“Market Oriented Strategy for Distance Education – A Case study of Dr.Baba Saheb Ambedkar Open University –Ahmedabad, Gujarat.”

Abstract

Market orientation refers to the organization wide generation of market intelligence pertaining to current and future needs of customers, disseminating intelligence horizontally and vertically within the organization and organization wide action or responsiveness to market intelligence. It comprises three core themes: a customer focus, co-ordinated marketing, and profotability (Kohli and jaworski,1990). Thus market orientation starts by analyzing what potential customers- who constitute a market- require and at what price, and then attempts to systematically direct the efforts of the organization towards meeting the requirements of customers (Leader and Kyritsis, 1989). Distance education (DE) is an exchange process between the two viz ; open university or institute of distance education and the students (Bandhu,1995a). Market oriented distance education requires provision of wide range of services necessary for different students, at convenient place, at affordable cost and promoted through right promotional media. Since distance education is catering to the educational needs of different students, it is viewed as a centre of different faculties working together. It is in this context a need has been felt to work out the level of market orientation in distance education i.e., whether the institute has properly addressed educational requirements of target clientele with different demographic and educational background or not.