Abstract

Universities increasingly compete through value propositions, service processes, and communication ecosystems rather than through program supply alone. Yet evidence remains limited on how students’ perceptions of the educational marketing mix are associated with satisfaction in non-metropolitan higher education settings in Latin America. This study examines a private university branch campus in a Latin American emerging economy using a quantitative, cross-sectional, non-experimental design and a probabilistic stratified sample of 287 complete student responses. Educational marketing was operationalized as students’ perceived evaluation of the educational marketing mix—product, price, place, and promotion—whereas satisfaction was measured with SERVQUAL-informed, performance-oriented service-evaluation items. The findings show a strong positive association between the perceived educational marketing mix and student satisfaction, with promotional communication emerging as the most closely related dimension. Descriptively, both constructs were concentrated at intermediate levels, indicating an acceptable but non-distinctive institutional experience and pointing to service weaknesses in security, empathy, and responsiveness. The article contributes by problematizing the use of marketing-mix logic in higher education, clarifying that satisfaction is not a proxy for educational quality or belonging, and showing how perceived value communication and service delivery are connected with students’ satisfaction judgments in an emerging-economy context.

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