USING NETNOGRAPHY AS AN ICT RESEARCH TOOL FOR HIGHER EDUCATION MARKETING – THE CASE OF ROMANIA

The meteoric rise of computer mediated communication - reflected by the proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies, social networking sites and virtual online communities - has awaken the interest of affinity marketing professionals with the intent of marketing higher education products and services to these highly targetable, fast growing user bases. Thus, Web 2.0 communities are emerging as a key factor for the process of changing the organizational and learning paradigms of higher education institutions.
Although online consumer groups enclose various and frequently hidden “need information” on higher education products and services – representing a large pool of market, customer and product know-how – until now, Romanian universities have not made the necessary efforts to use this resource and to adjust their offering to the new requirements of the network society.
At the present time, little is known in Romanian Universities about how to capitalize on this know-how. Therefore, in this paper, we explore the possibility of using “Netnography” – a relatively new qualitative marketing research methodology inspired by cultural anthropology, which adapts ethnographic research techniques to the study of cultures and communities emerging through computer-mediated communications – for gathering information on the symbolism, meanings, and consumption patterns of online consumer groups in the field of Romanian higher education.
We will try to illustrate that integrating the interaction with these virtual communities into the overall marketing effort of higher education institutions to reach audiences in the targeted segments is a rather farsighted strategy. Applying specific tactics like setting up a virtual community presence of the institution inside targeted online communities (e.g. setting up an account for the organization; establishing a own institutional branded “group”, creating events to promote off-network activities) and persistently monitoring groups and pages that refer to the institution or even establishing an owner-hosted online community will increase the effectiveness of the overall marketing effort to reach a younger target audience (especially 18-25 year-olds).
Although the measurable benefits of applying these ICT based tools and strategies are, until now, not fully explored and documented, this paper is a first step in this emerging Web 2.0 marketing strategy, in that it attempts to show the importance of understanding the opportunities and limitations of virtual communities, while the greatest risk in marketing planning of Romanian higher education institutions is to simply ignore the growing popularity of online communities.