Customer Centric Marketing Strategy for Universities

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the ways of using a customer centric approach to develop a marketing strategy for universities. Customer centricity is defined as the university marketing strategy that implies unique intra-disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies, bringing into line individual students' experiences and capabilities with changing the market place and job opportunities. The main forces that urge higher education institutions to change the core of their marketing strategy are characterized; namely, MOOC development and eliminated geographical barriers that stimulate students' mobility. Further, four important directions of customer centricity are described, depending on the role the students and other university target audiences play in the process: the customers being the source of sustainable competitive advantage; customers as the source of information for the company; customers as the source of information for other representatives of the target audience; customers as employees and value co-creators.