The Art and Science of Marketing a Marketing Department

Marketing departments quite often are not geared to market themselves properly. The article explains why marketing departments have difficulty developing effective marketing strategies for themselves. The authors present an outline for developing a plan for a market-oriented product, and the article presents an overall marketing plan which can be used by any marketing department. Many marketing departments in American universities are creative, productive and aca-demically sound, but are not well known in busi-ness circles or other target markets. This is because many of these marketing departments do not know how to market themselves. While marketing departments are busy taking care of academic activities, they are also heavily in-volved in marketing themselves. Unfortunately, the latter activity is r7ot always a conscious effort on the part of these departments. Most are somewhat unaware of what they are doing in this respect and do not have a carefully planned marketing program in place. Perhaps the most important reason most marketing departments do not have programs to market themselves is that this area of marketing has had limited research and has not been developed adequately. One may question the importance of devel-oping a good marketing program for marketing departments. Being recognized as the best or one of the best certainly aids a department in attracting the best students and the best faculty and in placing its students in the best possible positions. Furthermore. domestically and inter-nationally, the department would have access to the best consulting and research grants. The