Abstract:

The intellectual capital (IC) forms an intangible part of the capital, which could be hardly assessed through accounting, resulting in higher values of market capitalization compared to booking value of commercial companies. While business organizations can financially assess the effect from having strong IC, for universities, which are mainly non-for-profit organizations, this becomes problematic. Most of recent research of IC for universities focus either on methodological issues of which components should be included into IC of universities, or on assessing the level of IC disclosure. Majority of the researches done in this area agree that the IC disclosure has a crucial role from the agency theory point of view – providing valuable information for stakeholders on how universities are using public and private resources. Usually, scholars evaluate the level of IC disclosure based on information published in universities’ annual reports and/or websites. At the same time, none of the research had assessed the marketing role of IC disclosure. Few research connected IC disclosure with digital communication, however not for higher education sphere.

Intellectual capital of universities affects their competitiveness, therefore detailed IC disclosure should be a part of universities’ marketing activities, including promotion and positioning. Proper IC disclosure provides better understanding of the quality of university’s education. This becomes even more important in the context of a growing level of competition caused by the rapid digitalization of educational services. The emergence of the EdTech segment, which is dominated by commercial educational structures focused on selling popular educational products for advanced training and professional retraining, threatens current competitiveness of classical universities, forcing them to use all available marketing tools to ensure a stable position in the educational services market.

From the point of view of disclosing information about intellectual capital and forming the image of a university, event marketing can be one of such tools for various educational organizations, including higher education organizations. The use of event marketing tools is focused primarily on creating an experience for various groups of stakeholders. While participating in universities’ events stakeholders build their own opinion about particular university. Therefore, the information disseminated during these events directly affects university’s image.

At the same time, digitalization has changed the educational environment significantly, creating certain barriers to use event marketing tools by Russian universities. As part of this study, an online survey was conducted, in which 269 respondents took part, including 161 students and 108 graduates of Moscow universities. Multiple regression analysis provided insight into the extent to which digital events influence the perceived effectiveness of event marketing strategies and students' decisions to attend university events. The importance of attractive form and relevant content are positive predictors of the overall effectiveness of the university’s interaction on digital platforms, which makes the issue of appropriate IC disclosure support for a university event relevant.

Keywords:

Intellectual capital disclosure, event marketing, digitalization, universities, higher education.