The study aimed is to examine the relationship of brand image and service quality towards student loyaltyin purchasing at a university shop, namely UniShop, in the southern state of Malaysia. By understandingstudent loyalty, the university management might encourage students to shop at the UniShop and generaterevenues within the campus. The decreasing sales of UniShop are affected by a hypermarket located withinwalking distance to the university in August 2017. From the literature, the entrance of multinationalcompanies might affect the small companies surrounding them, including UniShop which is a smallenterprise. Thus, the research examined student loyalty in purchasing at UniShop by distributingquestionnaires to the students of the university. The researchers used proportionate stratified randomsampling to generalize the finding across all semester students in the university. The findings showed thatbrand image and service quality played an important role in student loyalty. Students were the maincustomers of a university shop, contributed most of the shop’s business sustainability, and generate indirectincome to the university. In order to maintain student loyalty, UniShop has to take some initiatives includingto increase the scale of products, focuses on student-centered services, improve the shop layout, and sellexclusive university merchandise to increase the student's self-belonging to the university products.
Keywords: brand image, service quality, student loyalty, university shop
The Marketing of Higher Education: Managing Student Loyalty Based on Tuition Fee Policy and Service Quality
