THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO THE FORMATION OF A MARKETING MECHANISM FOR PROMOTING EDUCATIONAL SERVICES

Abstract

Reviews of theoretical approaches to marketing in higher education commonly conclude by summarising the principal approaches. This article extends this perspective by empirically examining their predictions. Five approaches are considered, together with the prediction each makes regarding the composition of promotional communication, and these predictions are examined using data from twenty anonymised higher education institutions in Uzbekistan. The principal discriminating construct is evidence distance, introduced here as the number of steps separating the marketing unit from the graduate outcome data required to formulate a claim that a prospective student can independently verify. The marketing mix approach, which treats promotion as a controllable decision variable, predicts that claim composition is associated with promotional budget and staffing. The empirical results provide limited support for this prediction. The coefficient on log promotional budget declines from 10.336, with a t-statistic of 2.99, to 0.604, with a t-statistic of 0.43, once evidence distance is introduced into the specification. Marketing staff also shows no statistically significant association, with a coefficient of −4.330 and a t-statistic of −0.60. By contrast, the capabilities approach, which proposes that an organisation’s market activities are constrained by its capacity to sense and access relevant information internally, predicts that claim composition is associated with access to evidence. The results are consistent with this prediction: evidence distance has a coefficient of −13.018, with a t-statistic of −12.15, while R² increases from 0.332 to 0.931. The verifiable-claim share declines monotonically from 69.5 to 14.0 per cent across the five levels of evidence distance, while enrolment yield declines from 93.0 to 48.5 per cent. A second finding was not explicitly predicted by the approaches examined. Claims published per staff member increase from 16.6 to 24.3 along the same evidence-distance scale. This pattern suggests that marketing units with more limited access to relevant evidence may maintain or increase the volume of promotional communication even as the share of verifiable claims declines. Fourteen of the twenty institutions are positioned at an evidence distance of three or more, and each additional step in evidence distance is associated with an estimated 10.15-percentage-point difference in enrolment yield.