DIGITAL BRAND RESONANCE IN AZERBAIJANI HIGHER EDUCATION: A SOCIALLISTENING AND NLP ANALYSIS OF STAKEHOLDER DISCOURSE

Abstract

The landscape in which students, alumni, and potential applicants continually negotiate the institutions’ brand perceptions is through unstructured digital discourse. Spanning 47,832 social media posts and comments collected from ten public universities ac ross October– December 2024, this study also triangulates a previously validated survey-based structural model of consumer-based brand equity (CBBE) in Azerbaijani higher education (Paper 1) with a large-scale social listening and natural language processing (NLP) analysis. A custom five stage NLP pipeline— including AzerBERT sentiment classification (macro-F1 =. 881), aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA; mean κ =. 776), BERTopic/LDA topic modelling and social network analysis was established to overcome Azerbaijani agglutinative morphology and widespread code-switching. In a prespecified triangulation protocol, all five structural paths were validated and directionally consistent. Three findings are theoretically significant: scholarship−delay discourse (1 8.4% negative posts; polarity −0.67) pinpoints the mechanism of brand credibility-trust hyperscale; urban-non-urbanclustering coefficient differentials (0.671 vs 0.412; d = 2.69) identify location -moderated equity conversion; and platform-specific thematic divergence (χ² = 847.3, V =. 42) illustrates differential brand-dimension activation across channels.