The University President: The New CMO

Why would a prospective student, faculty, donor or alumni want to live your brand? Why are you the first choice for some students? What gets your faculty up every morning? What keeps alumni connected emotionally and financially? It is the desire to be part of a unique community that shares a vision. It is participating in a differentiated experience that springs from the very soul of the institution. It is the university brand.

Administrators, faculty, and students all contribute, shape and help build a brand.   Traditionally, the university president's responsibilities have been focused on institutional planning, balancing the budget and exceeding university fundraising and endowment goals. Over time, the president has become responsible for student recruitment and retention and improving the overall student experience.

Who is the custodian of the soul of a university? Now, it has become a university president's responsibility.

Voice of the Customer

In other industries it is the CMO, or Chief Marketing Officer, who is responsible for ensuring that a company remains focused on the customer. The CMO manages a company's communications and actions to deliver a clearly defined customer experience.

"Many colleges and universities are failing to develop their marketing potentials because their presidents are mistaking insular admissions, promotion or development activities for total marketing activities," writes Dr. Eugene Fram .

Higher education institutions historically do not have a centralized customer marketing organization. As a result, college marketing efforts are often disjointed, occasionally overlap, and lack a university-wide focus. Many institutions have let the market define who they are. Today, to be successful, a university brand needs a champion at the top to lead that process and provide focus to the university's message.

Evangelist for the Brand

And no one is better positioned to be that champion than the president. He serves as the public face of the university, and acts as an advocate for his or her faculty, administration and students to the Board of Directors. As such, the president has the unique perspective to create a shared vision for a university, one that can align internal stakeholders and more effectively utilize resources and actions. The president's commitment to marketing and communicating a university brand sends an important signal to the institution. But how do you deliver on student expectations and ensure student retention without first defining those expectations?

Translating and expressing the brand is the first step. By working with an agency or brand consultancy that specializes in education marketing, the university president can develop a plan for approaching university stakeholders in order to help them understand the brand's values. Once you've established the basis for a unique experience, the key is to roll out the new identity from within.

Catalyst for Collaboration

Successful university marketing begins with internal constituents, especially faculty. Stereotypically, faculty is resistant to marketing efforts because they have not been involved in the choices that led to resource allocation. This can be avoided, simply, by including faculty in the formative stages of the brand decision-making process. You can build trust and buy-in by demonstrating how a new brand vision will not only benefit the students, but also the faculty and university as a whole.

Then, when the president reaches out to all constituents to bring them together to find common ground, he or she is acting as a powerful instrument for collaboration and change.

Champion of Resources

The president is also responsible for institutional planning and budget allocation, a political hotbed, yet an important strategic component in brand building. When budgetary resources are prioritized and allocated to deliver on a promise of a quality student experience, all constituents are working toward the same goal. Discussions can begin by simply asking: "How does this decision strengthen our brand, our student experience? Are there other priorities?" Soon all funding discussions of any institutional initiatives, be they faculty recruitment or meeting student enrollment goals, have a singular focus.

Another area that needs to be aligned is the disparate communication resources spread across the university. By tradition, education budgets are fragmented under different departments, reporting structures and promotional goals. The approach and strategies for individual schools and programs are frequently inconsistent with overall university messages. Often there isn't a singular communication plan that focuses all of the university's resources on established goals.

Without a definitive message, you can't expect students, faculty and donors to come to the same conclusion about what you stand for. The president must integrate all communication efforts, from advertising, public relations, website development, search engine marketing, brochures and newsletters to student retention efforts, under a specific reporting and management structure in order to easily direct university-wide communications. Establishing a consistent brand message for the university allows you to use resources more effectively and increase the impact of outreach initiatives.

Magnet for Support

According to the Council for Aid to Education, declines in government funding are requiring colleges to actively solicit private donations ($29.75 billion in 2007 ) and rely more heavily on fundraising. Being a worthy cause just isn't enough anymore. There are many institutions vying for project funding. Donors want to invest in institutions and programs that share their values, have a clear focus and can make an impact. Fundraising can be more effective when you have specific student goals in mind because it helps donors understand where the university is headed and how contributions will help achieve that goal. The more powerfully you can make your brand's purpose come to life, the more effective you will be at generating support for achieving its goals.

The Brand Starts Here

When a president starts thinking like a CMO, all of those seemingly disparate duties become unified under a clear objective: building the university brand.

The university president must be ready to provide the inspired leadership that will define what a school stands for and where it is going.  By actively defining the values and marketing position of the university brand, the president can galvanize resources to gain university endowments and exceed performance goals. The brand vision must start here.

The customer or student can get lost without a champion at the top. The time has come for the president to take responsibility for defining and executing the university brand. He, or she, is the difference engine who will shape the future through a well-articulated higher education marketing initiative that involves all aspects and participants in the university life.