Yesterday I talked a bit about some basic rules of branding in universities, and why some of the wailing about the similarity of university brands are kind of overdone. The key reason for this is because in fact most universities are competing in a very local market with only a few genuine competitors. So yeah, maybe there are only a half-dozen genuinely unique brand-types out there, but as long as you have fewer than six direct competitors, that’s not necessarily a problem.
But, say some people, surely the growth of internationalization change all this. To the extent that institutions are relying on international student dollars, institutions are actually playing in a market with hundreds or even thousands of competitors – doesn’t that invalidate the above argument and make having really unique value propositions much more important?
Well, kind of. It’s important to distinguish here between brands and marketing efforts/materials. Of course, your marketing materials need to speak to international students. The question is whether your brand needs to.
When you’re working with brands, the rule of thumb is that the brand is supposed to “speak” to a relatively small number of audiences (say, three). For example, a research university’s brand is probably designed to address top professors, promising graduate students, and transformational donors. Why these three? Because these are the things that contribute most to prestige, and prestige is the way universities keep score with one another.
So the question is: what kinds of universities need to actually have international students as one of their top three audiences? And the answer I think is “not many”. Maybe it makes sense at institutions like the London School of Economics, where 30% of all income comes from overseas students. In Canada, where there’s essentially no one in that position (St. Mary’s U aside, possibly) it’s harder to make that case. For nearly all institutions, the key audiences are domestic, and so there still isn’t much of an imperative around uniqueness.
That said, there is a need to make sure that your marketing materials and your brand don’t actively conflict with one another. An institutional brand has to contain some kind of promise that appeals to potential students. For the most part, brand promises which focus around specific regional or national themes leave international students utterly cold. So U of T’s one-time claim to be “Canada’s answer to the world’s problems” or U Saskatchewan’s unofficial motto of being not just the University of Saskatchewan but the University for Saskatchewan – those simply don’t speak to potential overseas students. So there’s a juggling act here: universities have to speak public and authentically in a way that appeals to diverse audiences. In all but a few cases, this probably doesn’t require a change in brand; what it does require is finding a non-parochial vocabulary which can appeal to locals and international audiences alike.
The problem is that in some cases, this will have the effect of making university brands less diverse at a global level. But so what? So long as it still works….
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Alex, thanks for these two helpful articles. Here are some additional thoughts from (one part of) the BC context:
– the comment about few of our institutions needing a strategic position for international students doesn’t ring true in provinces like B.C., where all the institutions have in their mandate letters a requirement to increase international student numbers (with the exception of NVIT which specifically targets aboriginal students).
– for institutions with “teaching-intensive” missions, the focus has to be on quality in teaching and learning where it is notoriously hard to garner reputational capital. We are exploring this in two complementary ways for the BC context – “we” being a number of institutions within the BC Association of Institutes and Universities.
– One part of the approach involves institutional strategy for exemplary teaching and learning environments, where each institution develops signature outcomes where they can become “prominent internationally, a leader within Canada and an exemplar within the sector in BC”. Some of these are traditional institutional learning outcomes such as Teamwork Capability and Creative Thinking. Others are ’emerging learning and knowledge practices’ (to use SSHRC’s term from their Future Challenges list), such as Innovation Capability and Knowledge-building in the Workplace.
The second element of the approach is to cooperate across institutions in a Collaborative Innovation Network, where each institution contributes its signature expertise to raise the bar on particular outcomes across the sector and in turn benefits from the exemplary capabilities others have developed. All of these signature strengths have to be directly related to employability and the workplace, so Experiential Learning, Community-Service etc. are big components in the implementation.
But we don’t have to be restricted by that requirement: at one institution, some work is starting up with a U.S. partner on a ‘Student Transformative & Employability Outcomes Record’ to integrate the workplace focus with a larger concern for developing the whole person.
Its early days on all of this as yet, but we can see a path forward in which the sector is able to establish a BC brand highlighting institutional cultures of knowledge building and knowledge mobilization in teaching which serves as a model for the way students need to engage with knowledge in their own careers – and in their other roles as community members and global citizens.
You may remember some of this from a presentation of some initial ideas at HESA’s Stepford Universities conference a few years back. My own view – as yet untested – is that we can support international marketing efforts when these signature strengths have particular relevance in the regional workplace context (and all of these institutions have regional service mandates). Attracting students from different contexts – major metropolitan areas, edge cities, regional hubs in the hinterlands, remote or island contexts – could focus on similar contexts in BC where the institution’s signature strengths relative to the region’s particular needs can become a valuable asset to potential students.
I think it’s problematic to draw a distinction between a university’s “brand” and its marketing materials because however finely targeted those materials are, unintended audiences will still see them on the university website etc. So, for example, you can’t have the university positioning itself as forward thinking to students, but another part of the university e.g. Continuing Ed positioning itself as ‘learning the old-fashioned way” (this is a fictional example to make the point). Hence university brand statements are necessarily broad, which raises the question of whether they can really differentiate the institution.
With regard to brands, I would say part of Western’s brand is “party U”, but so is Ivey, the clock tower, its alumni etc. A brand is never just one thing but a collection of attributes, good and bad. I think in this case the author is saying “the knock against Western is…” rather than its brand, of which the ‘knock’ is merely a part.