Research As A. Positioning Tool In. Enhancing Brand. Image: A Study On. Management. Institutes In Kolkata. Researchjournali s Journal of Marketing

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1 1 Research As A Positioning Tool In Enhancing Brand Image: A Study On Management Soumik Das Assistant Professor, Institute of Engineering & Management, Kolkata, India Institutes In Kolkata

2 2 Abstract Competition for students isn t the only worry for academic Institutes. Scholarly commission and blue ribbon panels have called for widespread improvements in accountability and transparency. The basic demand for being leaders in higher education is confidence, trust and satisfaction in terms of public acceptability. In higher education quality and transparency are important factors which help to enhance the brand of the institute. In many cases though educational brand strategies are limited to marketing & advertising campaigns that are directed to the admission of the students,there is something more which helps to build the brand of the institute. In today s competitive scenario excellent research works helps building the brand of a management institute. Like business competes by taking talented workers, colleges and institutes compete vigorously for talented students, faculty and the research work done by the scholars and faculty members.research gives a new dimension in the thought process of the students and also acts as a tool to attract corporate. There are research works which may also help to build a synergy between institutes and corporate in turns spreading the brand of the institute. In an education institute effective brand management strategy can be maximized if a brand carries promise and if every member of the academic community is committed to fulfill the promise. In this paper the authors will show how research acts and an important branding tool in building the brand of the institute. This research work will be based on analysis of data to be collected from across different management institute in Kolkata. Necessary statistical analyses will be carried out to arrive at a decision thereafter. Keywords: Branding, Research, Management Institutes 1. Introduction Branding is a management concept that has gained increasing popularity in higher education institutions over the last few years. In this world of cut throat competition national and international; management institutes in all parts of the world have begun a search for a unique definition of what they are in order to differentiate themselves and attract students and academicians. A new vocabulary such as branding, corporate communication, identity, and reputation has emerged in academia, management institutes more aware of the link between what they stand for in terms of values and characteristics, and how they are perceived. The branding of management institutes & colleges occurs within a context that is characterized by an increasing transfer of good business practices from the private sector. Practices such as performance management (Guthrie and Neumann 2007), managerialism (Amaral et al. 2003; Anderson 2008),

3 3 entrepreneurialism (Clark 1998; Slaughter and Leslie 1997), and new models of financing and governance (Gornitzka et al. 2005; Sörlin 2007) are only some of the reform waves that contribute to the transformation of management institutes today. Researchers and academicians have suggested that the management institutes have begun to function like an industry rather than academic institutions. The Management Institutes have a concept of edu- corp and the founders of these institutes are eduprenuers. Despite the fact that branding efforts in academia are easily observable for example, through the use of core values, vision statements & visual designs, there is a striking paucity of research on branding in higher education. Existing studies either discuss branding policies in general or in specific institutions (Belanger et al. 2002; Chapleo 2004; Judson et al. 2006) or focus on external aspects of branding (Bulotaite 2003; Gray et al. 2003). As per the studies done from our end no one has adopted an internal focus by investigating exactly how branding efforts unfold in specific cases and what happens in the course of these processes. We believe such a focus should be explored more in detail, particularly with respect to the challenges of defining the Institute brand. Research publication is a very important component that can add to the repute and bring recognition to an management institution and strengthen its image to the stakeholders in particular and the community at large. In an age when education has been globalised and commoditized, reputation of an academic institution is perhaps the most powerful branding and promotional tool for the institution in question. Research abilities and skills and the research output of an academic is one of the three key measures by which he or she is evaluated for career progression. The details of the RQF (Research Quality Framework), which has been modeled after the United Kingdom and New Zealand approach, are not known yet. However, it seems clear that a various new performance measures are likely to be considered in assessing an academic s research impact (Bishop 2006). One would not be wrong to speculate that these measures would include, among others, total number of published papers in refereed journals and conferences, relative rank of the journal in which an individual s papers are published, quality and impact of the research etc. The purpose of this paper, however, is not speculating on what may or may not be included in assessing an individual s research performance but to see the how research acts in enhancing the brand of an institute. The author have used two established metrics of research performance such as h-index, & i10index and do a analyses performance of the management professors & research scholars in few management institutes of Kolkata.

