Abstract
Higher education institutions are called to expand their role and responsibilities, by enhancing their entrepreneurial mindset and redefining relationships with stakeholders. In order to cope with these new challenges, they have started to operate in a strategic manner, by performing marketing and merchandising activities. Indeed, in a sector characterized by the presence of competitive funding models, several forms of accountability, and performance indicators, universities have become open systems and have started to operate like enterprises, considering students as customers. Given this premise, the aim of the paper is to individuate marketing and merchandising strategies in higher education and to evaluate their effectiveness in order to foster stakeholders engagement. This is in line with the entrepreneurial university model that represents the starting point of the theoretical study, then a literature review of “marketization” in higher education institutions is presented, showing how this field is not yet completely investigated. Data refer to the Italian context and are analyzed through a qualitative method. Findings suggest that most Italian universities perform merchandising strategies, but currently there is not sufficient information to evaluate their effectiveness in higher education, it was only possible to make hypotheses.
Highlights
In a context where governments are reducing public spending, higher education institutions have been forced to reconsider their relationships with stakeholders, by adopting new practices in order to foster their competitiveness (Plewa and Quester 2008).The idea that universities, previously perceived as organizations completely detached from the rest of society, could operate in an entrepreneurial way was introduced in the early 1980s, but this led to several debates on how higher education institutions could provide a significant contribution to social and economic growth
As previously mentioned, merchandising strategies could be too expensive for education institutions, especially for those universities that mainly base their activity on the availability of public resources, but, against general expectations, non-state universities do not result as very interested in merchandising: For 22 of them there is no reference to it
By considering all institutions engaged in merchandising, one of them, The University of Calabria, realizes this practice exclusively through the activity performed by its campus, the University of Genoa through the activity of the engineering faculty, and the University of Messina thanks to the efforts of its CUS
Summary
The idea that universities, previously perceived as organizations completely detached from the rest of society, could operate in an entrepreneurial way was introduced in the early 1980s, but this led to several debates on how higher education institutions could provide a significant contribution to social and economic growth It is in line with the entrepreneurial paradigm (Etzkowitz et al 2000), a new way through which higher education institutions are called to operate, characterized by the capitalization of scientific research in order to diversify their financial resources sources. It suggests a continuous interchange between universities and the rest of society, with universities that appear more practical and engaged in societal issues, far from the previous idea that described them as “ivory towers” (Etzkowitz 1998) In this sense, they have re-conceptualized their role, and are able to generate value in a regional or national context (Mowery and Sampat 2005). This can be identified with the concept of social engagement, that is one of the three dimensions of universities’
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