After I wrote my first book about 25 years ago, published by CASE (The Council for Advancement and Support of Education), titled Marketing Higher Education-A Practical Guide, I wondered what the next "big" issue for higher education would be. The subject was not very difficult to predict. I'm sure you could have predicted it as well as I did. The subject became the title for my second CASE book: Institutional Image: How to Define, Improve, Market It.

Image assessment
Now, in my consulting business, Topor Consulting Group International, often carried out in conjunction with my colleagues, Dr. Moshe Engelberg (Ph.D., Stanford) and Professor Emerita Elizabeth Pollard, as Topor Consulting Group International, one of the most frequent requests we get is to help schools, community colleges, colleges, universities and higher educational systems assess their images in the marketplace. In most cases the assessment includes a competitive analysis, strategies and recommendations for image improvement. These recommendations are very specific, often defining content of messages and necessary actions.

Who cares?
You may think, "Why is it important to know what your school's image is?" That question has many possible answers. One of the immediate responses may be to help in recruitment and retention. Understanding how your institution is perceived by key audiences such as potential students, parents, counselors and alumni and internally on the part of admissions advisors, faculty and key administrators can yield powerful information to assist in the recruitment process. Using this information creatively, one can develop recruitment processes and materials that will assist, for example, in reducing attrition and better attracting the right kind of student. Information can help to make more effective matches between provider (your school) and user (new student). Better matches mean expectations are better met, contributing to satisfaction on the part of the user (student). Understanding perceptions and applying findings can support your school's efforts on many fronts, including curricular development, faculty recruitment and a host of other activities that require understanding and positive feelings from key audiences.

Identifying and understanding important audiences is another reason to conduct image research. For example, we have found that, for some institutions, placement of graduates for employment is a vital issue. So we are careful to include current and potential employers in our studies. We may compare graduates of one school to another from employers' viewpoints.

Even the big ones make mistakes!
A responsive institution has a strong interest in how its publics perceive the school and its programs and services, since we know people often respond to an institution's image, not necessarily its reality. A public holding negative images of a school will avoid or disparage it, even if the institution is of high quality and those holding a positive image will be drawn to it. Images can change as a result of circumstances, events and developments. For example, Stanford had a significant loss of image power as a result of international media publicity over its indirect cost problems, where the government and a legislative investigatory committee alleged improper charge backs for research. Unfortunately, in Stanford's case, the Board and key leaders have decided to "pull in the reins," rather than approach the problem directly through research, strategic planning and implementation. Strangely, Stanford's leaders have chosen to cut out most of its Public Affairs department(through layoffs and repositioning), and project a low profile with the idea that "No news is good news" and the problem will go away. In my estimation, this "no news attitude" is dangerous and suggests stagnation and failure and will ultimately damage the institution.

Often a school is viewed as responsive by some groups and unresponsive by others. It's obviously important to determine why this occurs. Can it be changed? What are the behind-the-scenes issues in the minds' of perceivers? People tend to form images of institutions based on often limited and even inaccurate information, images that affect the success of the school. This may include attendance, donations, media perceptions, joining faculty or staff and other tangible and intangible results.

Understand for success!
It's most important that you and your colleagues understand your school's image in the marketplace to make sure they accurately and favorably reflect your realities.

A Harvard professor, David Garvin, writing in "Models of University Behavior," a working paper, has said:

"An institution's actual quality is often less important than its prestige, or reputation for quality, because it is the university's perceived excellence, which, in fact, guides the decisions of prospective students and scholars considering offers of employment, and federal agencies awarding grants."

Image is power!
Philip Kotler, well-known Kellogg chaired professor of marketing at Northwestern University and editorial advisor to this newsletter, has said "Image is Power." Few would deny having a positive image in the marketplace is an asset. Of course image, by itself is useless unless backed up with reality of quality products and service.

In this respect I firmly believe the statement I have made at many talks and on many consulting assignments, "The best way to kill a bad product is to market it." Pledged to be ethical marketing consultants, our firm will resist getting involved with any client who attempts false image creation. It's not in their best interest and certainly not in ours.

Loving education
Most of all we are careful to learn about a school's traditions, its history, myths and legends. We have a strong respect for higher education and are careful not to fall into the trap of overlooking the educational rigors of the place while focusing total attention on the "business." We remain very sensitive to the function of higher education and its implications for participants, internal and external.

Mission first
If you are embarking on your own image study, with or without external professional assistance, be sure you do not lose sight of the mission for your school. That is a good place to begin a study like this. Even better is to study your school's mission as it's evolved over the years. We have been fortunate to work with some higher education systems that have been astute in developing short and long-term vision statements. This sort of looking ahead can be very valuable.

