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The problem with university branding efforts
In 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 (see image), a VERY simple word randomiser.
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Relationships are built with people not institutions; education is a relationship between a teacher and pupil.
Students do not want “authentic relationships” with brands as much as they want a relationship with their teacher/s. Teaching has become the casualised, temporary position in universities shouting what to the world? So many institutions pay so much money to so many support activities that do not make a change. UWS became WSU and achieved what? Why?
I did not study adult Education at Sydney because it was Sydney but because of the course and staff involved. Similarly I studied at Lancaster (UK) because of Peter Checkland not because of Lancaster University as a brand. Study at Hawkesbury came from the reputation of the staff and programs in Agriculture not the brand of the overall institution.
I coughed up cash for the course I wanted based of the people teaching it and their past success in that area. I did not choose an institution and then find a course. Logos, motto, web pages are thinner than silk; the engine behind it is the study program and the academics teaching – period.
It seems a whole lot of consultants and support staff are making motzahs out of smoke and mirrors. Once education became “a product” the rest was inevitable.
Hi Paul, thanks for those thoughtful comments. I agree in large part: students don’t need to have the logo perfectly produced, or a nifty slogan, they need teaching staff and support staff who can support them to learn and achieve their goals. Advertising has its role, especially while the Government insists in competition between public institutions, but you are right to say treating education like a product is a poor strategy.
If the marketing has failed, what has been the result of that for Universities? Can this failure be correlated with a decline in student numbers across the sector? According to Higher Ed data – 1.5% increase on the previous year for domestic students and 10.2% for overseas students. So, despite the article’s claim that marketing does not really work, or any more, (and I’m not surprised), enrolments are healthy. What this marketing perhaps does do is service the sector as a whole, in terms of attempting to inspire University as a preference over other career path options.
I can see why international students might need more information (not slogans) on an institution’s reputation or areas of real strength; less so for domestic students who have better access to options to glean information – from word of mouth to contacting real people at institutions. But where is the intercultural translation on what a student in, say, India is inspired by when it comes to making a choice?
Hi Patrick,
My argument is not that marketing has failed, but that branding efforts have…but I wonder of you think a 1.5% increase in domestic enrolments nationwide is a fair return-on-investment for the hundreds of millions spent on marketing universities within Australia? University marketing budgets, excluding staffing costs and overheads, ranged from $1.5 million to almost $15 million in 2013 (SMH, October 22, 2015). I think we should be able to do much better than that!
The problem is not that university advertising is ‘samey’. The problem is that they are ridiculous. These buzzwords and slogans literally mean nothing. They are ungrammatical word salads that provide no possible means to interpret them. The result is to entrench the passivity of the ‘consumer’ on students who have no idea what they are ‘consuming’. Honestly, if the best we can say is that we need more ‘authentic relationships with brands’, we’re all screwed. People have no relationships with brands, authentic or otherwise. A brand is a convenient fiction. A relationship is what you have with another being.
I am not quite sure if there was a conclusion on the best way forward in this article. It seems I hear several different interests expressed by prospective students – One group want the best university in their chosen field to increase their career/employment options, the second group want a university that will give them easy pass marks because they feel unprepared for university or because they want to work 40 hours per week while studying “full time” for their degree. There is a third group who have no idea what they are getting themselves in to and seem to make few enquiries regarding their upcoming uni years and/or just decide on geography and price. For those who are discerning, they seem to focus on what past graduates say about the quality of their lecturers and tutors and what the job finding network has to say about the course. I am not sure much of this can be affected by a marketing program.
Hi Craig, I would argue the brand should not focus on selling degrees. Sure, you need some advertising for that purpose, but the institution is so much more than a degree mill (hopefully!). Brand is about the meaning people attach to the symbols, and if that’s just ‘we make money selling you a qualification’ it’s a race to the bottom. Thanks so much for commenting.
Most new ones are laughable. They often replace good ones like ‘ seek wisdom’ How about a generic
‘No bull’.