Getting Past the Crisis: Marketing Communication of University Sustainability

Abstract

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 legitimacy, 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 strategies. 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 Medellín 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.