Loyalty to higher education institutions and the relationship with reputation: an integrated model with multi-stakeholder approach

Abstract

Higher Education Institutions face a highly competitive climate nowadays. Thus, these institutions need to increase their market orientation and, a key factor, stakeholders’ loyalty. In this paper, a model of high predictive power of loyalty is tested for a mediumsized European university, using a sample of 4023 individuals, including students, social entities and the general population. The results suggest that satisfaction and reputation are the antecedents of loyalty, although the importance of each varies depending on the stakeholder in question, since stakeholders respond to different strategic patterns. Thus, in the case of students, satisfaction is clearly the predominant variable, while for social entities, reputation is more relevant. The present work contributes to the theory of marketing for higher education institutions by defining a model that includes a reputation as an explanatory variable of the antecedents of loyalty and applying it to the main stakeholders: students, local social entities and the population.