Social Media Marketing and Customer-Based Brand Equity for Higher Educational Institutions

Book excerpt: This book examines the extent to which social media marketing influences the customer-based brand equity of higher education institutes. Higher education institutions operate in a strong competitive environment due to the homogenous nature of their services and always look for new marketing strategies to be competitive in the marketplace. Therefore, building customer-based brand equity has become crucial for higher education institutions to differentiate themselves from others to attract prospective students. Social media-based marketing facilitated prospective students to communicate and collaborate to gather information relevant to higher education institutions and their respective brand equity. However, many models on customer-based brand equity received limited support in the higher education sector, particularly in emerging Asian countries. As such, drawing from social information processing theory, this book empirically investigates how higher education institutions can develop customer-based brand equity by using social media marketing and subjective norms mediated by brand credibility, taking cross-country comparisons between Sri Lanka and Vietnam. The book goes on to examine the applications and implications of the findings for higher education institutions in developing branding strategies through social media.