Quality Dimensional Analysis: A Basis for Marketing Strategy of Higher Educational Institutions

Higher education institutions currently face an increased number of participants in the market on the supply side, and increased level of requirements at the demand side. Therefore, an appropriate marketing strategy is required to pay attention to this fact. We need to apply conquest marketing to secure a sufficient level of interest and enrollment of students on one hand, and retention marketing in order to create the satisfaction and loyalty of the already enrolled students on the other. The key role in formulating and designing the marketing strategy of an educational institution is assigned to the quality of the educational process, the quality as perceived by the students, and the level of satisfaction derived from the same. Since one specific feature of the service process, including the education services too, is the heterogeneity of the services and difficult standardisation of the service process; the measured quality of services in fact represents the quality as perceived by the clients. From this follows that the precondition of a successfully created marketing strategy is the choice of an adequate quality-measuring model in the education process (service provision process). The paper uses the Kano model of service quality measuring to identify among students the factors that are used by them to measure the quality of the education process and point at them the marketing strategy of institutions.