The metaverse is a controversial concept, hyped by some but viewed as a marketing strategy by others. Although the first mentioning of the metaverse dates back to 1992, it has gained attention in the last years, especially after Facebook changed its name to “Meta” in 2021. Based on immersive technologies such as AR and VR, digital interactions and commerce within the virtual world, the metaverse is expected to grow along with its enabling technologies. This article aims to discover the status of the adoption of the metaverse concepts in Romania, among people with digital skills. The analysis was performed based on an online questionnaire, posted on public social media accounts. The results of the study have shown that few people have tried applications within the metaverse, and even fewer have invested in metaverse tokens. People who played RPG or virtual world games seem to have used metaverse applications more than those who have not, thus, this could be a good driver for metaverse adoption. Awareness of the metaverse concept was not a driver of metaverse adoption. However, results show that people who purchase cryptocurrencies and NFTs would also be interested in the metaverse, more than people who have not transacted these digital assets.

Events are considered to be the most personalised form of marketing, as they generate direct contact with customers and partners. Academic events aim at promoting socio-economic values by facilitating collaborative partnerships with the involvement of academics, researchers, graduates, students and representatives of the economic environment. They also aim to set up participatory networks between socio-economic actors, academic centers and research institutes, as well as between different communities at national and international level in different fields of activity. The experience offered to the participants creates a close relationship with the academic brand, which gains a human face, which positively influences the way it is perceived by the public. Through academic events, it is favored to combine ideas, generate new concepts and phenomena that are useful to society’s progress. Moreover, by debating and analysing current trends on how both the economy and the university are affected, new theoretical and practical opportunities can be identified. The main purpose of experiential marketing in academic events is to create memorable and long-lasting ties between the participants and the academic environment, as well as to generate real opportunities for socialisation and interpersonal interactions. The article will treat the results of a qualitative exploratory marketing research. It aims at clarifying and understanding the paradigm of the scientific event as a factor of university visibility. In this sense, we aimed to identify the relationship of interdependence between the scientific event and the brand of an university.

The brand of a university is the result of the interaction between the vectors it uses to position itself in relation to its stakeholders. Among these, high school students who aspire to become students play a key role. The way in which the university is perceived by its main recruitment base (the high school environment) is crucial for the capacity of the university to recruit the best qualified candidates. Considering there is a lack of a coherent project by either the higher education system or the secondary education system that looks into the high school students’ choice of an educational trajectory, there is a need for in-depth research about the motivational mechanism that drives future students to opt for a certain university. In order to fill this gap, the present study aims to research the vectors that drive the high school students’ choice of a university programme. It is a quantitative, sample research conducted on high school students in the last year of their programme, in representative high schools in one of the districts of Bucharest. The method used is the survey, the technique is that of face-to-face interviews, and the instrument used was the semi-structured questionnaire. The second research is an exploratory qualitative study conducted on the class tutors of the high school students; its purpose is to describe, with the help of some hypotheses, their preoccupations throughout the pedagogical process of career orientation. By changing the perception of the academic environment, this can help promote social cohesion and a synergy between the processes of accumulating knowledge and those of stimulating creativity and innovation in the university environment. The present study aims to contribute to this project and is based on the literature that reflects the experience of some of the most important schools in the international context, as far as the recruitment of future students is concerned.