Branding the “wow-academy”: The risks of promotional culture and quasi-corporate communication in higher education

Abstract

This article examines the branding of the new Tampere University in Finland and the reactions it evoked in Finnish social media and news media between 2018–2020. The merger of the University of Tampere and Tampere University of Technology into a new foundation-based university provoked considerable public debate and sparked uproar over the communication style and practices of the university’s new management. The main reason for the outcry was that the new governance model of the university ignored the traditional democratic way of running a university. Our article contributes to the growing literature on public relations communication in higher education by focusing on promotional culture and the role of the changing media landscape in university branding. We analyze how and why the brand messages were contested and transformed into memes and satirical commentaries on social media. When the university’s management tried to restrain this subversive play with legal sanctions, the issue escalated into the news media. Our qualitative analysis demonstrates the possible repercussions of a quasi-corporate style of communication on the credibility of the university as a higher education institution in a hybrid media environment.

The role of organizations in the public communication of science – Early research, recent studies, and open questions

“…› the rise of strategic organizational communication of HEIs under the influence of new public management and its implications (Fürst, Volk, Schäfer, Vogler, & Sörensen, 2022;Väliverronen et al, 2022), › the intention and ability of HEIs to establish a centralized public communication strategy that integrates all organizational units and members into one organizational voice or choir (Koivumäki & Wilkinson, 2022;Väliverronen et al, 2022;Voigt, 2022), › the interdependency of scientists' individual public communication and organizational PR (Fürst et al, 2022;Koivumäki & Wilkinson, 2022).…”

“…The tension between the scientific culture and the rise of a corporate-like PR approach of scientific organizations is evident in the two Finnish contributions. Väliverronen et al (2022) present a case study of a management reform following a large university merger. This reform tried to establish a "promotional culture" in the branding of the new Tampere University.…”

“…Based on an analysis of newspaper articles and social media posts, Väliverronen et al (2022) reconstruct the "clash between the values represented by the university community and the new management" (p. 502).…”

“…Both questions cannot easily be answered in general. The case study of the new Tampere University by Väliverronen et al (2022) suggests that as part of the new public management style the management "might seek to control the voices in organizations" if their messages are not "in line with the organizational voice" (p. 496). Yet, in "fundamentally heterogeneous and polyvocal sites" (p. 496) like universities such an attempt might fail.…”

“…While most interviewed PR officers in the 1983 study (Peters, 1984) distinguished clearly between their speaker role for the organization and their involvement as mediator in the communication of scientific research in which individual scientists remained the dominant communicators, the role of individual scientists in the context of organizational science communication seems to move gradually toward that of "content providers" for organizational PR. Researchers are still visible as individuals in the public self-presentation of HEIs, branded as members of the organization through corporate design such as mandatory (PowerPoint) presentation formats with organizational logos, as mentioned by Väliverronen et al (2022). They remain visible because they can more credibly and authentically than organizations represent the idealized image of science as truth-seeking in the common interest, and meet the "personalization" demands of old and new media.…”