Before You Brand: Organizing Your University MarComm Office for Success

July 17, 2024  |  Greg Summers, PhD

Education

Marketing in higher education can be especially challenging. Many university leaders place unrealistic expectations on their marketing teams, as if simply “telling our story better” can substitute for the kinds of genuine reforms that colleges should be making to better serve students. In addition, most colleges and universities are organizationally decentralized, which makes speaking with a unified voice difficult, even at small institutions. Finally, academics themselves are typically skeptical of marketing, viewing it as a disingenuous, business-oriented activity with no place in higher education, which complicates forging the kinds of campus partnerships you need to be successful.

Still, it’s possible to navigate these challenges. The key is knowing how to adapt your brand and marketing work to the unique academic culture of higher education. As a former provost and faculty member, I have some advice.

There’s no easy way to navigate the unrealistic expectations that many university leaders place on their marketing teams. But a good start is to make sure that you understand the president’s priorities, and that you have the needed resources and structures in place to accomplish those things. It’s a given that your office will be under-resourced – this is higher education, after all. But if that’s the case, it’s vital that you work with your president and her leadership team to prioritize among their intended outcomes and create realistic expectations. Often, what you need isn’t a bigger budget per se as much as clearly defined responsibilities. If student recruitment is among your priorities, for example, do you have the needed connections to and authority within the Admissions Office? If your university is launching a capital campaign, do the deans understand their roles and how they dovetail with yours? Discussing these issues first, usually at the beginning of each year, can save countless headaches later when you’re in the midst of implementing an initiative.

With your priorities defined, the next step is to create realistic “Plan Bs” for everything else that somehow needs to get done but didn’t rise to the top of the list. Most likely, this will be a substantial and potentially intimidating collection of tasks, all of which are important. The best advice here is to use the decentralized structure of higher education to your advantage, by empowering others to help accomplish your goals. If assisting the university’s colleges to communicate with their stakeholders falls into this category, for example, you can partner with the deans to make sure they and their staff members can carry most of this workload. If you sit down with their teams to map out their unique audiences and help them craft outcomes and draft messaging, if you provide them with branded templates for the most likely modes of communication, and if you are content with work that is pretty good if not perfect, then you can accomplish a great deal through this kind of delegation.

Building these kinds of partnerships with your academic colleagues can be the trickiest part of succeeding in higher education marketing. Most faculty members are predisposed to be skeptical of brand and marketing work, viewing it as business-oriented and disingenuous. The trick here is to acknowledge their skepticism and its potential validity. The surest path to guaranteeing that your brand and marketing will be disingenuous, however, is to deliver an experience to students and stakeholders that fails to deliver on the university’s brand promise. Framing brand in this way, as a promise, immediately puts the emphasis squarely on the work of faculty and academic staff members—on the teaching and support they provide students, on their research, on their community service—which is exactly as it should be. By acknowledging how important it is for the university to ensure that faculty succeed, you can better position your work in marketing their efforts as a partnership, one in which they can help both to ensure your messaging is accurate and that they are thinking themselves about how best to deliver on the brand promise being made by the university. Marketing may be an essential component of a successful brand campaign, but the only way to achieve authentic differentiation is through a student experience that truly lives up to the messaging.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to build partnerships for your brand and marketing work among key campus stakeholders, let me know. Email me at [email protected] and we can talk about best practices for helping your college or university to genuinely live your brand. Or you can visit BVK’s Brand Academy for Colleges and Universities to explore how to develop and leverage your brand.

We also offer a free presentation called “It Takes a Campus to Make a Brand.” Through case studies and practical advice, you’ll explore ways to better collaborate with university leadership, faculty and deans, and staff members who work in student support, admissions, alumni and donor relations, and human resources. To learn more, download our Presentation Overview below.