From Brand Building to Enrolment: A Mixed-Methods Extension of the Digital Brand Building Index in Private Universities of Telangana

Today, applicants decide mostly based on what they see online. A university’s website, its social feeds, the reviews its students leave all make impressions long before any campus visit, and make them decisively. The Digital Brand Building Index provided a way for researchers to quantify that digital front end: seven dimensions, 24 items, validated on Telangana student samples with solid reliability and validity evidence (S & POGUL, 2025). What the index has yet to be shown to do is to predict anything downstream no enrolment intention, no application behaviour. This paper details the methodology for testing exactly that as a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design. In Phase 1, approximately 600 applicants for private universities in Telangana respond to the DBBI items along with brand equity, reputation and enrolment intention measures. The data is modelled using PLS-SEM with mediation through university brand equity and institutional reputation, moderation across program type and first-generation status and out-of-sample prediction is assessed through PLSpredict. Phase 2 involves interviewing survey respondents aged 18–24 at the extremes of the intention distribution about which touchpoints mattered and why, and thematically analyzing the transcripts. Integration follows the conventions of explanatory designs where statistical pathways and applicant stories are read against each other, joined and displayed. The methodology provides forecast-like diagnostics for university marketers that show not only the strength of an institution’s digital brand building, but where that strength fails to convert into enrolment and why.

Digital brand building, Higher education marketing, PLS-SEM, Sequential explanatory mixed methods, Enrolment intention, Telangana

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