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21. Marketing in further education
Marketing has become a major preoccupation of FE institutions in the
period since incorporation (post 1992). Strategic planning
is a key requirement within the funding formula, and this is
expected to reflect a college's response to the market. In
large colleges a substantial marketing function has been
developed with specialist marketing teams, while in smaller
colleges the inclusion of marketing within wider remits of
middle and senior managers in more common. Research into
marketing in FE has examined both organizational and
functional aspects of practice (Smith et al., 1995;
Foskett and Hesketh, 1996; Pieda, 1996), and number of
patterns can be identified:
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Considerable diversity of
organizational structures.
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A focus on short-terms and project
marketing, with a lack of integration between strategic
planning and market intelligence.
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The development of a wide range of
expertise in promotional activities.
*
A distinction between markets with
many competitors (contiguous markets) and markets with no
competitors (parallel markets) in terms of the
sophistication of the marketing function.
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