Are university students really customers? When illusion may lead to delusion for all!
By Göran Svensson, Greg Wood. 2007
204 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Purpose – The marketing concept is an idea that has been adopted in non‐marketing contexts, such as the relationships between universities and their students. This paper aims to posit that marketing metaphors are inappropriate to describe the student‐university relationship.Design/methodology/approach – The authors provide a conceptual discussion of the topic.Findings – The use of marketing metaphors appears sometimes to be indiscriminate and the appropriateness to use them in student‐university relationships is questioned in this article.Research limitations/implications – This notion of students as customers has caused a misinterpretation of the relationship between universities and students.Practical implications – Students should not be viewed as customers of the university, but as citizens of the university community. The contention contained within this paper is that the customer metaphor is inappropriate to describe students' relationships to universities.Originality/value – The use of marketing bu...
Subfields: Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/42e7419e353ce030b57bf434e1940091ac98bea6
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Marketing
In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
In Strategy and Management
Citations in the corpus
- The effects of lecturer commitment on student perceptions of teaching quality and student satisfaction in Chinese higher education (2015, unknown): “In fact, when students pay tuition fees, they typically consider themselves as customers and the way they are treated by universities – for example, encouraged to express their dissatisfaction if they have any concerns – promotes the dominant marketplace customer model (Svensson & Wood, 2007).”
- Service quality in postgraduate education (2008, background): “It has been argued that a “customer” metaphor for describing the university service exchange from the perspective of students is unsuitable ( Svensson and Wood, 2007”