*3.1. Research Stages*

We developed this research into the two stages explained below.


In the first stage, we followed King (1991), Balmer (2001), and Aaker (2004), who stated that senior management members must be selected as informants because they are important in terms of corporate brand management. Further, informants who had day-to-day strategic management responsibilities were also selected. We conducted in-depth interviews with lecturers/researchers and focus groups with students. Interviews were developed for senior management and staff, and focus groups were created for students at undergraduate, master, and doctoral levels. Before the interviews were conducted, several preparatory procedures were undertaken. These included discussions with academics and practitioners national and internationally recognized in higher education (Barros et al. 2011). These discussions indicated the necessity of having a protocol in the interviews and focus groups. This initial study marshaled insights from thirteen in-depth interviews (seven in one faculty and six in the other), following a predesigned interview protocol. Each interview lasted for about two hours, and some informants were interviewed more than once. All interviews were recorded with the permission of interviewees. Four focus groups of students were created, two in each institution. Each focus group had six to eight students. To ensure the accuracy of interview data, we conducted member checks (Lincoln and Guba 1985). In addition to interviews, desk research was conducted by consulting faculties' websites and media news.

Data were coded first by hand, because we thought this would bring us closer to the data. Both stages were coded separately. In accordance with the general protocol for a previously designed qualitative study, data collection, analysis, and interpretation were undertaken simultaneously, generating tables of synthesized data. Simultaneously, several long meetings were held between the authors to obtain an in-depth understanding of the phenomena under study.

This exploratory research suggested that, in contexts of high consumer involvement, the relationships of a corporate brand with highly recognized brands have a definite impact on the identity and reputation of the corporate brand, by influencing the perceptions of the stakeholders and the educational services being offered.

This initial research suggested that corporate brand relationships with recognized brands have impacts on identity and reputation. To confirm this conclusion, a second stage was designed, in which the proposed model (with the selected dimensions and items previously selected in the first stage) was tested. See Figure 1. A questionnaire was developed for higher education engineering students; 216 complete surveys were obtained. The data permitted us to validate a new concept defining the relationships among brands from the students' point of view. The investigated relationships were the

ones among corporate brands whose mission was education; these included universities and other higher education institutions and strategic partnerships with national reputed research centers or international reputed universities such as MIT, Harvard, and Oxford, with which these brands interact in the context of conjoint degrees, international mobility, or other forms of interaction. To define each dimension, we adopted a holistic perspective for reviewing the literature on several fields of study, including B2B marketing, psychology, and organizational studies. We developed a procedure to determine the pool of items to use in this research; these are shown in Table 1.

**Figure 1.** Proposed Model (developed by the authors).




**Table 1.** *Cont.*

Sources: Adapted from Churchill (1979) and Malhotra (1981, 2004). AVE—Average Variance Extracted; CR—Construct Validity.
