All distance education institutions need inform their target audience (in this case, target students) about their education programs. In order to do this, distance education institutions apply some marketing communication activities including advertising. Distance education institutions have to use media to send their messages to target audiences. But target audiences are already in an ad-cluttered media environment and find ads irritating, boring, and offensive. Because of this, audiences try to avoid ads with different ways. On the other hand, audiences’ ad avoidance behavior is affected by some factors including attitudes toward an ad, ad clutter, and communication problems. This study aims to understand ad avoidance behavior and factors that affect ad avoidance. In the light of this understanding, distance education institutions may develop effective marketing communication programs and may manage ad avoidance.
TopDistance Education Marketing
According to the American Marketing Association (AMA) marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. (http://www.marketingpower.com/AboutAMA/Pages/DefinitionofMarketing.aspx)
Marketing is the critical element that determines the survival of business organizations and, to a large extent, distance education institutions in a competitive environment. Any service delivered through the distance education mode to be effective, it must of necessity employ some marketing strategies. Successful distance education programs in an open economy have to use and refine their marketing strategies and tactics (Michael, 1997). Educational institutions vary in their use of modern marketing ideas. Some colleges and universities are beginning to actively apply marketing ideas, whereas many private schools are just becoming aware of what marketing has offer. Public schools have generally not shown any interest in marketing, but they would like more public support nonetheless (Kotler and Fox, 1985: 8).
According to Michael (1990), educational marketing is “an institutional philosophy which provides a framework or a process for identifying and satisfying the needs of specific relevant publics in a mutually beneficial manner” (p. 24). Kotler and Fox (1985) define educational marketing as:
Marketing is the analysis, planning, implementation, and control, of carefully formulated programs designed to bring about voluntary exchanges of values with target markets to achieve institutional objectives. Marketing involves designing the institution’s offerings to meet the target markets’ needs and desires and using effective pricing, communication, and distribution to inform motivate and service the markets (p.7)
As a process, marketing strategy includes some sub-actions. Figure 1 shows a marketing process for educational sector.
Figure 1. Marketing process in the educational sector (Source: Michael, 1997: 114)