South African further education and training (FET) colleges have been enjoined to become more responsive to their external environment, in keeping with international trends in public vocational education and training (VET) reform. One mechanism for achieving this goal is to market colleges and communicate more effectively to future students, future employers and the communities in which colleges are located. This article reports on key findings of the first case studies of marketing practices in four colleges, noting very considerable variations in strategies and practices across their marketing functions. Nonetheless, we identify a common tendency to prioritise external over internal and interactive marketing. We argue that the limited understanding by marketing staff and college leaders about the state of the art of marketing practice is the product of the broader challenges of the unfinished college transformation process. We note the inevitability that the new South African colleges will gradually adopt marketing approaches as part of their wider process of evolution, but propose that there are unlikely to be simple solutions to a number of key tensions that are both internal and external to the marketing function. (Contains 2 tables and 4 notes.)