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The rapid adoption of social media has resulted in a fundamental shift in the way communication and collaboration take place. While social media is recognized as an important marketing communication tool, it has become overlooked how social media marketing activities (user-generated and firm-generated content) influence brand equity creation in the higher education sector. Drawing from social identity theory, this study identifies how higher education institutions develop customer-based brand equity using social media marketing and social brand engagement, taking cross-comparison between high and low subjective norms.

A survey was used to collect data from a sample of 936 undergraduates of private higher education institutions in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. These data were gathered using purposive sampling, and in testing the hypothesis and structure among the variables, structural equation modeling was used to determine the relationship between the study variables.

For the conceptual framework, the authors found that the structural equation model complies with the empirical data. The structural equation model shows that social brand engagement mediates the relationship between user-generated content, firm-generated content and brand equity. Further, the subjective norms were found to moderate the relationship between user-generated content, firm-generated content and social brand engagement, highlighting that the lower the subjective norms the higher the influence on social brand engagement as students receive low pressure and influence from external parties.

The study was conducted at private higher education institutes in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Future research could benefit from the perceptions of undergraduates in public higher education institutes. Future researchers could widen the diversity of service settings in the sample and replicate this investigation to discover if the results are consistent across the whole services sector.

The current research contributes to the services marketing and branding literature in the higher education context. The paper presents the crucial elements in building brand equity for higher education institutes to fill the existing gaps in higher education branding literature. The findings of the current study provide strategies to improve the higher education sector.

This study introduces three variables related to brands that have the potential to enhance university students' advocacy intentions. The research explores how university brand identification, the perceived prestige of the university brand and the social benefits associated with the university brand impact students' advocacy intentions. Additionally, the study examines the moderating role of gender in these relationships.

Cross-sectional surveys of 326 undergraduate students enrolled in a Spanish university, and structural equation modeling was used to test and validate the conceptual model.

The findings from the structural equation modeling indicate that university brand identification, perceived university brand prestige and university brand social benefits significantly influence students' advocacy intentions. Furthermore, the multigroup analysis reveals a gender difference in the factors influencing advocacy intentions. Female students demonstrate significance in all three antecedents, whereas male students only show significance in university brand identification and perceived university brand prestige.

The current study's findings provide several insights for higher education institutions in developing enduring and committed relationships with their students.

This study offers relevant insights into the body of research on university branding, explaining the students' advocacy intentions through the variables of university brand identification, perceived university brand prestige and university brand social benefits. Also, this study is a novelty in introducing empirical evidence for the importance of the moderating role of students' gender.

This paper aims to analyze the relationship between the brand awareness of an international university operating in Indonesia and enrollment intention serially mediated by brand congruity and brand attitude and moderated by brand experience.

A moderated serial mediation model was developed and was tested using the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to examine the proposed relationship. There were 132 prospective students involved as respondents.

(1) brand awareness may not always directly affect purchase intention; (2) brand congruity and brand attitude serially mediate the relationship between brand awareness and enrollment intention; (3) brand experience may not always moderate the relationship between brand awareness and consumer behavior.

This paper considers generalizability as its limitation with suggestions to undertake future studies in other settings and the longitudinal and broader scope. Future research could examine other variables to enhance the model.

This paper also proposes theoretical and managerial implications in higher education branding and marketing.

This study closed the gap in the unsuccessful relationship between brand awareness and behavioral intention that the mediating variables of brand congruity and brand attitude must be serially present. This study also confirmed that brand experience is not empirically suitable as a moderator.

This paper aims to explain the unsuccessful relationship between the awareness of prominent international education brands and enrollment intention.

A serial mediation model encompassing perceived congruity and brand attitude was developed and tested using the PLS-SEM technique, involving 132 respondents.

The results revealed that the awareness of international education brands, subsequently perceived as internally congruent with the prospective students’ self-image in terms of resource sufficiency, will yield enrollment intention by forming the desired brand attitude.

This paper includes generalizability as its limitation, with suggestions to undertake the broader scope of studies. Future research could examine other variables to enhance the model.

This paper presents theoretical and managerial implications for higher education branding and marketing.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study could be the first to discuss the international university landscape in Indonesia. In addition, the proposed model could be a plausible framework for explaining the intention to accept not only international education brands but also other brands of goods and services, thereby benefiting both educational and consumer research.

