Higher Education Institutions Internal Grant Agency of the Faculty of Business and Management, Brno University of Technology Shannon, K (2017) Exploring Public Relations Excellence and Integrated Marketing Communications at Private, Nonprofit Higher Education Institutions Snowden, C and Lewis, S (2015) Mixed messages: Public Communication about Higher Education and Non-traditional Students in Australia Springer Science and Business Media Dordrecht Terkan, R (2013) Effective Marketing At Education: Importance of Communication Materials International Review of Management and Marketing, 3(4), 146-152 Tolbert, D (2014) An Exploration of the Use of Branding to Shape Institutional Image in the Marketing Activities of Faith-Based Higher Education Institutions Christian Higher Education, 233-249 Trim, P (2003) Strategic marketing of further and higher educational institutions: Partnerships arrangements and centres of entrepreneurship The International Journal of Educational Management Yilmaz, A (2005) Using of Marketing Communication for Distance Education Institutions Marketing Journal of the University of Communications, Turkey  ... 1781401110029 Name of Coursework Subject: Academic writing Title of This Item of Work: AN ANALYSIS ON MARKETING FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE ON HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS (HEIs) Name of Lecturer: Nguyen... T.C and Foroudi, M (2017) IMC antecedents and the Consequences of planned brand identity in higher education European Journal of Marketing, 51(3), 528-550 Moogan, J (2010) Can a Higher Education. .. as an indicator of students’ decision-making which is influenced by their perception of institutions Therefore, a strong brand personality can increase brand equity and organizational performance