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Marketing in Higher Education
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With the advent of fees for full-time students and a very crowded and competitive market place, the reputation of your university will play an even more critical role in student - and academic - recruitment. Your reputation however is built on much more than results and research status.
Prospective students and other stakeholders will build a view of your institution from many sources with your official publications being just one. Everything from signage, location, how the phone is answered and building condition to web blogs and conversations with friends will be factors. Managing the messages relayed by these diverse channels is the role of marketing and in particular, brand management.
Despite this vital role, marketing is little understood in HEI and often perceived as a function by which the latest prospectus is published and is rarely part of the development of the organisational strategy. It appears that marketing in the HEI sector has failed to market its value and promote it potential contribution. In this article we hope to address that situation and present food for thought about where marketing sits within a HEI and what its role could or should be to meet the challenges faced by the Higher Education sector.
Is Marketing Important?
So why should marketing be regarded as so important? Most HEIs develop corporate strategies; some linked to a vision as to where they want to go and what sort of an institution they want to be. These are typically translated into plans and actions and may be broken down further into departmental strategies and plans and so on, and so the academic year starts. However, the glue that is often missing in this process is the marketing contribution. Consider the following questions:
- Does your vision or strategy set out how you want to look and feel to students, prospective students and the wider community?
- If so, what are you doing to achieve this and how is your success measured?
- Are you providing services people want now and how do you know what they will want in the future?
- How well are your recruitment activities working and how do you capitalise on your successes and learn from your failures?
- Is there a mechanism in place for feeding this information back into the strategy and planning process?
If you can readily answer all of these questions then you are doing better than most. All of these questions are aspects of marketing and should be considered if you want to effectively meet the aims and objectives you have set yourselves. Indeed, it could be argued that they are some of the fundamental building blocks for developing your corporate strategies and plans in the first place. Without consideration of these, you are setting sail without a map to show you where you are, where you want to be and how far you have travelled.
Marketing Strategy
So where do you start in developing a marketing strategy? In an organisation with devolved marketing you will probably need to think about developing local marketing plans that are aligned with corporate plans. A way of doing this is to incorporate a marketing strategy framework as part of the corporate document that guides the development of lower level strategies and plans. This may include the setting of expectations, standards and targets.
Developing a marketing strategy can be a daunting prospect for any organisation akin to a student staring at a blank sheet of paper with a 5000 word essay to write.
Like the student, you should look to others for inspiration and learn from organisations who have been there, done that. This way you don't waste time reinventing the wheel thus allowing you to fast-track your development.
Benchmarking your current marketing function can be a quick and effective way to identify strengths, underlying issues and gaps to address. You can set up your own benchmarking group, or may already be in one, however there are quicker, less resource intensive options. A number of consultancies will be able to benchmark your performance against other organisations and you can even do it yourself using the Benchmark Index through your local Business Links. Though an objective view point will invariably be more revealing.
Benchmarking will also help you gauge your current organisational arrangements for managing and administering marketing functions across your institution. HEIs are often complex structures that have grown organically and serve a wide range of very different stakeholders.
As a result, lines of communication and responsibility may have become unclear or even not exist. The shift towards more student focused organisations will further stretch these lines. To be a truly student focused organisation and to deliver effective marketing can only be achieved where communication and reporting lines are clear, understood by all and most importantly, meet the current requirements of the organisation. If this does not describe your institution you will hamstring your marketing strategy and its implementation unless you undertake an organisational review at the same time.
So, is structured marketing important? It helps you set out what sort of an organisation you want to be. It supports and helps you achieve your aims and objectives. It can support decision making through hard evidence. It can help ensure your institution maintains direction through time. It can flag potential issues relating to a course or product before they become real issues. It can help you address the changes that will come about through the introduction of course fees. It will help you face up to the growing competition in Higher Education. The answer is yes, and probably more so now then at any other time.
If you have any questions about the subjects covered in this white paper or you would like to find out more about how Oakleigh Consulting could help your organisation, please contact us on 0161 835 4100 or email us.
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