ABSTRACT
The Context for Marketing in Higher Education Marketing in higher education (HE) has been the focus of a series of major changes within recent years. It first began to make a significant appearance on the corporate agenda within the United Kingdom in the early 1990s (it had occupied centre stage for some forward-thinking US institutions for many years). However, for UK universities it was still at that time primarily driven by the need to recruit and admit students and communicate the portfolio offer. Since then, for many UK higher education institutions marketing has increased in remit and influence, and has begun to be recognised as a specialist professional function, fundamental to managing how an organisation communicates with key stakeholders and manages its profile. In this chapter, the authors – who work in a private consultancy, a UK post-1992 university (former polytechnic) and a UK pre-1992 university respectively – aim to review the context and propose some guidelines on how best to market universities effectively.
