Abstract:
The future of education industry is dependent on the university's ability to develop an effective marketing strategies, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Marketing strategies are the plans that enables the university to reach out to the potential students and to ensure competitive advantage in the industry. There is limited research on this topic to guide the universities to cope up with the current situation. In particular, few studies have studied customer satisfaction from the perspective of the students in Johor, Malaysia. Therefore, this study examines the relationship between marketing strategies, namely packaging, relationship marketing, price, and brand image and customer satisfaction at the Institute of Higher Learning in Johor, Malaysia. Questionnaires were distributed to 90 students who currently studying in universities in Johor, Malaysia. SmartPLS 3.0 (M3), also known as partial least squares (PLS) was applied to test the hypotheses and subsequently bootstrapping was conducted to investigate the standard error of the estimate and t-values. The findings indicated that relationship marketing and price have positive relationship with customer satisfaction. On the other hand, interestingly, findings revealed that packaging and brand image does not show positive relationship on customer satisfaction. It is believed that packaging has a short lifespan that influence the effectiveness of packaging on customer satisfaction. Besides, it is believed that the respondents does not really concern about the popularity of the brand. Moreover, this study also indicates that relationship marketing is the component that contribute the most to customer satisfaction at the Institute of Higher Learning in Johor, Malaysia. Lastly, this study offers theoretical and practical contributions to customer satisfaction literature and the education industry.
