Why 92s should not confuse reputation with ranking

‘I want you to know, David, that I am very comfortable with the word ‘brand’. 

So spoke Steve Smith, now Sir Steve of course, within weeks of me joining the University of Exeter as Head of Marketing back in the summer of 2011. Why did Steve want to reassure me on this? Because I’d joined Exeter from the private sector, after a long career in advertising and marketing in London, promoting some of the world’s biggest brands. And Steve, aware that there would be a degree of scepticism among some in his academic body to the very notion of marketing, was kindly showing me some pre-emptive support. 

This was the year before the sector decided en masse to charge undergraduate students £9,000 pa. Universities strong, mediocre and weak, going for the maximum allowed, the very opposite of what the Government had intended. 

Once the cap was removed, the weak and mediocre discovered to their considerable cost that there is a relationship between perceived quality and the price that you can get away with. And ‘customers’ (excuse another word from the world of marketing) understandably began to migrate to universities with the best perceived quality they could get in to with their grades. 

It is the issue of perceived quality which makes me think that universities are right to focus on ‘reputation’ rather than ‘brand’. Generally, ‘reputation’ is the cumulative impact of what people say about you, while ‘brand’ is more the cumulative impact about what you say about yourself. In higher education, people trust substance more than spin. They are right to do so.

In every market I have worked in there is an inverse relationship between the quality of a brand and its propensity to spend large amounts on advertising. So it is in higher education. High quality universities do not need to advertise. Their reputation comes before them, more from the quality of their research than the quality of teaching.

Those without the research substance have persuaded themselves that the only way to compete is to spend considerable amounts on advertising. They usually compound this by banging on about their high rankings as a so-called ‘modern’ university, trying to con students into believing that they are what they are not. Trying to compete on Russell Group territory, fooling no-one but themselves.

The reputation of post-92 universities should be built on substance, not advertising puffery. The substance in their case being be the quality of teaching they offer, the student experience they deliver, their student employability record. There is no shame in being a brilliantly vocational university, but academic snobbery often leads universities to magnify their marginal research impact. This not only ignores the fact that their students are vocationally-driven, it also ignores the inconvenient truth that most other post-92s are playing the same game. 

If you want to compete successfully, why would you do either?