This research aims to investigate the relationship between employer branding and its antecedent organisational culture within the context of the private banking sector. The study also investigates the relationship between employer branding and employee brand equity as a consequential construct. Additionally, the mediating role of trust and the moderating role of gender in the relationship between employer branding and employee brand equity has been examined.

The present study’s findings result from data analysis collected from a sample of 454 employees working in private banks in India. The data analysis was conducted utilising the structural equation modelling technique with the assistance of analysis of moment structures (AMOS) software.

The study’s findings indicate that supportive and bureaucratic (formal) culture in private banks exhibit a significant relationship with employer branding. However, the relationship between innovative culture and employer branding was found to be insignificant. The research also reveals a significant positive association between employer branding and employee brand equity variables: brand consistent behaviour, brand endorsement and brand allegiance. Further, the study highlights the mediating role of employee trust in management in the relationship between employer branding and employee brand equity. Examining demographic variables suggests that gender moderates the relationship between employer branding and employee brand equity.

The originality of this study lies in its exploration of the critical role of organisational culture variables in shaping employer branding within the context of private banks. The findings highlight that cultivating supportive and bureaucratic cultures can effectively enhance the employer branding of private banks. The study emphasises the outcomes of employer branding initiatives, signifying that they contribute to developing brand equity among employees. This leads to long-term employee commitment and advocacy towards the organisation, as employees become brand advocates for the bank with which they are affiliated. The study contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between organisational culture, employer branding and employee brand equity, providing valuable implications for the private banking sector aiming to reinforce their employer brand and increase employee engagement.

Improving service quality, student satisfaction and student loyalty is important to higher education institutions’ sustainable growth. The objectives of this study are a twofold: first, the study seeks to determine the dimensions of higher education service quality with a specific focus on Vietnam. Second, it examines how the service quality dimensions impact student satisfaction and student loyalty, with the moderating role of the university image.

This study followed a rigorous procedure, including interviews, a survey, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and reliability analysis to identify higher education service quality dimensions and their measures. After that, using the data obtained from 1,550 university students in Vietnam, confirmatory factor analysis was used to validate the identified dimensions and structural equation modeling was used to test a proposed model explaining the outcomes of higher education service quality.

The findings reveal five dimensions of higher education service quality: academic aspect, nonacademic aspect, programming issues, facilities and industry interaction. Most of these factors have a positive influence on student satisfaction. In addition, the university image moderates the positive relationship between student satisfaction and student loyalty.

This study’s findings highlight the complexity of service quality in the higher education context and encourage higher education institutions to improve their service quality in image to enhance student satisfaction and loyalty.

This study suggests a unique measure of higher education service quality dimensions and provides fresh insights into how they impact student satisfaction and loyalty in Vietnam.

This study aims to determine the effect of Islamic branding, experiential marketing and word of mouth on college decisions and to find marketing strategies through strengthening Islamic branding based on experiential marketing to increase the number of students at Muhammadiyah-Aisyiyah Higher Education.

This study used a quantitative method, with data collection carried out using a survey method by giving questionnaires to respondents. The respondents' criteria are active students, at least in semester three, who have studied at Muhammadiyah-Aisyiyah Higher Education in Indonesia, using a sampling technique with accidental sampling. Data analysis used Partial Least Square - Structural Equation Modeling to determine the estimated results or model predictions.

The results showed a significant direct effect of experiential marketing, Islamic branding and word of mouth on college decisions. There is an indirect effect between experiential marketing and Islamic branding on college decisions through word of mouth, but the word-of-mouth variable could not mediate the relationship between experiential marketing and Islamic branding on college decisions perfectly.

The limitation of the results of the study is that it uses respondents who are and have participated in learning activities on the Muhammadiyah-Aisyiyah Higher Education, where the Muhammadiyah-Aisyiyah Higher Education has added value compared to other private campuses. The added value on the Muhammadiyah-Aisyiyah Higher Education is the overall learning activity based on Kemuhammadiyahan Islam in Indonesia. Islam Kemuhammadiyahan is the identity of the Islamic branding strategy on the Muhammadiyah-Aisyiyah Higher Education, which is only owned by the Muhammadiyah-Aisyiyah Higher Education.

