Brand management based on consumer perceptions of a university

The paper scrutinizes the problems of positioning and managing the brand of an educational institution. Lack of the algorithm for managing a university brand on the basis of a positioning strategy is the main issue for academics to resolve. The authors find that the concept of position in the scientific literature has been little studied. At that, the position communicated by the university may not coincide with consumer perceptions of its brand. The methodological basis of the research includes the theoretical principles of brand management and positioning, as well as marketing research methods: content analysis, consumer surveys, in-depth interviews, expert assessment of the position characteristics. The authors propose a detailed definition of the term “position of an educational institution” and develop a typology of positioning strategies in the market for vocational education based on a combination of points of parity and points of differentiation characterizing the position of a university. The paper provides an algorithm for dynamic brand management that allows identifying and smoothing the differences between the position claimed by the university and that perceived by consumers. The brand management algorithm is tested using the case of the Ural State University of Economics (USUE). The results show that the USUE’s position corresponds to consumer perceptions for only 54.7 %. The article presents the university’s characteristics to be corrected and devises a scheme for marketing communications to bring the university’s position into compliance with consumer perceptions.