18/09/2026
𝗣𝗥𝗘𝗦𝗜𝗗𝗘𝗡𝗧’𝗦 𝗖𝗢𝗥𝗡𝗘𝗥 | One year after: From Wharton lessons to onwards UIP
On September 5, 2025, President Dr. Mario P. Obrero completed Strategic Marketing for Competitive Advantage, an executive program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. A year later, one of the program's central ideas has taken on a different meaning in the halls of the Ilocos Sur Polytechnic State College (ISPSC): an institution must understand the people it serves and the value it seeks to create for them.
That idea is particularly relevant today as ISPSC moves toward becoming the University of Ilocos Philippines (UIP).
At Wharton, the program explored how organizations understand their customers, position their products and services, build brand value, engage their audiences, and make decisions using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. For a higher education institution, these lessons take on a broader meaning. The people an institution serves are not simply customers. They include students seeking an education, faculty and staff building the institution, communities relying on its services, and partners working with it toward shared goals.
For President Obrero, the experience came at a time when ISPSC was continuing to define its direction as a growing institution. One year later, that direction has become more tangible with the institution's pursuit of a university identity.
The move toward UIP is therefore not simply about adopting a new name. It raises a larger question: What should the institution represent when it takes on its new identity?
That question lies close to the heart of what the Wharton program calls brand meaning. In marketing, a brand is not confined to a logo or a name. It is built through the collective experiences and associations that people develop with an organization.
For ISPSC, this makes the transition to UIP an exercise in defining and carrying forward institutional meaning.
The College enters this transition with a history already shaped by its seven campuses: Main, Candon, Sta. Maria, Santiago, Tagudin, Cervantes, and Narvacan. Each serves its own community and contributes its own academic programs, people, and experiences. Yet the transition requires these distinct parts to move toward a common institutional identity.
This is where becomes more than a campaign line.
It provides a way of expressing movement while acknowledging where the institution has come from. The idea is not to leave the ISPSC identity behind without context, but to build upon the work and institutional foundations that have brought the College to this point.
That balance between continuity and change is central to building an identity that stakeholders can understand and eventually make their own.
The Wharton program's emphasis on positioning also offers another perspective. Positioning asks an organization to determine what makes its offering meaningful and distinctive to the people it seeks to serve. For ISPSC, the question is not simply how to present itself as a university, but how UIP will articulate its role in Ilocos Sur and what it can contribute to the communities within and beyond the province.
The answer cannot come from communication alone. It has to be reflected in the institution's academic offerings, research, extension initiatives, services, partnerships, and experiences of the people who pass through its campuses.
This is where the lessons of an executive classroom meet the realities of public higher education. A university's identity is ultimately experienced rather than merely announced.
As the UIP transition continues, the work ahead involves bringing people into that experience. ISPSC students need to understand what the new identity means for them. Faculty, staff, and all that makes up ISPSC need to see themselves as part of the institution's next chapter. Communities and partners need to recognize the role UIP intends to play in the region.
One year after completing the Wharton program, President Obrero's executive education experience therefore finds its relevance not in the certificate alone, but in the questions it brings to an institution in transition: Who does the institution serve? What value does it create? What should people associate with its name? And what kind of institution should it become?
For ISPSC, the answers are still taking shape.
But the direction is clear. Onwards UIP is not simply a movement away from what the College has been. It is a movement forward with what it has built, toward an institutional identity that seeks to carry its legacy into its future as the University of Ilocos Philippines.(𝘗𝘈𝘑)
