TY - JOUR
T1 - SUPERANDO LA CRISIS
T2 - COMUNICACIÓN DE MARKETING SOBRE LA SOSTENIBILIDAD UNIVERSITARIA
AU - Ramírez, Sergio Andrés Osuna
AU - Sierra, Manuela Escobar
N1 - Funding Information:
* This paper is derived from the Project “Sostenibilidad instituciones acreditadas: evalua-ción de la sostenibilidad y su incidencia en el desempeño de instituciones de educación superior privadas y acreditadas de Medellín” [Sustainability in accredited institutions: Evaluation of sustainability and its impact on the performance of accredited private higher education institutions in Medellín], funded by Universidad eia and Universidad de Medellín.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, Universidad Nacional de Colombia. All rights reserved.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Higher education institutions (heis), especially during the pandemic crisis, have faced the challenge of designing a sustainable competitive advantage strategy to attract and retain students. However, since constructing a sustainable brand requires successfully building its legiti-macy, sustainability messages must be presented appropriately by using suitable communication channels, such as social networks, that attract younger generations of students and become the only form to communicate with them during the confinement. Hence, this paper investigates if Colombian heis effectively use marketing communication tools to inform their sustainability stra-tegies. For this purpose, a literature review of the terms “university sustainability” and “marketing” was initially conducted, applying a mixed-methods approach. Then, an exploratory analysis with the web scraping technique that considered Facebook® messages posted by five private heis in Me-dellín city (Colombia) was developed during a ten-month period. Finally, an examination approach was applied to summarize data, find hidden relationships, and make predictions through Python programming language. Despite good intentions and reasonable efforts, results indicate that heis do not seem to have a systematic strategy for communicating sustainability issues. Instead, they give the impression of managing sustainability issues mainly from an economic point of view. As a result, universities’ communication of sustainable practices that enhance institutional reputation and increase student retention still appears to be sporadic and insufficient.
AB - Higher education institutions (heis), especially during the pandemic crisis, have faced the challenge of designing a sustainable competitive advantage strategy to attract and retain students. However, since constructing a sustainable brand requires successfully building its legiti-macy, sustainability messages must be presented appropriately by using suitable communication channels, such as social networks, that attract younger generations of students and become the only form to communicate with them during the confinement. Hence, this paper investigates if Colombian heis effectively use marketing communication tools to inform their sustainability stra-tegies. For this purpose, a literature review of the terms “university sustainability” and “marketing” was initially conducted, applying a mixed-methods approach. Then, an exploratory analysis with the web scraping technique that considered Facebook® messages posted by five private heis in Me-dellín city (Colombia) was developed during a ten-month period. Finally, an examination approach was applied to summarize data, find hidden relationships, and make predictions through Python programming language. Despite good intentions and reasonable efforts, results indicate that heis do not seem to have a systematic strategy for communicating sustainability issues. Instead, they give the impression of managing sustainability issues mainly from an economic point of view. As a result, universities’ communication of sustainable practices that enhance institutional reputation and increase student retention still appears to be sporadic and insufficient.
KW - Exploratory analysis
KW - marketing communications
KW - pandemic crisis
KW - social media post
KW - university sustainability
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85144385921&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.15446/innovar.v33n87.105512
DO - 10.15446/innovar.v33n87.105512
M3 - Artículo
AN - SCOPUS:85144385921
SN - 0121-5051
VL - 33
SP - 109
EP - 122
JO - Innovar
JF - Innovar
IS - 87
ER -