Student Experience Marketing: A Proposal to Humanize Higher Education Through Smart Learning Environments

Digital transformation has profoundly reshaped how students interact with higher education institutions, particularly within online universities where a substantial portion of the educational experience unfolds through digital platforms, academic services, communication channels, and intelligent technologies. However, educational marketing continues to be predominantly associated with student attraction, recruitment, and conversion, while the post-enrollment journey is often managed in a fragmented manner across academic, administrative, and technological units. This structural silos undermine the continuity of the institution-student relationship and underscore the urgent imperative to transition toward holistic, person-centered experience frameworks. This study proposes the conceptual framework of Student Experience Marketing (SEM) as an integrative strategic approach that articulates services and social marketing, experience design, educational innovation, artificial intelligence, learning analytics, and human-centered support to orchestrate the student journey across their entire lifecycle. The model is grounded in five core humanizing principles: personalization, support/mentorship, empathy, autonomy, and belonging. Within this framework, technology is conceptualized as an enabler of experiential value rather than a substitute for interpersonal connection. Employing a conceptual and systemic design methodology complemented by descriptive, observational institutional quantitative data, the study synthesizes four distinct evidentiary sources: a GameLearn communication and support survey (n=390), a gamified experience feedback and perceived transferability registry (n=21,494), an induction course satisfaction survey (n=307), and an institutional academic risk report encompassing 132,465 student-course records across 303 courses. Findings reveal highly positive evaluations across all evaluated initiatives: 98.8% perceived applicability for GameLearn simulations, an NPS of +77.7, and an NPS of +89.6 for the induction course. Standardized courses incorporating GameLearn activities demonstrated an average failure rate of 10.8%, compared to the institutional baseline of 12.0%, alongside a moderate negative correlation between gamified experience satisfaction and failure rates (r = -0.16). These empirical findings are framed as observational associations rather than definitive causal claims. Drawing upon these insights, the paper articulates a Student Experience Ecosystem comprising eleven developmental stages and six operational dimensions: academic mentorship, learning analytics, socio-emotional support, real-world AI-augmented projects, collaborative networks, and lifelong learning pathways. The model concludes that humanizing digital higher education does not require diminishing technological integration; rather, it demands leveraging technology strategically to deliver a more personalized, timely, meaningful, and genuinely human-centered educational experience.