Why brand management is your best bet for fighting higher ed’s image problem

Colleges and universities looking to win over prospective students have never faced a tougher environment, with strident critiques of higher ed having become commonplace in the media. Social channels, in particular, by giving anyone and everyone—including our detractors—a megaphone, amplify their messages like never before.

In this context, brand management–historically an afterthought for many institutions–takes on new and grave importance. A strong reputation in the market, painstakingly built up through your efforts, is the only force able to prevail in the face of profound and widespread skepticism regarding higher education, including doubts regarding the value of a degree from your institution.

What Enrollment Leaders Are Saying About the Great Opt-Out

The relationship between brand and marketing

As essential as it has become, brand work can be difficult and expensive, and it can therefore be a challenge to reconcile with other pressing priorities. In particular, it can be tough to figure out resource allocation between direct marketing for recruitment and work on your brand.

The good news is that the two are mutually reinforcing. Excellent direct marketing is the most effective way of getting your brand in front of prospective students and other key audiences. It builds equity in your brand, which is key. And brand work gives you the right messages to use and the creative expression that is so important to ensuring that those messages resonate.

How to prioritize your efforts

That said, even given the virtuous circle they form, you should assign brand work and direct marketing different weight when it comes to prioritization.

While it is true that brand work is your best bet for altering students’ perception of you and their attitudes toward college-going more generally, direct marketing should remain the foundation of your recruitment-marketing work.

There are good reasons why the blocking-and-tackling aspects of student recruitment—name buys, email campaigns, mailers, digital ads, on-campus events, etc.—get so much attention from admissions teams. With a proven ability to deliver results and an ever-growing ability to personalize, direct marketing enables you to rapidly adjust to changing circumstances. The right way to look at brand work is as a means of further boosting the efficacy of a fully dialed-in direct-marketing program.

For more on this topic, including helpful resources and frameworks to develop and activate your brand, download our insight paper, Brand Management for Enrollment Leaders.