The moderating effect of intellectual capital disclosure on the nexus of marketing capabilities and strategic performance in universities

Purpose This study explains how universities' marketing capabilities translate into measurable strategic performance and tests whether intellectual capital disclosure, across human, structural, and relational dimensions, conditions amplify that relationship in an emerging economy higher education context. Design/methodology/approach We compile a multi-source panel for public and private Jordanian universities, aligning validated measures of marketing capabilities with independently assessed levels of intellectual capital disclosure. Strategic performance is captured through recognised indicators of university value creation. Hypotheses are examined via moderated models with interaction terms, university and year effects, clustered standard errors, and robustness checks. Findings Marketing capabilities are positively and significantly associated with strategic performance. Intellectual capital disclosure strengthens this association, with structural disclosure exerting the largest conditioning effect, followed by human and then relational disclosure. Universities that combine dynamic marketing capabilities with mature, verifiable disclosure architectures convert the marketing narrative more reliably into observable value, admissions, research funding, and partnerships. Research limitations/implications Findings are bounded by a single national setting and a 2014–2024 panel. Publicly reported proxies and content-based coding for disclosure may entail measurement error, and residual endogeneity cannot be ruled out despite controls. Future research should exploit longer multi-country panels and quasi experimental shocks, deploy lagged IV specifications and a multi-level models programme, college, university, and use audited, quality weighted disclosure indices to sharpen identification and generalisability. Originality/value The paper repositions intellectual capital disclosure as a contextual, knowledge infrastructure moderator, not a mere communication output, that raises the marginal returns to dynamic marketing capabilities. It demonstrates the empirical dominance of structural disclosure and disentangles the distinct conditioning effects of human and relational disclosure, integrating RBV KBV with dynamic capabilities, signalling, legitimacy, and complementarity supermodularity in an under researched higher education setting.