Branding is one of those things that inspires strong views in higher education.  Some fret over the fact that university brands are too similar, others get indignant over the fact that branding is necessary at all, usually using some variation on the rhetorical argument “what are we, dishwashing soap?”

Part of the problem, I think, stems from misunderstandings about what brands are and how universities use them.  Every university has a “brand” whether it wants one or not.  A brand isn’t logos and taglines, it’s the collective perceptions of an organization’s identity, or “personality” if you want to get anthropomorphic about it.  Trent’s brand, whether it wants it or not, is “Tree-Hugger U”.  Western’s is “Party U”.  Those little rhyming couplets about Brock and York (“if you can walk and talk…”, “if you can use a fork…”)  or that joke about one of my alma maters? (“Carleton – where the K stands for Quality”) – this are some of the most effective, if unfortunate, pieces of branding around.  So the issue isn’t really whether universities should have brands, the issue is whether and how they are going to manage them. 

The first issue in branding is who is the audience.  A managed brand is supposed to help you with your key audiences, and not all universities have the same audiences.  When smaller universities with lower admissions standards manage their brands, they are primarily doing so with an eye on undergraduate students because they worry about enrollment and filling seats so that they can pay their staff.  When U of T or McGill brand themselves, they don’t care about that stuff because they have far more quality applicants than they can accommodate.  Instead, they manage their brands in such a way as to attract top international faculty or with what I call “transformational donors” (i.e. people who can give them big whacks of cash all at once which can extend the intellectual reach of the university – mostly philanthropists, but also senior government officials and Ministers).  This is why some universities have taglines like “Yale, Shmale”  and others have ones like “A Place of Mind.”

The fact that universities brands are shooting to different levels of audiences is one of the reasons I think the “everyone has the same brand” argument is a little overdone.  But so too is the fact that (in Canada, anyway) most higher education institutions are playing to a really segmented geographical audience.  This makes the parallels to branding in other industries (eg. Dishwasher soap) somewhat fraught.  Ivory is playing in a continental market; universities like Fraser Valley, Winnipeg, Lakehead, Trois-Riveres, etc. are for the most part playing in a market which does not extend beyond provincial borders (and in some cases, considerably less).

What this means is that it really doesn’t matter how many Canadian universities have a brand of “your- friendly-local-university-which-does-great-things-for-the-local-community-and-launches-students-out-into-the-world” because these universities aren’t in competition with one another.  The number of students or philanthropists who are genuinely undecided between, say, Cape Breton, Windsor and Vancouver Island is infinitesimal.  So go ahead, use the same tag lines, visuals, and memes.  It’s all good.  Maybe if many similar regional institutions go in together on this they can get a bulk rate.

There are really only two situations where universities really need to be especially worried about the uniqueness of its brand.  The first is if the institution is genuinely in competition for students (usually grad students) or transformational dollars.  In Canada, that’s basically the U-15, give or take an institution or two (e.g. Simon Fraser, Guelph).  Here there is at least some need to stand out, although as one climbs the prestige ladder in higher education, the narrower are the criteria for genuine excellence and hence genuinely fewer potential brand identities that signal something which is both unique and desirable (UBC’s “Place of Mind”, for instance is a not-so-subtle way of sneaking in its desirable geography on top of a message of research-intensity, but not everyone has that option).  Basically, the needs for a distinctive call to transformational donors is at odds with the academy’s isomorphic preferences in terms of how to define “quality”.

The other situation is when you need to attract international students – an imperative faced by more and more institutions these days.  More on that tomorrow.