The Online Strategy of Romanian Higher Education Institutions: Present and Future

Abstract

The present paper focuses on two interesting topics: online marketing and educational marketing. Both concepts are relatively new and not clear defined at the moment, so that aspects regarding particularities of educational marketing and online marketing are discussed in this paper. The aim of this paper is to examine how the higher education institutions in Romania are using the huge potential of the Internet and the associated online marketing tools in their marketing activity and, also, to identify some new future directions for using these tools. A qualitative research based on content analysis research method was used in order to achieve the objectives of the study. Although the academic literature mentions the importance of marketing in the educational services industry since the mid-1980s, the awareness of the need to adopt a marketing orientation philosophy is a new trend not only for the higher education institutions in Romania, but also for those from outside Romania. Nowadays, the challenges the higher education institutions are facing are large and complex and involve, it seems, changes regarding the strategic approach, but also rapid changes in operational terms. The other important topic of the paper, online marketing, is also a relatively new one in the academic literature. Both the academic literature and practitioners in the field are using relatively similar concepts regarding the online marketing topic, concepts that are not yet clearly defined and delimited (including Internet marketing, digital marketing, e-marketing, web marketing etc.).