University branding : a myth or a reality

Every university needs a brand and an image that can be trusted and believed and that will differentiate it from others. University brand, in fact, is the perception and reputation developed in the minds of the people about the university or institution. It is the reaction appears in the minds of the people when they hear or see a name or symbol of some university or institute. This research aimed to identify key factors that are required to be taken care of while developing university branding strategy. For this research a deductive approach is adopted, as the main objective of this research is to investigate the influence of attributes like awareness, acceptance, and quality on brand image of universities, therefore, it is proposed to conduct semi structured interviews which are considered to be a most suitable for testing of influence of different attributes on brand image. The components used in the study are awareness, acceptance, prestige, incentives and quality. The result of the study shows that in the university selection decision, image of the university is the key determinant. The result also shows that the image of the university has four key constructing factors which are quality, prestige, financial incentives, and acceptance. Quality is found to be the strongest construct followed by prestige, acceptance and incentives.