Building student loyalty in higher education: the role of corporate reputation

Background

Reputation is a vital asset for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) as it constitutes a source of competitive advantage because it works as a quality sign for the stakeholders. Because of globalisation, decreasing funding and the changing environment in the Mozambican higher education market, HEIs need to build a favourable reputation to stay relevant. This research aims to study how a university's reputation can influence student loyalty.

Methods

Utilizing a descriptive and analytical methodology, a quantitative investigation was carried out by surveying 402 students enrolled in higher education institution (HEI) courses in Mozambique. The research employed a survey questionnaire to directly collect information from the study participants.

Results

The study concluded that university reputation affects student loyalty, as the relationship between both variables is statistically significant. All dimensions of HEIs reputation, namely, academic competence, social attractiveness, and responsible management, positively impact student loyalty. Although, the latter variable did not have a statistically significant impact, contradicting the current theoretical framework.

Conclusions

The study's findings suggest that corporate reputation has a favorable impact on student loyalty, demonstrating a significant relationship between the two factors. Therefore,improve student retention, HEIs should seek to enhance their academic competence and social attractiveness.

Furure research

The study suggests future research should address sample composition issues by increasing representation from underrepresented groups. It recommends a more in-depth exploration of the responsible management construct, advocating for the inclusion of context-specific indicators. Furthermore, the study proposes investigating additional factors to enhance the understanding of the relationship between university reputation and student loyalty.

The Relationship Between Communicative Actions, Behavioral Intentions, and Corporate Reputation in the Framework of Situational Theory of Problem Solving in a Public Health Crisis

Objectives: This study aims to determine the individuals' communicative actions based on the basic assumptions of the situational theory of problem solving (STOPS) and the effect of these actions on people's willingness to follow WHO's instructions in the event of an epidemic. It also seeks to determine the impact of corporate reputation on people's communicative actions and intention to follow instructions. Methods: Data were collected digitally from 261 graduate students enrolled at a state university in the Eastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. A structural equation model (SEM) was employed for data analysis. Results: Perceptual antecedents affected situational motivation, and situational motivation affected communicative actions. Communicative actions were a determining factor in individuals' willingness to follow instructions. The perception of corporate reputation influenced both communicative actions and people's willingness to follow instructions. Conclusion: The study revealed that STOPS can provide an important theoretical framework for more effective risk communication practices in public health crises such as epidemics. It also displayed the relationship between the individuals' communicative actions and their willingness to follow instructions and the determining effect of corporate reputation on both of these factors.

Firms, activist attacks, and the forward-looking management of reputational risks

A growing literature investigates how activists launch attacks against firms to improve environmental practices, a situation typically referred to as "private politics." Whether firms self-regulate in response has been shown to depend on reputational risks. However, reputation management in this literature is mostly reactive, whereas firms could be expected to anticipate and prevent reputation loss when faced with the threat of activism. How they would do so is not obvious, nonetheless, because firms have to consider two opposite effects: (1) a "reputational damage mitigation" effect, through which firms can pre-emptively align to what is expected from them, and (2) a "target enhancing" effect, in which self-regulation makes firms more visible and likely to be criticized. We show, theoretically and empirically, that these two effects actually co-exist and create heterogeneity in firms' responses when they witness activist attacks in their industry. The real impact of activism on the development of more sustainable practices is thus not only greater than if we solely considered the responses of firms that suffer direct attacks, as many firms start self-regulating before being targeted, but also varies within industries.

The Impacts of Perceived Risk and Negative Emotions on the Service Recovery Effect for Online Travel Agencies: The Moderating Role of Corporate Reputation

This study explores the impact mechanism of perceived risk and negative emotions on the service recovery effect of an online travel agency (OTA) through a scenario experiment. The results show that: perceived risk has positive and negative impacts on negative emotions and service recovery satisfaction, negative emotions have a negative impact on service recovery satisfaction, and corporate reputation plays a positive moderating role in the relationship between perceived risk and service recovery satisfaction. This study is helpful to better explain the impact mechanism of the service recovery effect of OTAs, and to provide a theoretical reference for improving the service recovery effect of OTAs.

Customer-based brand equity and customer engagement in experiential services: insights from an emerging economy

The aim of this research is to analyze links between customer-based brand equity and customer engagement in the field of experiential services (e.g., private health clinics)—taking an emerging economy context as our reference. The authors put forth a chain of effects—based in Social Capital Theory—to test the impact of customer-based brand equity on customer engagement, mediated by satisfaction and customer reputation. Causal model estimation results suggest that customer-based brand equity has both a direct, positive impact on customer satisfaction and customer reputation and an indirect impact on customer engagement. The final section of the paper presents theoretical discussion of the results and the main implications for business practice.

The interdependence of corporate reputation and ownership: a network approach to quantify reputation

We propose a novel way to measure the reputation of firms by using information about their ownership structure. Supported by the signalling theory, we argue that ownership relations channel reputation spillovers between shareholders and their invested companies. We model such reputation spillovers by means of a simple dynamics that runs on the ownership network, constructed from available databases. We focus on the core of the global ownership network with 1300 firms and 12 100 ownership links. Our method assigns an ownership-based reputation value to each firm, used to provide a quantitative reputation ranking. We compare our ranking with alternative rankings, to confirm that the top-ranked firms are correctly identified. We also demonstrate that our reputation measure does not correlate substantially with operating revenue or control and thus provides additional information about firms.