Page 75 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

Tuba Bingöl, Leila Samii, Tej Dhakar: Co-Communication and Brand Reflection in Higher Education:
Perceptions of Enrollment Intention and Recommending

One method that is commonly used to determine whether the target audience will
recommend a product is Net Promotor Score (NPS) (Reichheld, 2003). Moreover,
NPS has been found to increase brand loyalty (Schultz and Block, 2012). In this study,
the measure of NPS was not used, however, students’ recommending the university
to others was analyzed. Therefore, it would be important to note and to explore further
whether NPS has a same impact in the university setting in terms of brand loyalty.

Future research should explore the type of communication that impacts enrollment
decision from UGC and UCC. Our research focused on enrollment intention and
recommending the university, through co-collaboration and brand reflection, but did
not look at specific content. It would be interesting to explore the actual content that
follows the journey.

Moreover, this research only focused on international students and a university
setting. It would be important to extend this research to international consumers as a
whole. Since students are more familiar with social media, the information may
change with different generations as well as with different product categories.

REFERENCES

Aaker, D. A., and K. L. Keller. 1990. “Consumer Evaluations of Brand Extensions.”
Journal of Marketing 54 (1): 27 – 41.

Bélanger, C. H., Bali, S. & Longden, B. (2014). How Canadian universities use social
media to brand themselves, Tertiary Education and Management, 20:1, 14-29

Bolat, E. & O’Sullivan, E. (2017). Radicalising the marketing of higher education:
learning from student-generated social media data. Journal of Marketing Management,
33:9-10, 742-763

Brodie, R. J., Ilic, A., Juric, B. & Hollebeek, L. (2013). Consumer engagement in a virtual
brand community: An exploratory analysis. Journal of Business Research, 66, 105–114

Chauhan, K. & Pillai, A. (2013). Role of content strategy in social media brand
communities: a case of higher education institutes in India. Journal of Product &
Brand Management, Vol. 22 Issue: 1, pp.40-51.

Chen, C. (2016). The Investigation on Brand Image of University Education and
Students’ Word-of-Mouth Behavior. Higher Education Studies; Vol. 6, No. 4; 2016
75