campusreview.com.au
Realise the think
The problem with university branding efforts.
By Robyn Evans
I
n the heat of mid-January, when every university and college in
Australia was “in market” for semester one recruitment, a CSIRO
scientist invented a random university slogan generator, a very
simple word randomiser.
Activate, Realise, Be, Disrupt, Push, Become, Next, Now.
Dip the ladle into the word soup, and hey presto you have a
university slogan. Become your next. Activate your tomorrow.
As one of the marketers responsible for bringing ‘Become More’
and ‘Unleash your Fearless’ into being, it was hard not to feel judged.
It’s no secret that university branding efforts tend to all sound
a bit samey. Back in the far away days of the ‘90s when university
marketing primarily involved printed prospectuses, people joked
about the ‘undergraduates smiling under a tree’ trope that even
appeared in marketing for institutions without leafy campuses.
The work is exponentially more sophisticated nowadays:
cinematic television commercials, complex digital ad buys,
multichannel integrated campaigns – and exponentially more
expensive, with tens of millions being spent on ‘rebrands’ or a ‘brand
refresh’ – but still we all end up saying pretty much the same thing.
Are the critics of university branding right in saying it’s a waste of
money and a distraction?
The first objective of branding is distinctiveness. Branding is
a function of memory: brands are staking a claim in someone’s
mind, and the first hurdle is being memorable. Standing out. We are
falling at the first hurdle.
What is a harried higher education marketer to do? We are
aware of the problem but despite the investment, despite our best
professional efforts, we are not achieving the goal.
In 2017, while trying to find a way for my institution to get more
market impact out of our investment in brand, I was given the
time to look more deeply into the academic research on higher
education branding. I was so interested I signed up to do a PhD
on the topic.
ON CAMPUS
This is what hooked me: the academic research found the tactics
that work for other products and services do not work in higher
education.
There isn’t a huge of a body of knowledge for higher education
branding. Most of the research on branding is done on fast-moving
consumer goods (phones are a very popular topic). What has
been done makes it very clear that higher education is different
from other products and services, but that it is being sold using
techniques developed for other products.
Buying a phone isn’t like buying an education — and nobody
involved in university marketing thinks this — so why borrow the
branding techniques? It’s the dominant paradigm: it is how the big
agencies make their money, it is the stuff of industry magazines, it
is what gets featured at industry conferences and taught in courses.
We are doing industry best practice — but higher education
branding and marketing needs its own models.
Where can a university trying to stand out in a competitive global
market turn for solutions?
Where the research is most helpful to practitioners is in
providing insight into how people form attachments to higher
education brands – the psychological processes at play. University
brands are co-created in interactions between members of the
university: students and teachers, of course, but also students and
administrators, administrators and researchers, researchers and
funders. It is the quality and consistency of those interactions that
shape the perceptions of the university. In other words, as Zappos
CEO Tony Hsieh puts it, “Your culture is your brand”.
The bad news for marketers is culture is outside the control of
the marketing department. The good news for university managers
is that every university is a goldmine of data about what’s working
and not working in terms of brand perception. The really great
news is the opportunity this presents to throw out the rule book
and pursue genuine distinctiveness.
In Admap in April, four of Accenture’s leading customer growth
strategists said purpose was the key to long-term brand success,
saying customers are looking for “authentic relationships” with
brands: “The opportunity lies in building more authentic and
profitable relationships with customers. Meaningful relationships that
shift the customer dialogue from ‘give ME what I want’ to ‘support
the ideals WE believe in’. Long-lasting relationships grounded in
a common purpose and built around a collective sense of brand
belonging. Authentic relationships based on an affinity to brands that
do more than just make money.”
Completing a university degree requires “a long-lasting
relationship grounded in a common purpose”, so higher education
brands should have an advantage on other brands. We’re not just
an accessory to your life; your experience with us fundamentally
transforms your experiences and opportunities in life.
Treating education like a fast-moving consumer good, obsolete
next year, has shrunk university brands to the badge on the
testamur, with the brand message focused on the advantages
of studying for a degree. Brand strategies have three to five‑year
horizons, turning over along with the management team,
barely long enough for one undergraduate cohort to complete
their study. People have lifelong relationships with a university,
sometimes intergenerational. The brand of a university has to be
big enough to encompass all of that. ■
Robyn Evans is a marketing communications strategist.
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