Assessment of integrated marketing communications on organization performance of Kenyan Private Universities

Organizations adopt integrated marketing communications as a strategy to remind, persuade and inform their customers of the products and services they offer; such firms become competitive to increase their performance. Private universities are not indifferent of the marketing strategies; they design their communications to inform their publics of the services they provide as they compete with public universities.The study assessed integrated marketing communications on the organization performance of Kenyan private universities. The study employed descriptive research design. Purposive sampling was employed to choose 4 private universities. The sample size involved 96 respondents. Primary data was gathered through a close ended questionnaire. The data was processed through SPSS software for analysis of both descriptive and inferential statistics and data was presented in means and standard deviations. On a 5-point Likert scale, the scores for direct marketing, advertising, and public relations were (Mean=4.32, SD=0.74; Mean=4.18, SD=0.83 and Mean=4.12, SD=0.81) respectively to imply that the respondents stated to a great extent the variables influenced organization performance. The score for personal selling was (Mean=3.00, SD=1.27) which was a moderate score. Correlation analysis was performed where direct marketing (p =0.890, Sig. = 0.000), advertising (p = 0.850, Sig. = 0.000), personal selling (p = 0.873, Sig. = 0.000) and public relations (p = 0.819, Sig. = 0.000) had strong and significant relationship with students’ enrolment. Further, direct marketing (p = 0.899, Sig. = 0.000), advertising (p = 0.857, Sig. = 0.000), personal selling (p = 0.870, Sig. = 0.000) and public relations (p = 0.823, Sig. = 0.000) also had strong and significant correlation with brand equity. This implied that any of the components of integrated marketing communications displayed a strong and positive correlation with organization performance in terms of student’s enrolment and brand equity.