Marketing in Higher Education - It's a multitude of missed opportunities

As one lioness told me, “Its no fun hunting zebras. They have an unusual talent of galloping forward whilst looking back and a great sense of timing that helps them kick you as you pounce on them. The kick can shatter your jaw and boom, you are on a permanent fast.”

“Gee, so tell me, how do you conquer your food market then?” I asked.

“Simple, I have a group of sisters and some of our daughters. We are all agile, fast, lean and focused lionesses who understand that our health, our success, recreation and earning a kill is a product of us attacking as a team. We are all participants, no weaklings here; we all have powerful paws, less body fat, great eyesight and strong jaws. Me, I’m the leader of the hunting pack; in your world you would call me the communications director. I’m tall, confident, adaptive, quick and unbelievably multi-skilled. During the hunt I lead the pack, I can move around with my energy intact; there is no time to worry about my lost cubs or the insects that are a nuisance. I stand motionless in the savannah grass, raise my body up to size up the open field. My sisters get into position on the periphery. They crawl, stop to gather further intelligence and make the necessary adjustment to the attack. Me, I coordinate and control this meeting of talent, skill and eagerness. I manage the timing, close in as my team moves into place. I understand the necessity of coordinated functioning in a ‘survival of the fitness’ environment. Gosh, nothing is as difficult as a zebra that has been hunted before. They are clever, informed and terribly sensitive to squeals from their communities. All this doesn’t always succeed as my team outwits and outplays them all the time. Well, almost all the time…”

This story about a hunting pack of lions speaks to a number of important issues in higher education marketing. Until the late 80s, institutions of higher learning in South Africa operated in a protected and regulated market that almost guaranteed each, a steady subsidy income and student enrolment. The attitude towards marketing then could best be described as an “Ag, we won’t go to them, they’ll come to us, they know who we are” attitude. No more. The market is now deregulated, open to outsiders, vulnerable to chancers and government subsidies come with a lot of strings attached.

These changes necessitated a change in attitude and the establishment of marketing strategies in institutions that once thought themselves too sophisticated for the skill they have long been teaching to their commerce students. Now this arrogance continues to plague some institutions of higher learning and hinders the attempts aimed at drawing the intellectual elite being pursued by various marketers.
Academics, the first citizens in these institutions, are not comfortable with the concepts of students as customers/clients and communities as the market. As a result discussions about marketing strategies devolve into a debate on definitions and origins of terms as opposed to being pinned around the consolidated approaches that would net institutions the type of student that would benefit from the tertiary education experience.

The adoption of the marketing concept is made difficult by its penetration to areas that come very close to what has previously been seen as purely academic work. Suddenly there is a threat of non-academic mortals having influence in the flow of funds to academic research and development. Marketing in institutions of higher learning is in essence a friend-raising exercise. Such friends could be donors and sponsors that help supplement income or students that help raise the profile of the institution thereby drawing more donors and then more students.

Most institutions approach this friend-raising exercise by forming teams targeting the various sections from which such friends are then drawn. These teams could be anything from a one-person show to a team as large as ten. They could be organised around a single department or be spread across numerous. There seems to be no single model that survives more than five years. The teams are forever forming and disintegrating as institutions come to grips with the intricacies of marketing.

But perhaps the Achilles' heel of the marketing activity in institutions of higher learning is the marketing team(s). It’s almost guaranteed that the top five institutions will use five different names for the same activity. From recruitment to community liaison to public affairs to corporate communications to communications office. These various names provide numerous definitions to the same process and could be taken as an indication of an inability to clearly define the core of the business being undertaken. It’s a market in some diffused state of identity crisis.

This identity crisis demonstrates a bigger struggle within organisations that are faced with the task of adopting what they have for very long considered a commercial concept that belongs to commercial organisations into what have been organisations that didn’t have to be run economically. Registered students translate into currency both in fees and government subsidies. The same students are used as pawns in attracting institutional donors. As a result, student recruitment has become one of the critical marketing exercises in tertiary institutions.

