Innovation in educational marketing: a study applied to Brazilian private higher education institutions

Educational marketing enabled higher education institutions (HEIs) to identify consumer needs and prepare actions to enhance their competitiveness. The educational field specificities are not considered and HEIs use the same business strategies, despite the importance of educational marketing. This is due to the lack of theories and models consistent with educational marketing and this study sought to understand educational marketing management practices focusing on innovation in Brazilian private HEIs. We performed a qualitative approach through multiple case studies by creating two instruments for interviews at various structure levels. We selected active HEIs in Brazil’s different regions, given the diversity of regional development that surrounds the country. We performed content analysis for each case study individually and subsequently all cases together in a comparative and integrated method. The results showed common points between conceptions and actions developed by marketing managers in the HEIs, investigating how management and innovation practices in educational marketing occur in Brazilian’s HEIs. This study permits replication of good practices in other HEIs; mainly assisting the ones with financial resource limitations in developing their marketing strategies.