Positioning strategy to attract international master students

: Católica Lisbon case study

Abstract

Católica Lisbon is a leading Portuguese business schools that managed to establish itself with-in the Top25 of European business schools. During the next decade Católica Lisbon aims to further grow and improve the reputation of its Master of Science programs. The big challenge for the Portuguese business school thereby is to attract a greater number of diverse and high quality international students in a strong com-petitive environment. In order to evaluate if the current marketing and positioning strategy is adequate to achieve this mission, it is crucial for Católica Lisbon to understand international students and their decision patterns to choose a business school. This dissertation aims to analyze which drivers influence a student´s choice and if internation-al business students differ in how much they value hedonic and utilitarian dimensions in their decision. The literature review of this thesis gives an overview about hedonic and utilitarian decision making and introduces findings of previous researches in the area of higher educa-tion marketing. The case study describes the above stated challenge of Católica Lisbon in the context of its history and the developments in the European higher education market. Findings of a market research among international business students reveal that there are segments of utilitarian and hedonic-utilitarian driven students. These segments differ signifi-cantly in the importance they attribute to different factors in their choice and how likely they would choose a business school with Católica’s features.

Date of Award	17 Jul 2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Pedro Celeste (Supervisor)