4 4 2. Theory & Literature Review Aaker points out that a brand is a distinguishing name and/or symbol. Intended to identify the goods or services of either one seller or a group of sellers, and to differentiate those goods or services from those of competitors. Though physical product may be very similar to other products, a brand is identified as something unique. It is something that penetrates in the minds of consumers than in the product or the organization itself. It may even be perceived as having a distinct personality (Aaker 1997) with whom consumers may develop personal relationships (Fournier 1998) or use to define and express themselves (Aaker 1999). An important aim of branding is to create strong emotional ties with consumers and thereby satisfy functional as well as symbolic needs. Branding of management institutes has gradually increased in importance. It is generally seen as more complicated than product branding, as the institute brand is intangible and organizations consist of people whose attitudes, beliefs, and values may vary considerably. Hence management institute branding is believed to depend on the organizational culture to a much larger extent than product branding, requiring total corporate commitment to the corporate body from all levels of personnel (Balmer 2001, p. 281). The goal is to articulate the organization s essence through clear and coherent messages, making every communication consistent with one official identity definition (van Riel and Fombrun 2007). A institutes communication should be integrated and orchestrated (van Riel 1995; van Riel and Fombrun 2007), and employees should all share and endorse the same views about the institute, preferably by living the brand (Ind 1997, 2004). Thus, in order to achieve a uniform expression of the institute s identity, the organization must not only strive for a consistent definition of its identity, it should also have a consistent, single identity. 3. Branding And Identity The identity of a management institute is believed to be a fundamental starting point for the corporate brand definition. In order to communicate an institute s identity, the institute must first know its essential and unique characteristics. Therefore, the literature on branding and institute identity emphasizes how institute identities can be managed, defined, and measured. Authors agree that there should be an existence of an underlying reality (Argenti and Forman 2002) or a bundle of characteristics (van Riel 1995) that goes to the heart of an Institutes existence. This essence can be referred to in terms of essential characteristics, research work done, identity, core values, or common starting points, and is assumed to exist as an empirical fact that each company will be able to identify (van Riel 1995, p. 19). Management institute s theory is to present an alternative view on identity, emphasizing that identity is a collective phenomenon (Albert and Whetten 1985) that evolves over time. From this perspective, achieving

5 5 a coherent and precise identity formulation is less likely. An institutes identity is seen as encompassing aspects that are dynamic (Corley et al. 2000; Gioia et al. 2000), thus making a finite list of identity characteristics difficult to specify. Precise self-classification is also restricted by the existence of multiple organizational identities, which emerge when different conceptualizations exist regarding what is central, distinctive, and enduring about an organization (Pratt and Foreman 2000). Albert and Whetten suggested that precise classification may even be undesirable or unattainable in some contexts, as the complexities of organizations may make a simple statement of identity impossible (1985). 4. Branding Academia Despite the growing importance of branding in academia, literature searches reveal very few papers that specifically address management education branding. There is an established literature on marketing of higher education (cf. Hemsley-Brown and Oplatka 2006) that can be divided into papers that focus on marketing communications (Klassen 2002; Mortimer 1997), marketing models (Mazzarol 1998), and strategic marketing including segmentation (Balwin and James 2000; Reindfleisch 2003), market planning (Maringe and Foskett 2002), positioning (Gray et al. 2003) and finally, branding. Branding, however, is dominated by a focus on external aspects of branding rather than in-depth studies in specific organizations. The few empirical studies that exist focus on the communication of Institute brands (Belanger et al. 2002; Bulotaite 2003), branding policies including identity or brand architecture (Baker and Balmer 1997; Chapleo 2004; Hemsley- Brown and Goonawardana 2007), and international branding (Gray et al. 2003). Other papers are more theoretical by nature, discussing the emergence of brand identities in moments of articulation (Lowrie 2007), the pros and cons of branding (Stensaker 2007), and whether management institutes can have successful brands.thus the research as a branding tool in management education is still very much at a pioneer stage (Hemsley- Brown and Oplatka 2006). In a market where students are recognized as customers, institutes have to implement strategies to maintain and enhance their competitiveness. They need to develop a competitive advantage based on a set of unique characteristics such as research work done by faculty & scholars, new teaching methodologies, infrastructure, corporate relation etc. Furthermore, management institutes need to communicate these characteristics in an effective and consistent way to all of the relevant stakeholders. Under these circumstances, institutes have finally realized the role of corporate identity (CI) as a powerful source of competitive advantage. Few writers have realized that apart from the normal branding process the internal aspects also play a very important role in building the brand of the institute. New research done work by scholars and faculty

