Digital Transformation as Institutional Branding: A Multi-level Marketing Governance Analysis of Romanian Higher Education Policy

Higher education institutions across Europe increasingly present digital transformation as a marker of strategic modernity, yet the gap between this communicated image and the underlying governance reality remains underexplored. Romanian higher education provides a revealing setting in which to examine this gap, given the convergence of supranational funding mandates, ambitious national legislation, formalized quality assurance standards, and resource-dependent universities operating under intense external pressure. Combining institutional theory with marketing governance frameworks, the European Union, the Romanian Government, the Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ARACIS), and individual universities are positioned as distinct actors whose framing choices, governance instruments, and accountability logics jointly determine the credibility of digital transformation claims. Strategic policies, funding frameworks, and legislative instruments issued between 2020 and 2026 are examined through qualitative documentary analysis structured around actor-specific coding categories. Supranational and governmental actors are found to construct an assertive digitalization narrative reinforced by conditional financing and regulatory reform, while universities adopt a markedly more pragmatic stance, channeling resources toward infrastructure visibility rather than pedagogical depth. The resulting asymmetry exposes the system to means–ends decoupling, with digital investment decisions only loosely tied to demonstrable improvements in teaching and learning. By tracing how institutional isomorphism interacts with strategic communication across governance levels, new insight is offered into the marketing governance dynamics underlying higher education digitalization in Romania.