Fighting Dire With Dire: How University Marketing is Failing the Next Generation
Universities specialise in boasting about their world class facilities, but they are still likely to fail future students, says Robin Fenwick.
9 Jul 2011, 19:42
Letting down the next generation?
You may well have had the hideous misfortune to be asked if your company were a car, what particular vehicle would it be? It’s a question beloved of marketing consultants, and for all I know car manufacturers pontificate the flipside - what kind of companies their cars would run. Thus a generation of bright young things has been raised to metamorphose their local branch of Waitrose in to a BMW and back again.
These exercises, for all their faults, help to expose the character of an organisation. In that spirit, imagine that a prospective undergraduate walks in to a party where each UK university has been transformed in to a partygoer. They know this is a party at which they could meet someone who will change their lives. All they have to do is pin their hopes on a person they like, and pledge up to £9k a year for the pleasure of their company.
By the time they've been introduced to the fifth person, our potential undergraduate has hit on a problem. Everyone looks the same, everyone sounds the same, everyone talks the same talk, and they're all promising the earth. Faced with an eery crush of enticing bright smiles, the budding scholar really has no idea if the person they’ll go home with lives in an Oxford penthouse, or an Ipswich bedsit.
It is a paradox that hundreds of universities teach or research the subject of marketing in a richness of ways, and yet the Higher Education sector is becoming so acutely self-absorbed that from the look of their marketing materials, swathes of universities could be merging in to one vast and rather bland entity.
You can browse any university prospectus with a bullshit bingo card to hand and be guaranteed of a full house of words like leading, first, career, lively, awards, international, and inspirational. A thousand faces of grinning photogenic students glow out of hundreds of university websites, each carrying ever more carefully framed photographs which show off only the very best of what each university has to offer. Allusions are made to millions of pounds invested in (often unspecified) buildings. The 2008 Research Assessment Exercise found research of “world leading quality” in 94% of universities, allowing virtually every institution to boast of its world leading research status - and they do.
It could be argued that there is nothing wrong with universities trumpeting what they do best, but with over one hundred institutions telling much the same story we are left with an homogenous and indistinct mess. Most importantly, potential undergraduates who are being asked to make a major financial commitment lack the information necessary to make an informed choice.
Universities have been dishearteningly slow to adapt to the current funding regime. It is blatantly obvious to many that, in return for pledging to repay a "tuition fee" of thousands of pounds, students should be told up front how many hours of tuition they will receive, and from whom. They should be told what their employment prospects are if they work hard and get their degree. They should be told what condition the teaching and social facilities are really in. While this information is certainly collected, it is not often made available, and it is rarely published in an attractive way. The government knows this, which is why the recent Higher Education White Paper insisted universities publish data so that independent organisations can compile new guides. We have to hope that Which? can pick up where the hideous Directgov Unistats site has left off.
Universities are not hawking a tangible £36,000 product. They’re selling a years-long commitment to hard work and personal growth in a supportive environment, with some fun along the way. It’s essential that they are up front with undergraduates, telling them what they will get for their money. This demands honest marketing.
It’s time for a university, any university, to stop fighting the inevitable consumerisation of Higher Education, and to show instead how it can be done well, and balanced with the long-established understanding of universities for the public good. Let’s see a university show the true range of facilities on its website. Let prospects watch recordings of actual lectures. Be up front about the amount of effort proper degree study needs. Use infographics to show where the institution really sits when it comes to value for money. Demonstrate your distinctiveness honestly.
If universities cannot or will not create a competitive market of distinctive institutions, in time they will get a sharp shock from private providers do not have legacies of old buildings and entrenched union interests. They will need only one very clear message to set themselves apart from the established sector - “we offer everything the others do, in more modern facilities, for thousands of pounds less, and we treat you as a paying customer.” It has its attractions.
Last year, nationally compiled student satisfaction ratings stalled at 82%. With students paying many thousands of pounds more for degrees and postgraduate study, this is likely to drop sharply in years to come. There will be a time lag, as only final-year students are surveyed, so the fireworks will come safely after the next election.
In the meantime, Universities are in danger of being their own worst enemy when it comes to student satisfaction. If they promise the earth, it is not unreasonable for students to expect that it will be delivered. An Audi is a fine car, but if the marketing materials promised you a Ferrari, you’d rightly want your money back – something to which undergraduates who have been missold degree study are currently not entitled.
The author
Robin Fenwick
Robin Fenwick is a digital communications expert and the co-founder of LibDem Voice.
Full profile →
Comments (0)
Subscribe to this posts's comments feed