As universities worldwide are being required to be more responsive to the needs of their customers, the literature has focused on identifying exactly who is the customer in the higher education industry. It is common to view the student as the customer but this notion is not universally accepted. This paper reviews the debate in the education and marketing literature about students as customers and reveals the difficulty in using the word customer to describe the student/university relationship. The author argues that the debate must move away from identifying the customer and focus on the university as a service provider. An emerging perspective on market orientation suggest that strategic insights may be gained when firms take into account their customers’ view on the organization’s level of market orientation. Recent research offers evidence on the applicability of a customer- defined market orientation construct. This study extends this line of research by exploring the customer- defined orientation antecedents and outcomes in higher education institutions. This paper accentuates the subject by initially reviewing a number of theoretical viewpoints as to why a customer perspective should be sought when assessing organizational phenomena such as market orientation. Consequently, a number of hypotheses were put forward followed by the results of this study. Correlation analysis and regression analysis among other statistical tools were used in this study. The result using regression analysis showed that all the proposed relationship were significant. The result further demonstrated that service quality acts as a partial mediator where customer satisfaction was not derived completely by service quality. This paper eventually concludes by elaborating the various conclusions derived from the study.
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