Research On Marketing Strategy Of Higher Vocational Colleges

With the adjustment of industrial structure and continuous development of social economy of our country in recent two decades, higher vocational education, fulfilling a great-leap-forward development, has become a crucial component of higher education. However, it has been facing the challenges at the same time, especially the decreasing of school-age population, the large-scale enrollment of undergraduate university, the transition of application-oriented university and the low-aging tendency of studying abroad, which has threatened the enrollment of higher vocational colleges. On the other hand, the internal phenomena such as disconnected personnel training overlooking the social demands, indistinctive major setting, limited social recognition and reputation are making the higher vocational education have to face the bottlenecks as well.Considering the above reasons, higher vocational colleges need take advantage of the marketing strategy to strengthen their competitiveness in order to acquire dominance and development in the fierce competition. Combing with interrelated resources, these colleges can realize and seize the requirements of employers after analyzing the target market, with the purpose of making the market positioning more accurately. Later on, the school brand will be established gradually via meeting the demands of employers. Only if higher vocational colleges put the marketing strategy into practice will they achieve the innovation of management.This paper takes HZ Polytechnic as a research object, using some relevant theories to analyze it. HZ Polytechnic, mentioned in this paper, is a public vocational college which is made up of several merged schools, which has achieved a rapid development in a relatively short time. For realizing the late-development advantage, the college has set up its own development blueprints and had a clear market positioning to make every effort to contribute to the local economic development and to seek success on running school characteristics and standard within next few years. Even though HZ Polytechnic has had the management innovation during different stages through using some marketing concepts and approaches, it has many deficiencies and leaves a lot to be desired, comparing with other higher vocational colleges, especially those national and provincial demonstrative ones.There is an analysis of external environment of HZ Polytechnic and the market demands, defining the positioning of the college and specifying its marketing strategy by using 7PS theory. In the end of the article, the paper points out that many opportunities for college development will be created if the education and management level get much improved.This paper is mainly divided into six parts:The first part explains the research background and meaning of the topic as well as the development and the status in quo of school marketing theory home and abroad, putting forward the research methods, chapter arrangement and innovation; as for the second part, based on the function of vocational college marketing, the paper expounds the vocational college marketing theory from three aspects, namely service marketing, non-profit organization marketing and marketing mix strategy, giving a general sketch of PEST analytical method concerning the overall environment, ’five-force model’analytical method concerning the individual environment and SWOT analytical method, which aims to provide vocational colleges with an analysis tool when making a marketing strategy option; in the third part, the paper describes the overall environment, market environment and internal environment of higher vocational colleges respectively, meanwhile, it analyzes the restricting factors in school development nowadays; The fourth part makes use of’five-force model’analytical method and SWOT analytical method, taking HZ Polytechnic as an example, to analyze the pros and cons of higher vocational college so as to provide a basis for drawing up the related marketing strategy; the following fifth part brings in the STP marketing strategy and the corresponding 7PS marketing mix strategy in order to define the market positioning of HZ Polytechnic; finally, the last part makes a conclusion of the whole article.In brief, higher vocational colleges, as a non-profit organization, can learn from the marketing strategy theory of enterprise management to find out their market positioning and suitable development strategy, thereby constructing the scientific marketing strategy. Only if higher vocational colleges focus on the core competiveness can they possess their own advantages so as to maintain a sustainable development.