The constant restructuring and repositioning of the sections can’t be wrong in themselves. What is, in my view, the rot in the process, is the lack of attention to the composition of the teams that need to fulfill these functions. Take the example of a student recruitment team. The South African education market is not homogeneous. It has permutations of heterogeneity. Practitioners in the student recruitment market understand that for as long we have this constitution, for as long as we have an apartheid history and for as long as education is a political tool, our approach to recruitment has to be informed, calculated and heterogeneous.

Some institutions have chosen to approach the student recruitment process through some very creative models. Some of these models work well and produce campaigns that win prizes within the marketing/advertising industry. But then some are great ideas applied in totally mismatched areas and do a lot more damage than good.

As mentioned earlier, institutions of higher learning are new to the cutthroat marketing/advertising industry. They are therefore gullible to advertising agencies that sell them ideas based on the latest technology or trend as opposed to what would work for the target market of the said institution. The gullibility is fanned by the absence of effective strategies aimed at the various components of the target market. Almost all recruiting sections are afraid of spelling out their target market because they themselves aren’t convinced that it sounds ethical and specific enough not to draw attention from political and human rights groups.

The other area where the rot builds up is in the staff recruitment process of the recruiting staff. Staff recruitment is more often done along the lines of academic staff recruitment. The heads of the recruiting sections are very often graduate administrators who are often not apprised of the complexities of the target market. Equally mediocre teams who are either PR specialists or ex-teachers then support these HoD. I should be quick to point out that there is a lot of advantage in using people with a PR or school background if one’s market is education. What perhaps is my point is that the team members shouldn’t be one-sided but should rather be all-rounders, multi-skilled players.

Every consumer psychologist will tell you that there are different communication skills appropriate for boys only, girls only and mixed groups. That first language and second language users handle communication differently. Now if recruiting teams from institutions of higher learning do not understand this and instead carry the same display stands and freebees and deliver the same presentation to all groups, then who are they really pitching at? This is not to say that certain groups should be handled in patronising/discriminating ways. Coca-Cola has been sold to various cultural groups using different but equal approaches.

A homogeneous, middle of the road approach in a heterogeneous market results in publications that feature rainbow pictures of multicultural student groups sitting on campus lawns looking happy. The freebees are often water bottles given to teenagers whose only form of exercise is a stroll around the mall. These tools are useless to the institutions they are meant to market but profitable to printing companies that have constant price increases.

The problem with middle of the road approaches is that they are very often non-specific, and difficult to measure quantitatively. Its like fishing with a net, you catch a lot of algae in the process. This also means that you try and cover all areas of the market and this dilutes your impact.

Like a pack of lions out for a hunt, marketing teams should mark their prey well. They should be informed by their intelligence gathering unit about the ‘weaknesses’ and effective communication styles of the ‘prey’. They should carry the right kind of promotional material designed to get maximum impact. The leader of the ‘hunt’ should be informed and be well positioned to offer the right kind of co-ordination of the various activities that together produce the most effective hunt. The co-ordinating, control, management, intelligence-gathering and policy-making functions should be consolidated into a structured strategy that offers the best possible form of attack. Simply put, the marketing offering should be a viable system that is both structurally fit and able to create feedback mechanisms that help in the modification of activities when necessary.

Remember each lioness in a hunting pack is a strong hunter in her own right. She can strike a kill on her own through a number of traits she possesses. So each participant in a kill contributes strength towards attaining the goal. Recruiting teams can imitate this trait in their team composition. Tertiary institutions very often use quality as a selling point. It is therefore important that recruiting staff demonstrate quality through traits like fluency, eloquence and attention to detail. Such staff needs to understand the need to sometimes appear discerning, sophisticated and witty without sounding fake. You cannot sell a degree programme like you sell a used car. They need to be trained in public speaking and be multicultural communicators. This is no job for a philistine; one wrong move and your institutional image is damaged; perceptions about the quality of the product you promote slide down the scale.

Team composition is one area where you cannot compromise on quality. The team needs to be credible, uncompromising yet flexible. South African audiences are getting increasingly informed and most questions they pose are quizzes aimed to set someone up rather than get information. The recruiter needs to be prepared for this and provide disarming responses.

Recruitment whether targeting donors or students relies on image. The onus is on each team to define that image and then to maintain congruency between the defined image and the activities of teams that portray that image. Unless that becomes part of the communiqué, marketing in education will continue to be a multitude of missed opportunities.