Critical (multimodal) discourse studies of marketing or corporate documents of universities have shown the rapid neoliberalization of higher education and academia around the world. However, little attention has been paid to promotional materials for academic events. This chapter examines posters advertising invited lectures, colloquiums and conferences displayed on the campus of a “top” university in Hong Kong, the University of Hong Kong (HKU). The study draws on multimodal discourse studies and social theories of branding to analyze how different discursive components and semiotic placements of the posters create particular social meanings and values for the academic events and/or institutions. It identifies several dominant “tropes of branding” emerging from the displayed posters such as global connection and leadership, hierarchical internationalization with local advantage and interdisciplinarity. It shows how these tropes manifest or resonate with HKU’s more general self-branding enterprise of building itself into “Asia’s Global University”. The chapter concludes by discussing how its findings can deepen our understanding of institutionality in the areas of higher education and academia under the conditions of neoliberalism and globalization. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

This chapter observes that branding is a stated strategic priority of four out of seven public universities in Hong Kong. However, the branding activities they propose miss the essence—the alignment of their various identities. By adapting the concept of corporate branding to the analysis of their self-representations in four distinctive types of communication materials (strategic plans, vision and mission statements, student recruitment materials, and press releases), we introduce a new approach to university branding study by examining the content alignment in addition to the content itself. Findings show that while all Hong Kong universities have balanced their self-representations between excellence and uniqueness, new technical universities that openly state branding as a priority show more signs of alignment in the communication materials.