What's love got to do with it? Exploring the role of universities and third places in supporting human mate choice

The growing cost and difficulty related to “finding someone” suggests that the role of service organisations in explicitly supporting and designing opportunities for love between customers merits further attention. This study employs a multidisciplinary approach of both services marketing and the economics of mate choice to understand how service organisations can exercise the third place effect and facilitate human mate choice (love) opportunities for consumers in extended service encounters.

Three qualitative co-design workshops were conducted with actors (students, casual and professional staff) from the Australian university ecosystem (n = 36) to identify consumer expectations related to mate selection in third place service contexts. A quantitative online survey of (n = 1207) current Australian university students was used to rank the importance of core and enhancing service elements.

The authors find that love holds a status in the minds of some consumers as an implicitly expected by-product of participation within the core service consumption experience in third places. For service providers to facilitate mate choice opportunities in third places, the results suggest that the design of the connective mechanism(s) should maximise opportunities for informal consumer-to-consumer interaction to allow prospective partners to ascertain compatibility. Further, consumers expect the organisational facilitation of engagement in order to clarify expected etiquette and support goal congruence. In the tertiary education marketplace for love, there is an increased preference for interpersonal engagement by those studying on campus (compared to externally), and a positive relationship between duration of enrolment and increased priority for mate choice service provision.

This research makes a novel theoretical and empirical contribution by being the first exploration of the economics of third place love in the tertiary education sector, also being a research primer for the field of services marketing to consider service design in third places to support mate choice.