Effectiveness of Emotional Marketing on Brand Loyalty in State Run Universities

Abstract

This paper seeks to provide an in-depth understanding of how Emotional Marketing affects brand loyalty and how state universities like Midlands State University (MSU) can implement Emotional Marketing to maintain its long established name. This study provides an insight on how universities can implement emotional marketing as a strategic tool to gain competitive edge. Exploratory research was used in order to discover ideas and insights in the problem understudy. Descriptive research method was used because it helped to condense the vast amount of data obtained from the respondents into a few summary measures. A sample size of 129 respondents was chosen comprising 100 students, 23 academic staff and 6 non-academic staff. Findings revealed that MSU has not yet adopted the new marketing concept; emotional marketing. It owes its market dominance to excellence on innovation mainly, for instance it is the first to introduce the visiting school programs, and e-learning among other programs. This paper clearly shows that Emotional Marketing has become a contemporary service marketing strategy and is quite relevant in the university setup. The contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that Emotional Marketing can aid MSU to remain competitive in an environment where there are 7 other state run universities and 5 private owned universities.

Keywords: brand loyalty, emotional marketing, customer emotions, emotional intelligence, emotion measurement