Print Advertising of Educational Services: an investigation on the impact of the pictures facilities and testimonial about attitudes

Just like other services organizations, some higher education institutions have invested in printed advertisisng to attract applicants. The services management lieterature suggests that using stimuli such as pictures of the facilities and alumni testimonials may help to turn tangible the offer of services so strongly intangible as higher education. In the present work, the impact of two different types of cue on prospects attitudes is investigated. The cue paradigm (Olson & Jacoby 1972) has been used to select the two types of cue: intrinsic (facilities picutes), and extrinsic (testimonials). An experiment has been conducted not only to assess the effect of the impact of four levels of presence of cues (absent, only intrinsic, only extrinsic, both) on prospects' attitudes, but also the effect of prospects involvement level with higher eucation organizations on each of the four conditions. Results show that although there were no differences detected between the effects of fourt types of argument about public attitudes, respondents with low involvement in the dimension values/self image has showed more favourable attitudes regarding the (intentions of enrollment) when exposed to testimonials (extinsic cue).