The Marketing Approach in Relationships Between Universities and Firms

Abstract

Establishing stable relationships between universities and businesses is as an attractive strategy whereby universities can adapt their activities to the environment. Therefore, it must be ensured that businesses continuously participate in the activities of university institutions. The objective of this article is to identify the factors that determine said continuous participation. The relevance of the subject is that it focuses on the considerable benefits that can be derived from the existence of stable relationships between these agents. Thus, participatory behaviour by businesses in their relationships with a university makes them an important source of cost-free information that allows a university to improve its offerings. The results obtained from the study identify business satisfaction and business commitment as the variables that determine continuing participation by businesses with universities.

KEYWORDS:

• commitment
• continuous participation
• educational offer
• enterprises
• relationship marketing
• satisfaction
• universities

This study was conducted within the framework of the “CREVALOR” Excellence Group. We are grateful for the assistance received through the Research Project of the Ministry of Education and Science, SEJ2005-06603/ECON.

Notes

1. For a detailed review of the diverse customers of universities, see Marzo (2005).

2. The same way in which, in human resources, workers are considered to be internal customers of the organisation (Eisenberger et al., 1986, 1990; Shore & Wayne, 1993).

3. These analyses are not shown here because they are beyond the objective of this article. To view the analyses, see Marzo (2005) and Marzo, Pedraja, & Rivera (2006a).