UNIVERSITY BUSINESS COOPERATION AS A QUALITY SIGNAL

This study employed signaling theory for building and testing conceptual model to explore the role of quality cues (including University Business Cooperation (UBC) and Credibility Brand (CB)) to signal the quality for products which had unobservable quality and their impact on perceived sacrifice for increasing consumer’s purchase intention. The study was conducted with two independent cases: Tra Vinh Viettel and Tra Vinh University (TVU), there were 121 telecommunications service customers and 159 senior students interviewed, then the SmartPLS software was used for analyzing data. The research results confirmed these cues to be the quality signals; Credibility Brand negatively effects on perceived sacrifice in case 1, but for case 2, this has no statistical significance; UBC effects on perceived sacrifice in both cases positively. The results encourage enterprises and universities to invest in UBC and CB appropriately to effectively exploit this quality signal and also to attract customers to consume more products. The study was carried out in Tra Vinh Province of Vietnam with non-probability sampling method, and only implemented in the cases of TVU and Viettel, which limit the reliability and popularity of the study.