I am writing today as an academic, not as a university marketing guru. I served as a professor of Mathematics in various Christian universities over the past 17 years. I have served as a faculty senate clerk and on many, many faculty committees. That said, I strongly believe in the power of a university brand to drive up academic quality. Faculty and academics tend to silo the two concepts. They want to leave brand thinking to the marketing department. Not thinking about your institutional brand as an academic, dean or a chief academic officer is a mistake. It is tied to your academic quality.
Part 1: Your Brand and Your Academic Quality
Before we get into a discussion on brand, it is important that everyone understands your brand is not a logo, font set and color scheme. It is not even a short catch phrase like “Building Leaders Together”. Brand is simply defined as what people think about when they think about you.
Let’s think about the relationship between brand and quality by taking a quick trip to the grocery store. When I go to the grocery store to get some soda (which I should probably never do), I have some options. I can get a name brand soda like Pepsi or Coke, or a generic cheaper version of the same product. There are certainly arguments to be made around which soda tastes better, but often I buy Coke even though I would agree they are basically the same. Why would I get a more expensive product when they are the same? It is not because I am stupid or foolish. I am buying soda but I am also buying the reliability and feeling I have associated with the brand. The actual taste of the product only comes into play in my decision making if the generic brand’s taste is far superior to the name brand product (which is basically never), or the taste of the name brand product becomes horrible over time (which doesn’t happen with a consistent product). So, Coke it is.
How does this help us think about our academic quality and how people make decisions about coming to our institutions? Academic quality is the taste of the product, not the product itself. People are looking to buy an experience. They are buying a feeling, reliability – a brand. As the feelings people have about Coke get better, people buy more Coke even though the taste of Coke is the same. Colleges and universities often don’t understand this idea when it comes to selling to undergraduate students. They think that increasing their academic offerings and providing more majors (making the taste slightly better) will bring in more students. I have sad news. It won’t. Why? Because students choose colleges based on feelings not facts. If you want to be the institution that everyone wants, then your brand must be built up, not your academic portfolio (and especially not your general education package!). Here is the crazy part though: as your brand increases in value, the perception of your academics will rise without you doing anything to change them! And it gets even better. Over time, great faculty will be drawn to be a part of your brand and your actual academic quality will get better over time. So building a strong brand affects both the perception and the reality of your academic programs.
Does this phenomenon work in reverse? If you increase your academic experience and offerings will your brand value go up? Yes, but to a much lesser extent. You want your academic offerings to be in line with the marketplace needs – this is important. If you are out of alignment with the market, change is needed. As your university makes real changes to make its academic programs better, the brand will get stronger as there are more people talking about their great experience with your programs. But the time it takes to move your overall institutional brand using this method is extreme. It is not a good solo strategy for building a brand. If it were, we would buy a lot more generic cola (assuming that generic colas have gotten better in taste over time). Unfortunately, your academic quality can quickly ruin your brand. If you actually have weak academic programs and students don’t have a great experience in your classes, you will quickly have a negative brand around having weak academics.
Here are the two relationships between brand and academics that we need to be aware of:
- Great brands raise up academic programs – both in perception and in reality.
- Poor academic programs can ruin brands.
Just as important, here are two false relationships that will cost us many hours of work and a lot of money:
- Adding and/or changing academic offerings will make more people buy our brand.
- If people are not interested in coming to our institution it is because something is wrong with academics.
Hopefully this is helpful to you as you think about building an academic portfolio in your institution or academic division. You may be making the institution better by adding a new major or program. You may even bring in more money. But your brand will lift your overall academic quality. Spend some time in your next division meeting thinking about your brand!
-Nick Willis is a partner at TG Three
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