<p> In the 21<sup>st</sup> century, prospective undergraduate students decreasingly identified with a particular denomination, and this impacted the marketing of faith-based institutions. These prospects and their parents also were increasingly price-conscious, so the faith-based universities were competing against lower-priced public universities and community colleges. The problem addressed in this qualitative, multiple case study was that marketing executives at faith-based universities who failed to implement marketing performance measurement systems could not adequately measure marketing effectiveness or determine whether marketing activities affected the organization’s performance. The purpose of this study was to explore how marketing executives at three faith-based universities in the Midwestern United States were measuring the performance of their marketing activities and how they compared these marketing metrics to indicators of organizational performance. Face-to-face interviews were held with nine participants, who had executive marketing responsibilities at three different faith-based universities. University websites and IPEDS reports were analyzed in order to achieve triangulation. The findings supported the literature that quantitatively measuring marketing performance was difficult. Measures, such as enrollment numbers or dollars raised, could only sometimes be linked to particular marketing campaigns. As was shown in the literature, the faith-based university marketers who had limited knowledge of their marketing performance measurement were unable to justify all of their marketing expenditures and could not necessarily make a case for these marketing activities’ relationship to the performance of their institution. The emergent themes from the face-to-face interviews all supported the literature, which underscored the importance of using marketing performance measurement to justify budget requests. The findings from the case study and literature showed that faith-based institutions were found to be more at risk to suffer from decreased or stagnant enrollment, because they could not compete with community colleges or public universities on price. By expanding on the results of this study, the self-designed interview questions could be used with other higher education marketing executives. Practical applications of this study and recommendations for future research were presented as they would benefit marketing executives in faith-based higher education as well as those in private and public higher education, in general, and in the business environment.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:10179140 |
| Date | 21 December 2016 |
| Creators | Smith, Sharina Alongi |
| Publisher | Northcentral University |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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