A Study On College Students’ Cognition Of The Brand Image Of Chinese Universities

With the marketization of education and the open enrollment of high-quality students in Colleges and universities at home and abroad,Chinese colleges and universities are in fierce competition.In recent years,the number and scale of colleges and universities continue to expand,the curriculum of colleges and universities become more and more homogeneous,the distinction between colleges and universities becomes fuzzy,the awareness of colleges and universities in the dissemination and promotion of their own image is not strong,and the audience’s cognitive evaluation of Colleges and universities usually depends on university rankings and other ways.Therefore,in order to highlight the advantages in the fierce competition,colleges and universities must find a more competitive way to achieve differentiation.Brand is the link between colleges and universities and the audience.Only by taking the brand road and establishing a brand image with its own characteristics can colleges and universities be invincible in the fierce domestic and foreign markets.The academic research on the brand image of colleges and universities focuses on the investigation of the identification system of the image of colleges and universities.The research still stays in the shallow theory,and there is a lack of systematic research on the influencing factors of the deep deconstruction of the brand image of colleges and universities.Based on this,this paper selects college students who need to choose a school as the research object,starting from the perspective of audience cognition,using the research method of procedural grounded theory,rooted in the interview text data,by constantly comparing concepts,refining categories,exploring the logical relationship between the main categories,combing out the key factors affecting the audience’s cognition of university brand image,It provides a useful reference for the construction of university brand image.After three-level coding based on grounded theory,it is found that the audience’s cognition of university brand image is mainly affected by the accumulation of university brand image elements,the media and the audience’s perception Association.Combing and integrating the identification elements of university brand image,and classifying them systematically according to the three aspects of university concept culture,behavior organization activities and visual image design,can help universities to make clear the advantages of their own image,grasp the comprehensive and comparative advantages of their own image,and establish their core competitiveness.As a bridge of information transmission between universities and the audience,the media plays an important role in the audience’s cognition of university brand image.Therefore,universities should integrate media resources to realize linkage communication.In view of the problem of bad brand association caused by improper handling of crisis events in Colleges and universities,colleges and universities should establish a sense of crisis,strengthen the management of brand image in Colleges and universities,avoid perceived risks,and cultivate positive brand association of the audience.