An empirical study of the effect of brand personality and consistency between marketing channels on performance within the UK higher education sector
type: CreativeWork
description: 2/316 Abstract Over the past decade, increased pressure on Higher Education Institutions (“HEIs”) has contributed to additional national and international competition for students and funding. This has been compounded by policy decisions on the part of government. Such increasing competition has led to an increase in managerialism, with tools and practices traditionally associated with the corporate sector now being adopted and utilised by HEIs. Marketing and brand management has received special attention from such institutions, particularly in order to attract students and build reputation. Some authors argue that the concept of branding transfers directly to the education sector, whilst others argue that HEIs are more complex with more specialist approaches required. Research suggests UK universities do not consistently communicate across all audiences, whilst previous literature recognises brand consistency as important. However, this literature is based predominantly on anecdote, or on evidence from single cases. In this study, sixty HEIs were selected to represent the full range of UK universities. For each HEI, a prospectus was obtained, and the websites and Twitter feeds of the institutions were downloaded. This provided 18,956,366 words to analyse. Brand personality was measured using Aaker’s brand personality scale and Opoku’s dictionary of synonyms. The frequency of words was used to assess brand personality across Aaker’s five dimensions for each marketing channel. The data was then analysed to test the research hypotheses, using statistical analysis techniques. These looked for relationships between brand personality, strength, consistency, and performance. Results highlighted a positive correlation between brand personality consistency relating to the prospectus and website, and HEI research and recruitment performance. Those HEIs with a consistent brand personality between these two marketing channels performed better on RAE, UCAS Demand and points. T…
abstract: 2/316 Abstract Over the past decade, increased pressure on Higher Education Institutions (“HEIs”) has contributed to additional national and international competition for students and funding. This has been compounded by policy decisions on the part of government. Such increasing competition has led to an increase in managerialism, with tools and practices traditionally associated with the corporate sector now being adopted and utilised by HEIs. Marketing and brand management has received special attention from such institutions, particularly in order to attract students and build reputation. Some authors argue that the concept of branding transfers directly to the education sector, whilst others argue that HEIs are more complex with more specialist approaches required. Research suggests UK universities do not consistently communicate across all audiences, whilst previous literature recognises brand consistency as important. However, this literature is based predominantly on anecdote, or on evidence from single cases. In this study, sixty HEIs were selected to represent the full range of UK universities. For each HEI, a prospectus was obtained, and the websites and Twitter feeds of the institutions were downloaded. This provided 18,956,366 words to analyse. Brand personality was measured using Aaker’s brand personality scale and Opoku’s dictionary of synonyms. The frequency of words was used to assess brand personality across Aaker’s five dimensions for each marketing channel. The data was then analysed to test the research hypotheses, using statistical analysis techniques. These looked for relationships between brand personality, strength, consistency, and performance. Results highlighted a positive correlation between brand personality consistency relating to the prospectus and website, and HEI research and recruitment performance. Those HEIs with a consistent brand personality between these two marketing channels performed better on RAE, UCAS Demand and points. T…
author: Rutter, Richard
language: en
date published: 2013
date modified: 2026-07-24T02:11:54Z
provider: University of East Anglia
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of East Anglia