Building a Brand in Higher Education; Why business practices — particularly brand strategies — are becoming essential in today's universities

Gallup Management Journal, July 12, 2007 by Robert C. Lockwood, Jerry Hadd

Byline: Robert C. Lockwood and Jerry Hadd

Synopsis: Like businesses competing for talented workers, colleges and universities vie vigorously for talented students and calculate ways to improve the conversion rate from accepted to enrolled student. The solution to the challenges schools face: Build world-class brands, just as smart companies strive to do.

Do these workers sound familiar to you?

Dana works in the marketing department, and his primary goal is increasing his organization's conversion rate. His challenge is that everybody he works with seems to have a different opinion about how to achieve that objective.

Maryellen is on a steering committee that is actively pushing a strategic quality improvement initiative to strengthen the organization's culture and brand. She has the same challenge that Dana does, but with bigger egos involved.

George is the organization's president. His current focus is on creating a sense of shared mission, vision, and strategy in an organization characterized by empire building within various departments.

What's more, Dana, Maryellen, and George are passionately committed to meeting their goals because their initiatives are at the core of the organization's strategic branding efforts.

Maybe you've met Dana, Maryellen, and George. You probably work with people just like them; all three have roles that could be found in any corporation. But they don't work in one. Dana, Maryellen, and George are leaders in academe.

The reason that Dana, Maryellen, and George seem so familiar is because academe and the corporate world share many characteristics. Prospective students, like prospective customers, have a vast array of choices: private or public school, large or small, domestic or international, liberal arts or technical -- the list goes on. Like businesses competing for talented workers, colleges and universities compete vigorously for talented students and calculate ways to improve the conversion rate from accepted to enrolled student. Higher education is a broad marketplace, and no college or university can rest on its laurels.

Calls for change and improvement

Competition for students isn't the only worry for academic professionals. Scholarly commissions and blue-ribbon panels have called for widespread improvements in accountability and transparency. For example, a Kellogg Commission report outlined a seven-part test of institutional engagement, which the commission proposed as a necessary condition for improving higher education.

Another commission appointed by U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings reported: "Among the vast and varied institutions that make up U.S. higher education, we have found much to applaud but also much that requires urgent reform. . . . As other nations rapidly improve their higher education systems, we are disturbed by evidence that the quality of student learning at U.S. colleges and universities is inadequate and, in some cases, declining."

A commentary by Larry Braskamp and Steven Schomberg on the Spellings Commission report lays out basic demands being made of leaders in higher education: "For confidence, trust, and satisfaction to occur, higher education . . . must first recognize that public accountability is a fact and an appropriate expectation. . . . A second step is for higher education to make transparent the evidence of quality that the public needs in order to trust higher education. We must measure what is meaningful, not give meaning to what we measure. . . . Assessment should be informing the various publics about how the educational experiences of students or of the institutional engagement in the larger society is bringing value to the students and society."

As Alec Gallup, chairman of The Gallup Poll, put it: "Dramatic institutional change can occur only by capturing the hearts, minds, and souls of all those individuals who comprise the academic community. Engagement, ownership, trust, confidence, integrity, passion, and well-being are some of the key ingredients to fostering an interconnected, collaborative, and efficient institution."

It's about the brand

Business leaders frequently obsess about their company's brand image; leaders in higher education likewise fixate on their school's perceived image and value equation in the marketplace. In many cases, though, educational brand strategy is limited to marketing and advertising campaigns. But an effective brand management strategy can be maximized only if the brand carries a promise -- and if every member of the academic community is committed to fulfilling that promise.

The challenge of building an educational brand is compounded by collegiate ranking methodologies, which make institutions' value propositions blatant, though not necessarily accurate. Several presidents have publicly refused to participate in ranking surveys, and others will elect to do the same. But most won't. Leadership teams often decry the flaws in collegiate rankings while continuing to participate in the process, thus adding to the misalignment of academic perceptions and brands.