Analysis of the profile of a student of a higher education institution (HEI): marketing as a tool for higher education institutions

Private higher education institutions (HEI) face a crisis that mostly derives from the stabilization of demand and the drop in incomes, which represent challenges affecting their management. Marketing tries to offer answers to some of the companies’ most important aspects, while combining consumers’ needs with company capacities and targets. One of the approaches in the educational market consists of target marketing, in which the market is divided into segments and specific assistance offers are developed. The present research resulted from the interest to get a better understanding of individual behavior in choosing services in education, with a psychographic segmentation being accomplished. A case study in a private HEI was carried out to find out who their clients are. Two hundred and eight students of different courses were selected by means of sampling by (researcher) convenience. They all replied to an instrument composed of questionnaires covering personality traits, basic human values and need for cognition. It was observed that the human values and the personality values are adequate variables in which to segment this public, while the need for cognition does not possess discriminating capacity among the students of different courses. These results are expected to contribute to the development of specific actions in educational marketing.