| Research of existing literature indicates that below the university level, there has been little effort made in branding academia, namely academic departments. The lack of branding may significantly affect the perceptions that potential students and future employers of these students have about one of these academic units. The impact may be most significant for units where the fields of study that are represented by the department may be unclear, such as in the case of engineering management. However, even in the cases of better-understood fields of study, for example, electrical engineering, the competition for students with other fields of study and within the field of study itself may drive the need for better branding.;A model for assessing and understanding a brand's meaning for an intangible service as provided by an academic department has been developed and applied to the case of an engineering management department. The results show that the model does provide a way to identify and catalog brand meaning and to locate the understanding of the brand in a hierarchy of branding elements across various stakeholder groups. These outcomes provide a path for future brand improvement in the minds of future students and employers of the graduates of a department representing the field of study. |
