FROM REASON-BASED PERSUASION TO EMOTION-ORIENTED APPEALS: CORPORATE BRANDING DISCOURSE IN SINGAPORE’S HIGHER EDUCATION SECTOR

This paper looks at corporate branding discourse in the context of Singapore’s publicly funded higher education sector, consisting of corporatized universities now run as private companies, and polytechnics which retain the status of public organizations. Drawing on elements of critical discourse analysis and genre analysis, the qualitative analysis investigates the discursive strategies employed by these higher education institutions to engender favourable audience dispositions towards themselves as part of the work of corporate branding. The textual analysis draws on a data set consisting of academic prospectuses produced by eight higher education institutions from 2007 to 2014; in a context of increasing market orientation in Singaporean higher education, these texts have become important organizational brand artefacts directed primarily at a prospective-student audience now recast as ‘customers’ or ‘clients’.

The analysis detects three main discursive approaches to branding employed by the organizations – namely, characterizing the brand; positioning the brand; and personalizing the brand – which, in that order, can be regarded as moving from more fact/reason-based to more experience/ emotion-oriented approaches. These approaches are semiotically realized in and through particular uses of language devices and features like positive evaluation, colloquial language and metaphor. In addition, the results suggest a positive correlation between the degree of organizational market orientation and a proclivity for experience/emotion-oriented approaches, as well as a discernible diachronic progression towards experience/emotion-oriented approaches in the branding discourse of Singapore’s higher education sector as a whole.