EFMD is an international membership organisation with 750 member organizations from academia, business, public service and consultancy in 81 countries.

The proposition for the conference is that Business schools are service organisations in which every stage of service can affect the perceptions of customers and ultimately the School’s reputation and future revenue streams.  So whose job is marketing?  Surely it is everyone’s responsibility, so how can it be made to happen effectively?

There will be three presenters from the UK, France and me from Norway and we will present how our schools work with and organize marketing and sales in our institutions.

My take on this is that most Business schools (and even many more universities) have a rather unstructured way of looking at this and the main reason is that a lot of (specially the faculty) the organisation feel that marketing is “below them” and that if you have good programs and good faculty, students will flock to your institution and marketing is for those institutions that have an inferior reputation and who have to get student through advertising…

Nothing could be further from the truth of course…

There will be attendees from the UK, France, Germany, Ireland, Poland, the Netherlands, Lithuania and Belgium.

So my question to all of you (especially those representing countries not included on the conference) if you have experience with or feeling about higher education marketing; what is your take on this?

I feel higher education in many countries still can be compared with the early stages when the consultancy companies started doing marketing. The general belief was that if you did marketing you were in desperate need of new clients and it would hurt your reputation. Anyone remember the first ad done by one of the big consultancy companies? Was it Accenture in the US?

I would appreciate your input on this!

Erik 🙂