Higher education (HE) institutions need to adapt to the global environment but the complex nature of HE highlights the role of marketing and the internal market in realizing the brand identity, creating a challenge for developing a shared brand meaning. This research explores how employees co-create brand meaning through their brand experiences and social interactions with management, colleagues and customers. Using a phenomenological approach, the findings highlight that brand meaning commences from historical, superficial brand interactions. Employees then develop brand meaning further through a series of brand interactions and social interactions. Bridging the internal branding and the co-creation literature, this study conceptualizes the evolving, co-created nature of employees' brand meaning in the experiential brand meaning cycle. This study extends Iglesias and Bonet's (2012) work and illustrates the function of employees as readers and authors of brand meaning, emphasizing the crucial role of brand co-creation in guiding employees' brand promise delivery.

Proposes a prescriptive model for political marketing based loosely on the Six Markets Model of relationship marketing. The rationale for this is to be found in an analysis of the historical treatment of political marketing, from within both disciplines. Argues that many of the conventional axioms of marketing are inappropriate in politics, and observes how in political science, as in marketing itself, there is a questioning of the fundamental rational foundations of a number of key theoretical constructs. In proposing a multiple markets model for politics, cites as evidence the fact that many of the approaches advocated appear already to have been adopted during the 1997 general election campaign of the British Labour Party.A man who is made a prince by the favour of the people must work to retain their friendship (Machiavelli, 1981, p. 69).

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There is a paucity of research that outlines how to understand the image of political brands. Responding to this identified gap in the literature, this research seeks to demonstrate the elicitation capabilities of qualitative projective techniques to explore the political brand image of the UK Conservative Party. This paper highlights that projective techniques can provide a greater understanding of underlying feelings and deep-seated attitudes towards political parties, candidates, and the positive and negative aspects of brand image. Many of the associations and perceptions may have been overlooked if other research methods had been adopted. Projective techniques may be adopted by political actors to assess how their brands are understood and, if required, make adaptations to their communicated brand identity.