The Role of Integrated Marketing Communications for a Business Management School in the Indian Context: Challenges and Implications for Future
Author(s)
Alan D’Souza (Former Executive Director, Mudra Communications, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India) and Prashant Pareek* (Assistant Professor, School of Business, Auro University, Surat, Gujarat, India) *Corresponding author's Email
Citation
D’Souza, Alan and Pareek, Prashant (2019), “The Role of Integrated Marketing Communications for a Business Management School in the Indian Context: Challenges and Implications for Future”, MERC Global’s International Journal of Management, Vol. 7, Issue 1, pp. 09-15.
Article history
Submitted: July 30, 2018, Revision received: August 31, 2018, Accepted: September 12, 2018
Management education in India has completed more than half a century and during these fifty years one can observe a perpetual rise in the number of Business schools, steady growth for IIM’s (both in terms of number of IIM’s and student intake capacity), proliferation of specialisations, quality research and publications, and a vision of few prominent B-Schools to benchmark or collaborate with world-class institutions. There is not even a slight hesitation in accepting that management education, especially after the introduction of LPG policy in 1991 has spread in every nook and corner of our country to meet the demand of the rising number of management aspirants. But we can see that last five or six years have been challenging years for a large number of B-Schools in our country, they are facing problems like shortage of student admission, retention of quality faculty, mediocre research output, tumbling placements, and most important absence of industry-academia connect. In this situation, how B-Schools can communicate to the society about their points of difference, how B-Schools can attract students for admissions and good faculties for recruitment, how they can promote their USP’s. This paper focuses on the importance of marketing communications in the promotion of Business schools in India; authors have conducted studies on 21 B-School Directors at IIM-A and they have identified the challenges faced by b-schools when it comes to implementation of IMC tools.
Keywords
Business school, Branding, Integrated marketing communication, Management education.
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