Quality management as integrated part and strategic instrument for branding and sustainable development in technical higher education

Abstract

During the last years, Romanian technical higher education has undergone unprecedented transformations, forced by the complex present conditions of European integration. Globalisation, programme and qualification mixes, funding, are only a few of the aspects and problems to deal with. For a sustainable development in a strongly competing academic environment, technical higher education institutions have to simultaneously market and brand themselves. Branding becomes an imperative need for Romanian technical higher education institutions as they are not any longer operating in a protected, regulated market with a steady income. The present paper comes to offer a model of how quality management can be approached as integrated part and strategic instrument for branding a technical higher education institution, in the sense of targeting a sustainable development. The proposed model and strategy are based on the vision upon the quality management of the educational process as integrated part of what can be named experience economy, considering that the quality of internal practices have a deep impact on an institution’s overall reputation and image, through the externalized results, respectively on the external perception and relevance. So, the internal branding is outstood as main objective and strategy in the integrated approach that could ultimately lead to successful external branding of a technical higher education institution. Some obtained quantified results for a specific technical higher education institution are also presented and analyzed in the paper, related to the above mentioned aspects.