10.1017/9781108881920.011">
 

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Published as Chapter 7 in Academic Brands: Distinction in Global Higher Education (Mario Biagioli & Madhavi Sunder, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2022).

It is hard to reconcile the research university’s supposed reason for being – the reasoned pursuit of knowledge – with its methods for building brand awareness and equity. Just like pitches for other luxury goods, the selling of higher education depends on irrational appeals devoid of information and marketing missives meant to hug the line between legally protected puffery and outright fraud. Although universities have always borrowed from the selling strategies of the commercial sphere, in recent years, there has been a sea change in the prevalence and degree of less-than-truthful content in higher educational self-promotion. How do university constituents – administrators, professors, students – interpret this gap between their institutions’ traditionally understood role and the logic of today’s academic branding strategies? The chapter chronicles the main rationalizations these actors deploy to reduce the tension between academic mission and academic marketing. By telling themselves that their school’s advertising efforts can be quarantined from the university’s larger purpose or actually provide tangible and truthful information to outside audiences or are a necessary evil, university constituents reduce their internal dissonance but fail to confront the realities of academic branding.

Publication Date

7-1-2022

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

City

New York

ISBN

9781108841375

Keywords

trademark, puffery, merchandising, licensing, product differentiation, cognitive dissonance

Disciplines

Higher Education | Intellectual Property Law | Law | Public Relations and Advertising

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When citing this work, please include a reference to the DOI 10.1017/9781108881920

Academic Brands and Cognitive Dissonance

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