| Over the past 100 years, marketing has become increasingly significant for higher education institutions. A new model of higher education has emerged and includes aggressive student-consumers who shop for educational opportunities. As a result, institutions have been forced to respond to the changing forces within the educational marketplace and actively market themselves to prospective students, donors, and other constituent groups. Institutions now focus on establishing their unique places within the market by building brand identities designed to give them a distinct competitive advantage. The literature reviewed indicated that a college or university mission should play a central role in shaping an institution’s marketing messages. This study examined in detail the marketing efforts of faith-based colleges and universities to see how their faith-related missions are reflected in their marketing materials. The quantitative approach examined the printed recruitment materials, university Web sites, and admissions portals of 112 institutions that hold membership in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. The purpose of this study was to quantify how strongly a college or university portrays the faith portion of its institutional identity in the materials it creates for recruiting and general marketing and to determine whether that measure is predictive of external perception of that institution as measured by three factors: alumni giving rate, peer assessment score, and U.S. News ranking. A research instrument developed by Pendleton (2008) was used to measure the strength of an institution’s portrayal of its faith identity in the admissions viewbook, the home page of an institutional Web site, and the main page of the admissions portal of an institutional Web site that is targeted toward traditional undergraduate students. In all cases, the statistical analyses indicated that predicting alumni giving rate, peer assessment score, and U.S. News ranking levels was not possible based on this collection of variables. Recommendations for future research and implications of this study for current theory and practice are discussed. |
