Marketing of Educational Services: Research on Service Providers Satisfaction

Marketing is the art of creating a demand and the process of pursuing customers – existing as well as potential. Competition is everywhere; educational service sector is not an exception. Interestingly, the need to “market” their services has not really been felt by Russian education sector, as not so long ago educational institutions have faced more demand than they could cope with. At some point it is still especially true for high rank universities. However, significant demographical decline intensified competition in this sector. For specialized fields like management and computer education, where attractive market potential has increasingly caused more and more institutions to be set up, competitive situation is changing rapidly. Even the institutions facing heavy demand have been confronted with the question of being able to choose the desired target customers, and therefore face issues like product differentiation, product extension, diversification and service integration. All this has activated an interest in previously neglected area of marketing of education services.