Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to present a new marketing mix based on MBA students' attitudes and opinions towards the marketing initiatives of business schools in South Africa. The post-graduate business education market is, and increasingly, getting more aggressive in their efforts to attract students on to their flagship degree, the MBA. The traditional marketing tools historically grouped into 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion), 5Ps (adding people) and 7Ps (adding physical facilities and processes) may be wanting in this market. Design/methodology/approach -The approach taken was a quantitative survey of students registered at state subsidized universities in South Africa. Findings -The factor analysed data showed seven quite distinct underlying factors in the marketing activities of these business schools, some covering the same elements of the traditional marketing mix: people, promotion, and price. There were, however, four different elements: programme, prominence, prospectus, and premiums. Research limitations/implications -While the survey included only MBA students from a sample drawn in South Africa, the study does highlight the fact that the traditional services marketing mix may not be as useful to the higher education sector as it might have been originally thought. Practical implications -The development of marketing strategy may be better served by this 7P model rather than the services mix. Originality/value -This paper presents the underlying factors that form the basis of a new marketing mix specifically for MBA recruitment.

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Universities in the UK are facing huge changes to their environment, in terms of both supply of funding and level of demand for their courses. One of the most dramatic recent changes has been the alteration in status of the former polytechnics to fully fledged universities. In order to find out how both old and new universities are responding to this rapidly changing environment, we sent questionnaires to a number of senior staff. Based on 131 responses (81 from old universities, 50 from new), we have been able to paint a picture of how marketing is undertaken in these two segments. We report on how these institutions perceive their marketing task, and also the extent to which these two traditionally different sectors agree on the role marketing plays in their sector. Our research clearly indicates these two groups of institutions have fundamentally different approaches to operationalising their marketing strategies.

There has been enormous growth globally in the number of both MBA providers and students over the past few decades. While inclusion in national and intemational MBA league-tables is pan ofthe marketing arsenal of every MBA supplier that appears in them, identifying the determinants of success in this ever more crowded marketplace is a far less well understood issue. On the one hand, recognition ofthe fact that the task is more complex than a simple application ofthe traditional 4Ps is obvious to all, but on the other hand, operationalisation of relationship marketing principles seems rather too complex in this market where repeat purchase is clearly not the norm.This paper seeks to shed some light on this important but little understood area. We first examine the task through the traditional services marketing mix; comprised of Product, Price, Place, Promotion and People. Then, based on a sample of 507 current MBA students spread across the twelve different state-subsidised universities in South Africa, determine whether this is indeed the appropriate model, deriving instead a new seven-element model of the underlying success factors for student recruitment in the MBA marketplace.

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