Abstract
The brand acts as a lens for viewing product offerings with a favorable bias. The point of branding a college or university is to provide an advantage in attracting resources to benefit the organization. Branding denies access and restricts equality of opportunity and is antithetical to diversity. Administrators who follow a branding strategy are institutionally antagonistic to diversity. Branding a college is a deliberate signaling of superiority that runs along the fault lines of ethnic, cultural, and economic division. Brands are a retroactive investment in the name fixed by unconscious desire and self-interested relevance. By a process of naming through desire and self-interested relevance, names can become organizing quilting points, point de capiton, empty signifiers, or brand nodes that structure discourse. A set of mathemes/discourse functions and examples are used to illustrate the naming process.
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Lowrie, A. (2018). What’s in a Brand Name?. In: Understanding Branding in Higher Education. Marketing and Communication in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56071-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56071-1_4
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