Abstract:

As universities are operating within dynamic, challenging environments, marketing strategy becomes a priority to ensure strong recruitment together with student and faculty retention (Asaad et al., 2013). There is consensus that understanding the university brand and the clear development and communication involved brings great value to higher educational institutions (Duesterhaus y Duesterhaus, 2014). For this reason, strategic brand management becomes a key part of the educational sector and, especially, of higher education institutions (Rauschnabel et al., 2016).

Parallel to this, brands have evolved over time to become a life experience for consumers, having acquired an emotional importance that is reflected in the satisfaction of people who consume or buy (Camacho, 2008). However, Küster-Boluda et al. (2011) consider that in the search for new forms of differentiation that imply the real creation of value for the client, companies must be economically efficient. Thus, in relation to the definition of brand capital in higher education, Berry (2000) argues that although the product is considered the main brand in terms of packaged products, this is not the case in service companies. In this case, the company is the main brand, the service itself being the cornerstone of marketing for today and tomorrow. Moreover, this contribution, applied to the provision of educational services, includes generating brand capital based on the strength of the brand transmitted by the higher educational institution itself.

In this context, the objectives of this article are:
(1) to analyze what is meant by brand capital and establish what its determinant variables in the education sector are, and
(2) to determine at the empirical level, which are the most important variables of the capital of educational brand on the part of agents involved in public universities.

Thus, and in the described scenario, the realization of the present investigation supposes a scientific advance in the discipline of marketing, since to date, although specific investigations of brand capital and the variables that compose it have been carried out (Farquhar, 1989; Aaker, 1992; Keller, 1993; Fairlooth et al., 2001), there is very little research that exhaustively analyzes the perception of brand capital through opinions of the main agents involved in higher education institutions in Spain (Cervera et al., 2012).

For this purpose, an empirical study was realised using a valid sample of 1,246 responses from different agents involved in public universities. The results obtained show the repercussion of each variable of the brand capital relative to the determining variables, which are: brand awareness, brand image, perceived quality and brand loyalty. It can be helpful to university managers as they can decipher the clues as to the views of their students regarding brand equity and thereby generate appropriate strategies to maintain or improve it.

Keywords:

Marketing, brand capital, higher education, public university, structural equations modeling.