University Brand Personality: an Exploratory Research about the University of Florence
5. Conclusion, limitations, further developments
The purposes of this research is to explores brand personality with specific reference to university institutions and to refine brand personality scales in this area. To our knowledge is the first exploratory empirical research has ever run related to an Italian university.
Statistically significant results from the exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis are gained. Based on the exploratory research run we got four dimensions (factors) useful to measure brand personality of university institutions: “Organization”, “Dynamic”, “Openness”
and “Prestige”. These factors seem to be four complementary sides of the metaphorical personality of universities. The first one (Organization) express the capability of an
institution to be well ruled in term of organization and corporate stability that means i.e, the organization ability to recruit desired faculty members and to attract abundant funds
(Treadwell and Harrison 1994). The “Organization” dimension at the same time involves the practical side of the personality related to the so called “management operations”. The second one (Dynamic) can be interpreted such as the university personality side rooted on the
research and teaching innovation and dynamism. This factor appear to be highly related to: a) the key performance index measured for the university ranking and b) to the drivers
influencing students’ choice of a higher education institution (Milo, Edson, & Mceuen, 1989;
Nguyen & LeBlanc, 2001; Weissman, 1990). The third dimension (Openness) conveys the warm feeling of friendship and the emotional bondages and links the university is capable to activate together with the students and between the students (“university can build positive emotional attachment if they make prospective students feel valued and develop connection with them”; Sung & Yang 2008). Lastly the fourth dimension (Prestige) is the one that seems
1 To conduct a factor analysis, the KMO test must be greater than .5. This measure varies between 0 and 1, and values closer to 1 are better. A value of .6 is a suggested minimum. The Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity tests the null hypothesis that the correlation matrix is an identity matrix. The Bartlett’s Test must be significant. For this analysis, the two conditions are verified (KMO = 0.89 and Bartlett test χ ²(55)=4816.796, p=0).
2 Steiger and Lind, 1980; Pedhazur and Pedhazur Schmelkin,1991; Browne and Cudeck, 1993; Hu and Bentler, 1999; Tabachnik and Fidel, 2007; Steiger, 2007
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the most related to the brand reputation construct. It contains the expert and attractive base of the university personality and in this perspective, brand reputation is an output of the brand personality achieved by the organization (see also Herbig and Milewicz, 1995).
Being an exploratory research, further empirical analysis will be run for verifying the generalization degree of the results gather from the investigation of the specific case of the University of Florence; according to the authors national and international comparisons could generate and foster interesting insights.
The results of this research have academic and managerial facets. From the academic point of view, we have built and tested a purified scale of personality that can be applied to
university institutions.
From the managerial point of view, we have discovered that the main dimensions
explaining the brand personality of universities (at least of the specific institution personality under analysis); relying on this results university decision makers could have a better
understating of the students’ perceptions and could better shape brand value proposition for strengthening the emotional bonds and links together with the student community.
Figures and Tables
Table 1: Brand Personality of University of Florence: Exploratory Factor Analysis Rotated Factor Matrixaa : Factor
1 2 3 4
Pers8 (Well- Organised) ,685
Pers9 (Stable) ,797
Pers10 (Practical) ,745
Pers3 (Innovator) ,822
Pers4 (Dinamic) ,745
Pers1 (Open) ,688
Pers5 (Friendly) ,816
Pers7 (Warm) ,535
Pers2 (Expert) ,514
Pers6 (Prestigious) ,817
Pers11 (Attractive) 0,68
Extraction Method: Principal Axis Factoring. Rotation Method: Varimax with Kaiser Normalization. a. Rotation converged in 5 iterations.
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Figure 1: Brand Personality of University of Florence: Confirmatory Factor Analysis Model
,887 ,675 ,729
,821 ,794
,663 ,624 ,797
,739 ,590 ,658 ,887 ,675 ,729
,821 ,794
,663 ,624 ,797
,739 ,590 ,658
Fit values: RMSEA (.060), for which suggested minimum are < .05 as satisfying and < .08 as tolerable , CFI (0.957) and NFI (.949).
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The future of B2B-trade shows: Insights from a scenario analysis for a powerful forum of marketing communications
BEATRICE ERMER (LEIPZIG GRADUATE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT)
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