Chapter 2: Corporate Brand Communication in the Higher Education Sector

The focus of this chapter is higher education (HE) stakeholders and how stakeholders are categorized. The chapter covers definitions of brand identity and aspects of promotional mix in HE. The arguments focus on the ways that marketing communication has become increasingly digitalized, which has implications for integrated marketing communications and for brand identity.

Higher education continues to expand in an environment that is increasingly global and interconnected. Rapid growth in the HE sector and increasingly fierce competition among institutions has driven universities towards greater focus on marketing (Hemsley-Brown & Oplatka, 2016) and branding (Chapleo, 2015; Foroudi, Dinnie, Kitchen, Melewar, & Foroudi, 2017; Hemsley-Brown & Goonawardana, 2007), in particular the development of a strong brand identity (Spry, Foster, Pich, & Peart, 2020), a focus on key and multiple audiences coupled with strategies for marketing and brand communications to multiple stakeholders (Robson, Roy, Chapleo, & Yang, 2019). The purpose of the authors is to explore stakeholders, brand identity, corporate branding, marketing communications, promotional tools and social media communications in the context of three groups of stakeholders specifically: prospective student-customers; current student-participants; past-student alumni. This division of student stakeholders has been theorized by Dholakia (2017).