Marketing Models for Educational Institutions

The present paper aims at providing a conceptual and operational framework in order to better integrate marketing models and their business applications into educational institutions. First, the paper shows how the marketing models are deployed in the business sector and what are the advantages of their use. The second part is focused on describing the complex decision the educational institution customer is facing when it comes to choosing the right institution to attend and the satisfaction derived from the provided services. It is argued that the decisions related to educational institutions are prone to long term incubation and family and social circles involvement. Also the pupil or student satisfaction is strongly correlated with their expectations and can be measured by identifying the main attributes of the educational service. Several marketing models are presented as alternatives for the customer behaviour. These models include compensatory and non-compensatory models, but also stochastic models. Finally an operational framework able to handle a fuzzy logic model is provided, including the steps needed to create the model, in order to test how this decision can be modelled using marketing models. The advantages and disadvantages of the fuzzy logic model are discussed and a perspective on other proposed models is provided.