Repositioning An Academic Department To Stimulate Growth

Abstract

The complexity of the market in higher education, and the lack of literature regarding marketing, particularly branding, at the academic department level, presented an opportunity to establish a systematic process for evaluating an academic department’s brand meaning. A process for evaluating a brand’s meaning for an academic department is developed in this paper using Keller’s Customer Base Brand Equity model. This process will aid academic departments experiencing perception problems or wishing to improve their brand to better understand their existing brand meaning and assess the alignment between the student market perception and the industry market perception. This systematic process for evaluating a brand’s meaning is presented as applied to a case study.