2024/25 will be crunch time for many universities. It’s time to open up the closed shop.
Back in 2011, Steve Smith and David Allen, the dynamic duo who’d been driving Exeter up the league tables for years, hired me out of the private sector to head up university marketing. They were anticipating the highly competitive free for all that was about to be created the following year by the near tripling of tuition fees and the removal of the student numbers cap. My job was made relatively easy in 2012 when Exeter joined the Russell Group and by the time I left in 2016, Steve used to boast that 50% of AAA+ students shortlisted Exeter on UCAS. Brand perception had finally caught up with reality.
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Too small to succeed. Where the OfS higher education financial review should start
The news that the Government is planning to increase the undergraduate tuition fee cap to £10,500 over five years, then allow it to rise with inflation is nothing but a holding measure while the OfS carries out its review evaluating ‘the financial health and management and governance capability of HE providers to ensure that the interests of students are safeguarded throughout any financial adjustments or transition, including potential market exits.’
In non-procurement speak, what this really means is that the Government is betting that the HE sector will prove incapable of sorting itself out and that the OfS (advised by its newly appointed £4,000,000 fee consultancy partner) is preparing to step in and do it for them.
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Inequality in university applications is a problem higher education can't solve on its own
Amid all the good news today, (Clearing Day) the striking contrast for me is that 50%+ of young people in poorer London boroughs are now applying to university compared to less than 20% of young people in parts of the north and north-west and some of our long disadvantaged coastal towns.
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Why is kidology rampant within British universities?
In the competitive world of business, brands fight hard to present themselves as distinctive. Using propositions which derive from a point of difference, actual or perceptual. Think VW. Red Bull. Or more recently, Greggs.
Most of our universities do the exact opposite. They cling to their idea of a single generic ideal so fiercely you couldn’t slide a sheet of paper between them. If you don’t believe me, check out a few websites and play ‘Swap the Logo’.
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Why HE marketers should be sceptical about the Data Doomsters
If fatalism is the belief that everything in life is pre-determined and that we have no control over our own destiny, then free will is the belief that we have the power to choose our own actions and shape our own destiny. Which is why, as a marketer, I tend to be sceptical about people who argue that past trends determine future destiny – and that there’s nothing to be done about it.
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Why academics shouldn’t be in charge of programme presentation
In my former life as a Mad Man, Heinz was one of my most prized clients. Our advertising was always based on a strong emotional sell, there being no rational USP attached to one can of beans over another. Then one day, a new director of marketing was appointed, a man who’d spent his whole adult life in accountancy, a man who was intensely rational. He said he wanted us to base our beanz advertising on the least marginal point of difference that consumers could think of. That every bean was evenly coated in tomato sauce. Mad.
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How to help your Vice-Chancellor sleep better at night
There’s not much worse for a VC than the prospect of having to close a subject. The internal repercussions together with external reputational damage can be horrendous. Some closures might be understandable, including the recent spate of modern universities dropping humanities courses. But others are the product of a failure of what we might call micro-marketing.
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International or Bust? The inadvertent consequences of the Government cap on UG fees
Our government has an unfortunate habit of making decisions that have inadvertent and often damaging consequences. Back in 2012, when it introduced a £9,000 cap on UG student loans, it never expected the entire sector to price to the max.
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Why 20,000 more students were wrong in 2021 to think they’d get a better education at a Russell Group university
The Russell Group has become a brand, a byword for excellence in UK higher education. Schools use it as a lazy measure of their success. Parents are told that it’s the next best thing to Oxbridge. Students are given to believe that outsiders are second-rate.
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How to persuade students to choose your university over higher-ranked, even Russell Group competitors
Brand Russell Group has become a byword for overall excellence in UK higher education, when the truth is that it is a self-selecting university cartel whose members care more about research than they do about teaching.
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It’s time to debunk the myth that Russell Group universities are best for student education
The Russell Group is growing its UG market share because students, parents, teachers and employers have been falsely persuaded that its members offer a better education than the other 110.
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Why university marketers need to get more involved in programme marketing
University brand reputation may be the most critical factor in students’ minds, but they will then turn their attention to comparing programmes from their short-listed universities.
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To compete successfully, you must be distinctive. So why do most universities aspire to be the same?
In the private sector, brands compete on their points of difference. Differences that might be substantial or marginal, real or perceptual, values-driven or benefits-driven.
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Higher education’s obsession with rankings is damaging the majority of British universities
The recent debacle over A-level grades presided over by Frank Spencer’s doppelgänger has led to thousands of students being able to enrol into a ‘better’ university.
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Maximising conversion to firm
In the private sector, successful companies involve their marketers early in the product development process, assessing the market opportunity, understanding the customer’s wants and needs, then developing a distinctive and competitive proposition.
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‘Marketisation’ has become a dirty word in higher education. Here’s how professional marketing can clean it up.
Three news items caught my eye over Christmas and New Year.
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2019. The year Clearing became Cool.
It doesn’t seem that long ago that going into Clearing was an admission of failure. Failure for the student, because they’d missed their grades. Failure for the university because it was an implicit confession of weakness.
How things have changed.
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£1,000,000,000 spent on widening participation is far too much, far too late
Universities are spending more than £1,000,000,000 every year on highly local campaigns with a too little, too late focus on teenagers
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The Augar Report reveals the failure of marketing in universities
Amongst the many analyses, insights and recommendations in the Augar report, the evidence of the sector’s failure to adopt professional marketing practice becomes all too clear.
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Unconditional offers demean the universities that offer them
The news today from UCAS that over a third of students in England, Wales & Northern Ireland received an unconditional offer in the last cycle reminds us how many universities are scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of desperation tactics.
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