Higher Education Branding

Towards a higher education branding: Conceptualizing and measuring factors influencing choice of study programme

Abstract

Considering the declining university-student enrolment in Asian countries, study on higher education branding is more important than ever. Particularly, Thailand is now encountering a drastic demographic challenge with a huge decline in student enrolment. While research on university branding has been widely studied to position the institutions, however, there is little research on curriculum/programme branding. This prompts us to explore factors influencing students’ choice of a particular higher education programme, which can improve the understanding of students’ decision-factors. The findings would be useful to support marketing programmes, especially for branding development. Thus, this research aims to examine the factors affecting programme choice of prospective students. The study conceptualizes, constructs and validates a measurement scale of factors affecting choice of programme, especially the BBA programme. The survey was applied with 336 prospective students in Bangkok, Thailand. This research provides the operationalization of a set of factors influencing a student’s choice of BBA programme that can be applied across different contexts. Additionally, the measured influencing factors are found to correlate to different extents with behavioural intention measure.The results will be beneficial to faculties and universities to develop appropriate branding development, which can differentiate themselves from other institutions.