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Universities and branding
What is a university? The answer, it appears, depends very much on who you talk to. To an academic, it is a self-governing community of academics who put the pursuit of knowledge above and beyond anything else. To a university administrator, one of the many professionals who have been drafted in to run Britain’s higher education establishments in the last few decades, it is a large, complex business. To a government minister, it’s part of a long-term solution to transform Britain from an industrial nation into a ‘knowledge economy’. To a parent, it’s an investment in a child’s future. To a business leader, it’s a source of commercially valuable research and high quality graduates. To a prospective student, it is ‘me time’ - a three year adventure in independent living and making new friends that is the reward for putting up with thirteen years of compulsory education.
With so many different - and often conflicting - points of view, how exactly does one communicate a university? With difficulty, always mindful that whatever one says about it, someone will hold exactly the opposite point of view.
What a university is, in fact, is a kind of patchwork made up of an odd assortment of pieces. Nobody really planned them: universities are, next to the church and the military, amongst our oldest national organisations and they have simply grown that way. Conceived by a mediaeval mind for purposes quite different in practice, if not in concept, to the ones they fulfil today, they have evolved haphazardly into the institutions we know today. Our oldest universities are now approaching 800 years and still going strong - no British university, once granted its Royal charter, has yet gone out of business.
If we can talk about a university ‘brand’, it’s something quite different from the commercial brands we’re familiar with. There is no ‘unique selling proposition’ in higher education: the university’s ‘offer’ is its people, and they are constantly moving around from one institution to the next, collaborating far more often than they compete. Schools and courses and research and even the student experience don’t vary greatly from one university to the next - whatever supposedly distinctive attribute one finds, there is almost certainly going to be at least one other university in the country that can match it exactly.
The one big difference - and one that universities themselves are often uncomfortable with - is place. Unlike businesses, universities can’t simply relocate (although several have opened new campuses in different parts of the country, or even the world). Universities are in a historic relationship with their cities. And, in the case of our historic universities, this is sometimes an uneasy, standoffish ‘town and gown’ relationship. The new universities have often chosen to exploit this, cultivating stronger relationships with their cities, working hard to forge relationships that their older counterparts have taken for granted (and it is a curious feature of the UK that many of our cities now have both old and new universities).
The university brand thus has to be something that allows all the university’s stakeholders to see what they want to see in it - it needs to have something of the nature of a blank canvas, onto which they can project their own meanings and associations. It also needs to reflect a place name that may, in every other respect, have little real connection with the university itself. For international audiences, whose grasp of the geography of these islands may be sketchy, to say the least, it’s often easier if that place is already known - for instance, because the city has a premier division football team.
Branding universities sounds as if it is about presenting and packaging universities in the same kinds of ways as commercial brands. It is, however, the exact opposite of this - it’s about adapting the language and techniques of branding to work for an institution as rich and complex (and as indefinable) as a university.
Interestingly, universities aren’t becoming more like other large, complex organisations. Other large, complex institutions are becoming more like universities.
And now to prove your point that “someone [in a university] will hold exactly the opposite point of view”…
I’m not convinced that a university brand is different from the brand of any other company working in the knowledge economy. Like those companies (brand agencies included) the ‘offer’ is the people and, bar the RAE mass-migration exercise, research intensive academics do not have a particularly peripatetic existence. Moreover, although there is collaboration with others academic reputation is closely protected and promoted. Funding for research is fierce and with success based upon reputation and as such is hugely competitive.
Within the context of the ‘offer’ being the people, Academic Schools and courses probably don’t vary a great deal and the elements that comprise the student experience are equally consistent. To argue, however, that the way in which the student experience is provided is not distinctive attribute or a USP is misguided and belies the importance that students and their influencers place on measures such as the NSS.
Equally to argue that research doesn’t differentiate is misguided, the act of research in itself may not be distinctive but the outputs are both in terms of the knowledge economy but also to the economy of the institution itself. Successful research outputs generate income and contribute to the reputation and standing of the institution, in turn this has an effect on the perception of the institution to funding councils and the influencers of prospective students.
Given the above and with the onset of variable fees and the pressure to secure money through legacies and donations the sell element of marketing a HE institution has become more akin to high value products.
As such I struggle to recognise the importance of place beyond the influencing effect on the decision making of undergraduates. Just as, for arguments sake, a brand agency wouldn’t choose to focus too heavily on its London location a university shouldn’t focus on its place as a distinctor. Neither academics nor students choose Harvard due to its location; the location is a bonus. If Harvard, complete with all its academics, chose to move to Texas its brand would still be as resonant and have as much currency in the HE and knowledge market.
A key job of a university brand is to deliver on a challenge that most commercial brands would fail. Namely to sell a 12k product to 16yr old over 18 months, create loyalty whilst using the product and then ‘tap’ them for money in later years; in essence, persuade them to pay for getting into debt then donate money (years later) for that experience.
The challenge is not about adapting the language and techniques of branding to universities but to apply classic branding methodology to historic institutions struggling to adjust to a market led economy.
NB. I’m also not sure that a prospective student would feel that paying £3,000 a year plus accommodation costs constitutes a reward for compulsory education!