Education

Why marketers must break free of short-term tactical campaigns and start to focus on building long-term brand value

Developing an effective marketing strategy in the higher education industry is nothing if not challenging. Unlike other industries, regular application deadlines, limited student places and requirements to fill programmes with culturally diverse cohorts all distort the traditional approach marketers would ordinarily take to capture market share and increase sales. Imagine for example if a company that sells shoes could only sell its shoes during four brief windows each year (applications deadlines) . . . the pressure to focus on conversion-based activities during those windows and in the preceding months would be overwhelming, right? Or imagine if an online software provider could only sell 300 licenses (or student places) each year . . . how would you justify brand-building campaigns (or any marketing activity for that matter) when such a low number of sales are required to meet the quota? These distortions in higher education have seemingly led many institutions down a path of short-term thinking, where marketing teams move from filling one cohort to the next with little consideration for their institution’s long-term growth or reputation.

For guidance on how to address these unique challenges, marketers in the higher education space can look to a report published by Les Binet and Peter Field, two heavyweight researchers in the field of marketing effectiveness. The report, entitled ‘Effectiveness in Context’, is a manual for brand building and organisational growth that any marketing strategist would benefit from reading cover to cover. While offering a new perspective on how brands grow in differing contexts, the core principle of the article would not be unfamiliar to anyone close to Binet and Field’s (2018) previous publications.

According to Binet and Field (2018), there are two kinds of marketing, Sales Activation, or that which focuses on short-term sales uplifts and involves behavioural prompts that nudge consumers to want to buy now (think promotional messages), and Brand Building, or that which focuses on long-term growth and building brand awareness and reputation. Binet and Field argue that in most contexts, businesses will want to strike a 60:40 balance between the marketing spend that is attributed to each of these categories, with 60% of the budget going towards brand building and 40% towards sales activation.

The logic is simple, while sales activation is more likely to drive consumers to take an action in the short term, these initiatives will do little to build any kind of lasting connection with the consumer, while conversely, brand-building activities may not lead to a short-term uplift in sales, but they will build a connection with the consumer that makes them want to choose the brand in the future (potentially multiple times).

According to ‘Effectiveness in Context’, there are key situations when this 60:40 ratio is even more polarised, and where marketing spend should be skewed even more towards brand-building activities, this includes:

• When a brand’s product attracts a high degree of consideration before a purchase is made;
• When a brand’s product is purchased for rational reasons rather than emotional reasons; and
• When a consumer is likely to do a high degree of online research before making a purchase.

Consideration

There are few products that a person will buy in their lifetime that have the potential to influence their life as greatly as tertiary education, and with the exception of real estate, or perhaps an especially nice car, there are few investments that are as costly (and thus as high risk). All this leads to one conclusion — that consumers are likely to give more consideration to tertiary education than they are to most other investments they are ever likely to make. According to Binet and Field (2018), ‘the more consideration that people give to purchase, the more effective sales activation will be’. But rather than using this as a justification to invest more in conversion-based activities, Binet and Field argue that marketers should do the opposite. They contend that if it is relatively easy to convert consumers with Sales Activation campaigns, and relatively more difficult to establish brand awareness and reputation, then marketers can ‘get away with’ spending less on the former and have a need to spend more on the latter.

Rational purchases

The degree to which higher education is a rational decision is widely debated. According to Hossler, Schmit and Vesper (1999), ‘students want to maximise their utility and minimise their risks, i.e. they assume that a student’s university choice is a rational process and that students will always do what is best for them’. In contrast, Kotler and Fox (1995) argue that university choice is more heavily influenced by ‘status-attainment’, which, in turn, is driven by emotional factors such as ‘socialisation, the role of the family, social networks and academic conditions’.

Regardless of this debate, it’s difficult to see how rational factors wouldn’t play a dominant role in most student’s higher education decisions. Looking specifically at business school applications, the Graduate Management Admission Council’s latest ‘Candidate Decision Making Summary Report’ (2019) identified that ‘Candidates most often say quality/reputation (e.g., rankings, accreditation, faculty) is the most important selection criteria they have in choosing a school’.

According to Binet and Field (2018), when a purchase decision is more rational, people will respond more immediately to direct activity and promotions. This means consumers are more likely to be susceptible to sales activation than brand advertising, and as with high consideration purchases, marketers can afford to divert their marketing budget away from conversion-based activities (where it will be relatively easy to achieve results) and towards brand-building activity (where marketing communications will be relatively less effective).

High Online Research

Finally, in areas where consumers perform a high degree of online research before making a purchase, Binet and Field (2018) argue that consumers will be more aware of and responsive to sales activation activities. If consumers are actively researching their alternatives, they are simply more likely to download a brochure or engage with a higher education institution’s conversion-based campaigns. Simultaneously, brand-building campaigns will be less effective as they will not help the potential student assess the purchase decisions that are available to them.

The importance of online research in higher education would surely come as a surprise to no one. The internet is rife with websites that help students assess the range of tertiary options that are available to them, and university websites offer a wealth of information about specific programmes. According to a report authored by Google Insights and TNS Australia (2018), ‘97% of students considering higher education researched their options online…with 57% using a search engine at some point during their path to purchase’.

Ultimately, as with products that require high consideration and that are bought using rational criteria, Binet and Field suggest that ‘smart brands will take advantage of the relative ease with which sales activation results can be achieved and divert money out of activation and into brand building’.

So what does this all mean?

In short, marketers in higher education institutions need to break free of short-term thinking and start to see the forest for the trees. Short-term sales activation or conversion-based marketing can be achieved with relative ease (and for relatively less money) as prospective students are already giving a high degree of rational consideration and doing a high degree of research before making a purchase, and as a result, those institutions that will grow in the long term will be those that break free of the short-term mould and focus instead on brand-building campaigns that develop a unique value proposition that distinguishes their offering from their competitors.

 

References

Binet, L., Field, P. (2018). Effectiveness in Context: A Manual for Brand Building. Available at: https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/publications-reports/effectiveness-in-context [Accessed: 05 July 2020]

Kotler, P.; Fox, K. (1995). Strategic Marketing for Educational Institutions, (2nd ed.), New Jersey, Prentice-Hall.

Hossler, D., Schmit, J. and Vesper, N. (1999). Going to College: How Social, Economic, and Educational Factors Influence the Decisions Students Make. Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore.

Graduate Management Admissions Council. (2019). Demand for MBA and Business Master’s Programs: Insights on Candidate Decision Making. [online] Available at: https://www.gmac.com/market-intelligence-and-research/research-library/admissions-and-application-trends/demand-for-mba-and-business-masters-programs-summary-report-2019 [Accessed: 05 July 2019].

Google / TNS, (2018). The path to enrolment for higher education: why engaging students online is the new syllabus for success [online]. Available at: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-aunz/consumer-insights/path-enrollment-higher-education-why-engaging-students-online-new-syllabus-success/ [Accessed: 05 July 2020].