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.

He didn’t last long.

Accountants are good at bean-counting, not bean-marketing. So why is it that in a highly competitive market, most universities give their academics free rein to present their degree programmes to prospective students? They may know their subject better than anyone else, but this hardly qualifies them to work out how best to write about their programme to students faced with a choice of more than 57 varieties.

Because they describe, not sell. This is why degree descriptions are often so intensely introspective, written often on the assumption that the student wants to make an academic or professional career out of the subject, when the truth is that for most students, their degree is a means to a different end, not an end in itself. There’s usually no attempt to set the programme in a broader context, no highlighting of transferable skills, and most importantly, no attempt to distinguish the programme from the many others from competing universities that will bear exactly the same degree name. 

Academics are not natural marketers, which is why they should work with their marketing colleagues to produce copy which provides a compelling reason why students should consider your programme over another. Academics should first write about the substance and structure of the degree programme. Marketers should then convert this into a selling argument, giving it a distinctive reasoned theme as to why students should prefer, meanwhile making the language accessible to an 18 year old. Without laying themselves open to the charge of dumbing down.

Of course, there’s rarely such a thing as a Unique Selling Proposition, so the best strategy is to work out what you do best, run it right through the copy, with supportive evidence and with a strong top and tail summary argument. Don’t worry that other people might say something similar. If you’re always looking in the rear view mirror, you’ll get nowhere. Besides, he who takes the ground, owns the ground.

What’s going to stop this from happening? Some academics might be reluctant to relinquish control. Marketing departments in many universities are under-resourced and have to focus on macro issues. Some will have a comms background, rather than marketing. So they may lack the skills required to develop differentiated degree propositions. In which case, they may need training. 

Whatever the obstacle, it’s well worth the effort to overcome. When I was being interviewed to be marketing head honcho at Exeter after an entire life in the private sector, the Director of HR challenged me to explain how I would get academics on board. My naïve answer was surely we both wanted the same result: success. 

Except I then discovered in practice that it wasn’t naïve. The very complementary nature of our skills would make a good partnership between academia and marketing enormously productive.

And great fun for both.