Abstract:

Building university brand is a continuously evolving process, from the age that universities promoted their studies and activities in newspaper articles until now where web presence and social media are ways for communication and branding. The fact that the career, achievements and profile of university graduates are one of the key features of good branding and help universities marketing, remains. Word of mouth (WOM) is a key aspect of university branding. Graduate profiles and testimonials are presented both as evidence and WOM, in various ways and representations. Academic integrity, future employability and career success are implied in these stories where the student experience is present in many cases.

In our research we study representation practices that universities are using to support their brand through their alumni. In our approach we identified four categories of content representation:
1. Lists of names and tags related to education or career
2. Alumni profiles with photos and tags
3. Alumni profiles with a small photo and a snippet of their text/interview.
4. Alumni profiles with video with stories on their studies and their life / achievements.

During the first phase of our research we selected four universities, according to their content representation of their alumni. The experiment was conducted with the participation of 5 subjects. Two have academic background in science, two in computer science and one is a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) expert. Subjects were asked to navigate in the selected websites and they were monitored, using Think aloud Protocol (TaP), screen sharing and video, and they were recorded . They were free to choose one or more graduate’s profiles in each website, to focus. They were asked to explain their choices (persons and stories), which one had richer and better presented content, the differences they identified among the representations, and if they had impact in their opinion about the brand of the university.

The study has shown that subjects considered that rich representations, as video, are time-consuming to watch and as they were non-structured it was difficult to recall easily the person, the story and the university he has studied. Thus even very important stories can be left out, especially if videos and graduates profiles are not tagged. In cases where transcript of video was available, the content was easier to access, in fact to read. The university that presented the alumni in lists enriched with tags was easier for the user to focus and remember cases of graduates. In order to build a brand, this representation can be applied only when a significant number of persons are presented and their career and achievements include references to other brands and preferably brand leaders. In all cases subjects were biased as the names of the universities appeared on the websites which did not have similar brand identities, since one of them was a brand leader.

We are proceeding in the second phase of our study, where four no – name university alumni sites are created with the same content, but different representations, according to the four described approaches. In this part of our study new subjects with similar age and background will be involved. According to their feedback we expect to have a better insight view on the type of representations that have more impact in the creation of a university brand name, through alumni.

Keywords:

University brand, alumni.