Brand management: estudo da personalidade da marca de instituições brasileiras de ensino superior

Abstract

The theme of brand management becomes a major competitive differential in organizations that want to distinguish their products from the competition. Thus, brand management, known as "branding" or "branding management", creates organizations' identity in the market, so that clients/consumers remember and recognize a successful brand. Branding can be considered a strategic, conceptualization, and planning activity. The functional and symbolic attributes represent personality traits of the brand and have been communicated by organizations. In the context of Higher Education Institutions - HEIs, a clear communication of the brand personality enables the creation of students' identity with the HEI, promotes engagement, and positions and differentiates the HEI in the market (OPOKU et. al., 2012). In this sense, the aim of the study was to propose an analysis model to map the functional and symbolic attributes of the brand personality of Brazilian universities. To do so, the research used a qualitative approach, with the realization of a multicase study involving three HEIs from Minas Gerais. The results are presented in three articles. In the first article a literature review was carried out to map the studies related to brand personality, identifying that there are few studies related to brand personality in the context of universities, especially with the functional and symbolic attributes. The second article aimed to understand the communication process of HEIs through in-depth interviews conducted with university managers. The processes of institutional communication are still of a news character (journalistic content), not working on the aspects of brand management, but on reputation, prestige and recognition in the media. And the third article, by means of the planning and management tools and also the information available on the websites, a documentary analysis was carried out aiming at identifying the functional and symbolic attributes by means of thematic analysis using the statistical software WordStat9. When talking about the dimensions of brand personality that were most evident in the study, one can point out the dimensions of brand personality: competence (AAKER, 1997; PEÑALOZA et al., 2016), prestige (RAUSCHNABLE, 2016) and credibility (MUNIZ and MARCHETTI, 2012). Among the attributes mapped, it was identified the predominance of functional attributes (quantitative indicators): structure (facilities); faculty; research; teaching and; extension. Among the symbolic attributes: faculty qualification; sustainability; academic reputation; integrity; competence; sophistication; credibility and; prestige. Therefore, it was observed that even though the HEIs do not work the brand management in a holistic way, that is, in the dimensions that comprise the identity, image and personality of the brand, they perform the institutional marketing, specifically the marketing of performativity when prioritizing the quantitative indicators, aiming to obtain recognition, reputation and credibility in society. Therefore, it is necessary to reflect on the functional and symbolic attributes used by HEIs in communication channels and social media, in a conscious and planned way, in order to project the institutional image that is intended to be transmitted to the internal and external community of the organization.