Strategic Alliances in the Marketing of International Higher Education: A Framework for Enduring and Successful Outcomes

Abstract

The article will describe how a consortium of business schools, based in one European country, and essentially direct competitors, have successfully worked together over the past 5 years on a strategic marketing alliance for the recruitment of international students. The number of strategic alliances has grown considerably in industry over the past 25 years (Meier, 2011:1) and they may be one of the primary sources of future growth (Elmuti et al. 2012: 23). However, they are not always easy to manage. They are multifaceted agreements (Arino & Reuer, 2004: 44) that are highly dependent on trust between the major stakeholders (Vlaar et al., 2007: 412). Such cooperative competition or cooptition may lead to opportunistic behaviour leading to mutual distrust (Arino et al. 2001:127) and the failure of the alliance. However, development partnerships in higher education institutions (HEIs) have many benefits such as bringing greater diversity to the classroom and responding to ranking and accreditation requirements. As the budgets of HEIs come under increasing pressure managing such alliances will thus become an important competence for their survival. Drawing from a case study and industry best practices this article offer guidelines that can be applied to similar alliances to enhance the possibility of successful outcomes.