6 6 members gives a competitive advantage to the institute over the others. Previously it was questioned if research work done by institute s values has a place in branding processes, and whether such processes would build on the cultural heritage that primarily confirms the institute as a scientific institution; e.g. freedom of research, objectivity, truth, freedom to teach and to learn, etc. In other words, branding may have a potential for challenging the institutional integrity of an institute 5. Methodology The study is based on the research works done by the scholars and faculty members. The research takes into account the contributions done by senior academicians of the management institutes. There are two indexes which have been used to measure the research proficiency of the scholars and faculty members. The data relating to the indexes were taken from Google scholar. 5.1 Indexes The h-index Also defined as Hirsch index or Hirsch number, the h-index simultaneously measures the quality and sustainability of an academic s research output, and to some extent, the diversity of his/her research. Based on the distribution of citations received by the publications of a given researcher, Hirsch (2005) proposed that a scientist has index h if h of his Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np- h) papers have at most h citations each. This implies that if a scholar has published 5 papers with at least 5 citations each, he is said to have an h index of 5. The index is better than simpler measures such as the total number of citations or publications as it helps distinguish scholars who are truly influential from those who publish many papers but are not necessarily influential. Also, h index is not affected by single papers receiving many citations The i-10 index The i10-index indicates the number of academic publications an author has written that have at least ten citations from others. It was introduced in July 2011 by Google as part of their work on Google Scholar, a search engine dedicated to academic and related papers. 6. Findings On the basis of the indexes the following findings have been made which is shown in table 6.1

7 7 Table 6.1: Research Performance of Management Faculties and Research Scholars in Management Institutes of Kolkata: Statistics (Highest, Lowest, Median Values and frequency distribution of two selected indicators) STATISTIC H INDEX I 10 INDEX S H INDEX I 10 INDEX SCORES NO. % NO. % Professors in Management Institute" A", N=9 Below Highest Value Lowest Value Median Value Professors in Management Institute" B", N=4 Below Highest Value Lowest Value Median Value Professors in Management Institute" C", N=5 Below Highest Value Lowest Value Median Value Professors in Management Institute" D", N=3 Below Highest Value Lowest Value Median Value Professors in Management Institute" E", N=3 Below Highest Value Lowest Value Median Value Professors in Management Institute" F ", N=6 Below Highest Value Lowest Value Median Value

8 8 Correlation between the two indexes for each of the 2 groups reveal very high r values ranging between to 0.981( significant at the level 0.01 level) which indicates that these indexes are measuring the research performance of each of the academic reasonably well. It was found that institute A which is considered as the best institute in Kolkata has the most numbers of faculty having the H index and i10 index. 7. Discussions The various indexes here offer a way of measuring the performance of individual and management institutes. With the introduction of research as a branding tool various management institutes are able to rank them selves accordingly. The management institutes can find out what they really are and what they want. The score of the different faculty members & research scholars can help institutes to set benchmark against other management institutes outside Kolkata. The underlying principle was that the management institutes would reflect the academic breadth that an institute should have in terms of good quality research work & faculty members along with strong advertisement campaigns and corporate relations. 8. Conclusion A pragmatic approach to management institute branding would imply building on the variety that exists within the organization. Research being a one the important aspect is in any institute it will help to enhance brand of the institute if quality research can be done. We can also conclude that quality research will attract more corporate and new things will be induced in the mind of the students also. In today s world where corporate - academic interface is a important quality research will help to penetrate in the corporate. 9. Limitations & Future Research In this paper we have not checked the publication of individuals to ensure that all the publications are in Google scholar. We have only taken two indexes to measure the quality of the research done but there are various other indexes which can be considered. The author feels that there is a need for research that reports successful results of both defining a institute brand and making it known among constituencies. The further studies can be done on the basis of the different indexes and also on the basis of survey. The management institutes outside Kolkata can be taken into account and a result may be obtained to see that whether research acts as a positive tool in terms of branding. Apart from this researchers may include other measures of performance that can be derived from the data including the number of publication in top 10 journals and see how they correlate with the index other than the two taken in this paper. Hopefully the measures which are used will generate the right incentive for the individual for the institute in terms of academics & lead to future growth.

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