Visual And Rhetorical Analysis Of Higher Education

Abstract
In the contemporary capitalist society, the marketing of higher education adopts a highly capitalist-focused rhetoric, with commercials promoting students’ choices in favour of specific educational establishments for financial and not intellectual reasons. Educational institutions use various methods and techniques of persuasion to frame the audience’s beliefs and values in favour of certain educational choices. In connection with pervasive presence of propaganda techniques in marketing, this paper presents a visual and rhetorical analysis of higher education print advertisements’ analysis. This analytical study is intended to show how marketers of higher education reinforce problematic representations that can be read as discriminatory

Marketing is “an organisational function and a set pf processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organisation and its stakeholders” (Reid and Bojanic, 2009, p. 9). In the pursuit of maintaining and increasing their enrolment numbers, many higher education universities and business schools realise and underline the necessity of marketing for student enrolment (Ivy, 2008, pp. 288-289). Perceiving students as consumers, marketers investigate and determine factors affecting student’s choice for an educational institution and develop marketing models and theories applicable to higher education to promote particular universities and business schools (Cubillo, Sanchez and Cervino, 2006, pp.

This argument stands on the propaganda’s manipulation of communication form and content and individual’s psychology to invoke the desired belief or position in the targeted person (Show, 2007, p. 11). Both Public Relations and Propaganda share an array of persuasive techniques and methods applied to reach the goals. Aggressive branding utilises propaganda techniques and design practices to influence mass consciousness and to instil particular ideas and attitudes (Muratovski, 2011). This dimension of marketing of education indicates the propagandist abuse of persuasion to influence students’ choices of educational