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. Without exception, successful brands build their reputations on communicating what makes them different. Audi and Yorkshire Tea use their provenance. BMW and Fairy Liquid play on product performance. Persil and Heinz focus on caring for your family.

In a busy crowded world, you’re doing pretty well if people can spontaneously mention two or three words about your brand that stick in their memory. If nothing particular comes to mind, you’re in trouble. I know from my years in automotive marketing that buyers have only got room in their heads for three or four brands. If you’re not on their list, you’re going nowhere.

Odd then that the majority of British universities think they can compete by being as similar to each other as possible. Check out their website home pages and play ‘Swap the Brand’. They’re interchangeable. Many seem to be Russell Group wannabes, when their true function should be civic and vocational. Universities whose tuition income is twenty times as large as their research income describe themselves as ‘research-intensive’. They’re nothing of the sort, but they’d really like to be.

For this we can largely blame the class system which is alive and well within British higher education. An academic education has long been regarded as superior to vocational education, in England at least. With the disappearance of the polytechnics and their rebranding as universities in the early 1990s, they lost no time in taking on the behaviours, nomenclatures and appearances of their more established peers. Out went the flat caps, in came the bowlers.

With some honourable exceptions (among which I include Derby, Lincoln, Coventry, and Nottingham Trent) many downplayed their valuable civic community roles and the quality of their vocational education and opted to behave as if they were Russell Group manqués.

In the process, they abandoned their own competitive strengths and began to try to compete on the same ground as their more established peers. But as student numbers increased, many decided they wanted a ‘better’ university for their £50,000+ loans. And since the entire sector has long conditioned them to equate “better” with “higher ranked” (indeed, THE and QS have built entire businesses on this false premise) unsurprisingly students began increasingly to choose older, more established and more academically prestigious universities.

Which is why we now have so many middle and lower ranked universities in financial trouble. The lesson they are learning the hard way is that you should always play to your own strengths, never to those of a stronger competitor.

It also begins to explain why most British universities cling to a single generic idea of what a university should be. And why so many fail to grasp that to succeed in the new competitive landscape, they have to be distinctive and different from each other.

The same is true of the degree programmes they offer. Far too many are utterly generic. But more of that another day.