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The environment in which university institutions develop their activities has become more competitive over recent decades and market elements have been introduced into the sector. Accordingly, universities have shown a growing interest in developing and maintaining a favourable and distinctive image among their stakeholders. To this end, many of them have focused their efforts on the improvement and renewal of training programs. However, such efforts have not always been matched in the transmission of a more favourable perception among their stakeholders. This context calls for university management with a marketing orientation. However, university marketing is in its early stages in many parts of the world and the incorporation of marketing principles and practices in the field of higher education encounters much reluctance from citizens and academics. This contribution sets out the reasons for this resistance, which may be grounded in a misconception about the discipline, and a working framework for marketing management in universities is proposed to facilitate the practical implementation of marketing philosophy in such institutions. It is a framework whose design involves a combination of services marketing and corporate marketing proposals and highlights aspects that managers of higher education institutions should focus on 1) to meet the demands of different stakeholders with varied (and sometimes conflicting) interests and 2) to move towards the development of a favourable perception among the stakeholders of the institutions they manage.

In order to further knowledge regarding the factors that have most influence on the university image, a measurement model was established in this research from the perspective of society and validated using covariance structure analysis. In addition, to ascertain whether such factors and/or their degree of influence differ among stakeholders, an evaluation of measurement invariance was conducted to find out what implications there are for image formation when the perspectives of the different stakeholders are considered. Five samples of stakeholders were used (society, prospective students, current students, graduates, and companies), totaling 1760 respondents. The results showed that affective image, perception of teaching resources, and perception of graduate training significantly influence the formation of overall university image from the perspective of society and that the image structure identified from this perspective is shared by companies, although some differences are observed. However, the model needs adapting to consider the perspectives of prospective students, current students, and graduates. The results also suggested that affective issues have a major importance in image formation from the perspective of all the stakeholders considered and that it is in the cognitive aspects where differences between them become more patent. These findings constitute a valuable contribution for marketing literature as so few works have addressed the study of the university image adopting the standpoint of society or the comparison of different stakeholders. Further, they provide guidance to university managers when determining which aspects are recommendable to act upon for the projection of a favorable image to various audiences.

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