Students are conservative - ignore this at your peril.

One thing I have learned in many years in marketing and advertising, is that young people are seriously conservative when it comes to big decisions. In the 1990's I used to be responsible for Ford's advertising across Europe, while working at Ogilvy and Mather.  During my time there, one of the more interesting cars we launched was the Ford Ka. A bulbous little thing on skinny tyres, that looked like Ford's late answer to Citroen's 2CV. The client was desperate for it to appeal to young people, ignoring the inconvenient fact that young people generally did not buy new cars - having more important priorities in their life. We were expected to create branding and advertising which overcame all the conventions of the market, and the Ka was duly launched in a bright colour range, with funky advertising and events. It didn't work of course. Early customer research showed that it was more popular among the grand-dames of the 16th arrondissement than among the young in the banlieues. 

The same is true in higher education - at least it is in England. I learned this early on after I joined the University of Exeter in 2011. As the University's first head of marketing in some years, and being then a higher education virgin, I commissioned some qualitative research into prospective student motivations, fears, and concerns - just as the £9,000 student loan system was about to be introduced. One of our key learnings was that students wanted to choose a degree title that they could tell their friends about - without having to explain or justify.  English. Physics. Maths. Straight forward and nothing fancy.  With them about to take on massive loans, their university decision was critical - and within that, the degree title was important too. They didn't want a degree title that was new or unusual. 

So when a well-meaning professor asked me what i thought of a potential degree programme called BA Environmental Humanities, I had no option but to tell him that i had two problems with the name. One being 'environmental', the other 'humanities'. My advice to all universities is be conservative in the name, and you can be creative & original in the descriptor. It would be a shame if an innovative new programme died a death because this wasn't understood. This is just one good reason why academics should work in partnership with a skilled marketer when it comes to refreshing existing programmes - and even more when it comes to launching new. 

A good marketing person should mediate between the university and the student. Representing the one to the other, to the maximum benefit of both. If you don't bother to listen, then you simply won't hear.