Measuring Brand Equity of Higher Education Institutes and Universities (Case Study: Tehran Business Schools)

In current complex and competitive world that leads to the fast growth of business schools and fading global borders, introducing a business school’s brand to its shareholders has a special importance. Hence in the competitive educational environment, making differentiation and creating a strong university’s brand is very essential. By considering the importance of this issue, the debate of measuring Tehran business schools’ brand equity based on the proposed model by Pinar et al has been taken into consideration. In this research, the required data were collected using questionnaire filled by 372 students of 6 state universities including-Tarbiat Modares University, University of Tehran, Sharif University of Technology, Shahid Beheshti University, Kharazmi University and Allameh Tabataba’i University. Respondents were chosen based on the stratified random sampling method. The results of the research suggested that for creating a strong university’s brand some of the brand equity dimensions are more important than the others. Among the core dimensions, emotional environment was distinguished as the most important dimension that followed by perceived quality, brand loyalty, brand awareness and university reputation. In addition, among recognized supporting dimensions of a business school’s brand equity, physical facilities were the most important one which was followed by library services, student living and career development. According to the provided results, this project provides an opportunity to develop the current practical knowledge in measuring the business schools’ brand equity especially in Iran and also it helps business and management universities to recognize the suitable measures of their brand equity and specify the required proceedings for the brand development.