This study recommends marketing strategies through strengthening Islamic branding based on experiential marketing to increase the number of students at Muhammadiyah-Aisyiyah Higher Education.

The novelty of this research is the addition of experiential marketing and Islamic branding variable measurements on word of mouth and college decisions, especially prospective students to study at Islamic Higher Education in Indonesia.

This study aims to explore various determinants of university attractiveness and its relationship with sustainable institutes. Further, the study examines the mediating role of perceived student support and sense of belongingness on the relationship between university attractiveness and sustainable institutes.

The data analysis was conducted with 637 responses from the students from private universities located in the northern region of India. Variance based partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was applied in the study to investigate the proposed conceptual model on sustainable higher institutions. Additionally, by applying PLS Predict, the predictive relevance of sustainable institutions with important and performing constructs was found out.

The results of this study indicate that university attractiveness plays a critical role in enhancing perceived student support, and it has a direct and significant impact on developing sustainable institutes. Further, students’ sense of belongingness is expressed as significant mediator between university attractiveness and sustainable institutes. The predictive relevance of the study was reported to be high. Most important indicators of university attractiveness were found to be teaching, research and publications, branding and promotion, and diversity in courses offered by the private universities.

The conceptual model under study can be investigated with a moderating effect of private and government universities in future. Additionally, the role of additional variables in online scenario under current pandemic situation can be assessed through the model used in this study. Future research can be done by using qualitative analysis through thematic analysis and sentiment analysis of students in higher education institutes.

The present study is the first to explore the mediating relationship of perceived student support and sense of belongingness with university attractiveness and sustainable institutes. The conceptual framework can prove to be important for education specialists, administrators of education institutes at university level and policymakers. The study offers effective ideas for policymakers to bring sustainability in education sector in near future especially in emerging economies and attain sustainable development goals.

Personal branding is a strategic tool of marketing and communication to define success in organisations. While it constitutes a conscious attempt to commodify self and audit self, it must be intentionally managed to obtain its optimum results. This study aims to illustrate how personal branding may also pose unintentional and unconscious strategic tool for women academics in academia to help them get wider visibility and increase their chances of getting into leadership positions.

We employed a case study approach and convenience sampling to select our unit of analysis. Three universities in both public and private universities in the eastern regions of Indonesia were purposefully selected, and interviews were held with 30 female leaders occupying and occupied middle and lower leadership hierarchies.

Our research shows that, despite their unintentional, unplanned and poorly designed personal branding, women have been able to advance to their current leadership positions by building their own rooms for practising their own preferred leadership values to get them visible and heard. This way is performed through a gendered networking, previous leadership experience and bureaucratic requirements. The consequence of such a practice may limit the range of visibility to getting noticed as worthy individuals for senior leadership roles. This might be one reason why women are scarcely found in senior leadership positions.

We propose that natural strategies of constructing, narrating and marketing or communicating personal branding in academia through authentic actions can also be helpful for the success of women to get to leadership roles in a smaller and ambient environment.

This study aims to quantitatively consolidate the research conducted over the past four decades on how internal branding activities drive employee commitment. It summarizes several operationalizations of internal branding and tests the moderating effect of employee’s personal characteristics and job characteristics on the relationship between internal branding and employee commitment.

This paper uses meta-analysis as the research methodology. The analysis includes a sample of 65 studies (from 62 published works), yielding 226 effect sizes (coded into 82 composite effect sizes) over an aggregated sample of 21,706 respondents.

This study finds that brand communication, brand-centered human resource management (HRM), training and development, organizational support and culture, brand-centered leadership and an excellent reward system are the key operationalizations of internal branding. Furthermore, employee’s personal (education, age and gender) and job (tenure, work status and level of customer orientation) characteristics significantly moderate the internal branding–employee commitment relationship.

Limited empirical literature on some of the internal branding operationalizations such as brand-centered HRM and rewards has curbed the scope of moderator analysis.

This paper proposes some effective ways of implementing internal branding strategies and provides support for boundary conditions that brand managers should consider to strengthen the impact of internal branding activities on employee commitment.

As per the authors’ knowledge, this paper is among the few quantitative consolidations of four decades of research on the internal branding–employee commitment relationship.