Investigation into the Effective Factors Involved in Personal Brand Equity of University Professors

Purpose: Nowadays personal branding is considered a very important issue for specialists like the university professors, as one of the important classes of experts in the society, and the success criteria of personal branding activities is their perceived brand equity by the students. The purpose of present study is to investigate the effective factors involved in personal brand equity of university professors. Methodology: This is an applied study in terms of purpose and it is a survey-analytical study in terms of method. The statistical population consists of the students at Azad University Central Tehran Branch in Iran, Faculty of Management and the data were collected from 275 students using probability convenience sampling method. Structural equation modeling and SMART PLC has been used to test the hypotheses. Findings: The results show that competence of professors, the students' awareness of them and the instruction perceived quality by the students affect the professor brand equity through affecting the extent of attachment between the students and professors and the effect on the communicative variables such as commitment, trust and loyalty. Conclusion: Today being good in what we are doing as an expert doesn’t pay off enough and we can’t expect others to know our competencies and respect that while we are not communicating that thing properly through personal branding. Findings show that university professors must take a good care of their awareness, competencies and perceived instructional qualities which all let them have higher brand equity through communicative variables and benefit a lot from that.