The Effect of Brand DNA on the Interactive Marketing: Perspective of Junior Lecturers from the Faculty of Economics of a Catholic University

The competition among higher education institutions is getting tougher, especially in the era of globalization with the changing society overtime. As an established university, University X is facing the same problem. The main issue is how the university can sustain in the competition. Research work from Ford (2007) showed that creating unique differentiation is a substantial solution in order to survive the competition through finding the brand DNA (or its uniqueness) of the organization. How University X should focus on the uniqueness and enables it to stand out of the competition. The research focuses on finding brand DNA elements from the student and relates the brand DNA elements to the effort of promoting the university through interactive marketing. To answer the purposes, this research used qualitative approach in exploring the uniqueness. Further, this research conducted the in-depth-interview to 10 respondents who were the junior lecturers from the Faculty of Economics of University X. In analyzing the verbatim data, the authors used the data reduction model from Miles & Huberman (1994) with some modifications into five stages of analysis with data generalization. The results of the research shown that the most affecting brand DNA of University X were good education quality, good kinship, discipline, honesty, and Catholic, but lack of the value implementation. The higher involvement of the respondent determined the familiarity with the brand DNA of University X. The research also suggested that ‘good’ brand DNA determined the good interactive marketing activity which led to a higher sustainability of University X in the upcoming year.