Use it!
A common problem we discover in our work is that schools wisely conduct studies to determine their image but then do not find ways to implement their findings and evaluate results of change. Image studies, on their own, may make for interesting reading but are relatively worthless unless they are used to do something. Our studies include strategies and recommendations for implementing findings that can be used in web sites, publications, public relations, institutional advancement, admissions, alumni, curricular planning and development, community relations, media relations, fund raising and a variety of other important applications. So, if you are planning an image study, make sure you think about how you will make use of its findings.

For example, often we use findings to influence what is written and communicated about an institution. Professional communicators like to use our results because we apply PowerAnalysis principles we developed at Stanford. This process produces information that can simply and easily be applied to creative efforts without the writer, web designer or implementer having to be an expert or even very knowledgeable about marketing research. We developed these techniques because we realized that many marketing research studies, often expensive ones, simply ended up on dusty shelves. They may have produced some useful findings but few know how to apply or what to do with data! We like to conduct studies that have direct application to strategically help your school and help you understand how to use findings for strategic application. Market research data are like tomatoes...they do not store well.

Where do you start an image study?
The most important thing you can do to begin an image study, whether you plan to carry it out yourself, or hire a firm such as ours to assist you, is to set down, in writing, your objectives for the study. What are the exact things you want to study? If the decision to conduct an image study results from some specific concerns, what are they?

Strategic Task Force
Who will coordinate the study internally? Will you develop a Strategic Task Force committee to oversee the study? Who will be on that committee? Will you develop a sub-committee from your marketing committee? Will this committee consist of college or university administrators and faculty? The composition of your image analysis committee should include people with expertise in public relations and marketing as well as alumni and community members who are working in journalism, electronic and print communications, public relations, marketing and related disciplines.

Define the scope of the project
How will your project be carried out? For example, you could say that your image analysis study will be conducted through questionnaires and focus groups. You may elect to engage a professional firm such as ours to help define the process and design the questionnaires, conduct the focus groups and provide an analysis of the results of the survey and focus groups. In some cases, studies we conduct point to areas of staff weakness, so we recognize that and include suggested additions and changes in our recommendations.

The analysis can include how well your school compares with other higher education benchmarks used to analyze comparative institutions. You may request that the analysis answer questions about how to improve web site, publicity, news, publications, telethons, marketing and other outreach communications efforts. Define the idea that you want to enhance your school's image in the marketplace. If there are specific areas (admissions, alumni, fund raising, Internet communications, student employment, etc.) you want to focus on, make sure you point them out.

Cooperative analysis
Sometimes our findings point out marketplace niches that are not being well served. This can result in educational opportunities. Or we may discover opportunities for cooperative efforts with other schools that may have been overlooked.

Competitive analysis
Using competition is a good way to determine your school's image in the marketplace. By making comparisons when doing surveys, focus groups and other forms of qualitative and quantitative research analysis, you more easily and accurately reveal information about your institution. The idea of comparative analysis helps to define perceptions of your school and its efforts when put in context with others. It's a simple but powerful idea, especially when nuances of perceptions are being considered. To give you a practical but unrelated example, describing how vanilla ice cream tastes may be more easily achieved when you compare it to other flavors such as strawberry and chocolate, rather than attempting to describe it on its own.

Who do we ask?
One of the first things most clients ask us is the simple question, "Who do we study?" or "Who do we ask to best determine our school's image?"

External audiences
It is natural to direct attention to external audiences, especially if one of the objectives for your study includes admissions improvement. Obviously you need to study external audiences. Depending on the objectives of your image analysis the listof external audiences may vary, nevertheless, you must list external audiences. These may include representatives from these target markets:

• Web site visitors
• Potential students
• Parents
• Counselors
• Matriculated students
• Non-matriculated students
• Graduates
• Alumni (young and old)
• Peers
• Transfers (incoming and outgoing)
• Drop-outs
• Adult learners

• Local newspaper education editors
• Corporate leaders employing your school's graduates
• Corporate leaders employing graduates from competitive schools
• Potential employers
• Vendors
• Accreditation agents and agencies
• Professional newspapers and journal writers
• Legislators
• Immediate neighbors
• Business and civic leaders
• State leaders
• National leaders (if appropriate)
• Faculty from competing institutions
• Students from competing institutions (about your school)

Need help?
If you are going out to a professional group such as ours for a proposal and you want to make sure "all your bases are covered," you may want to consider the following information as you prepare your RFP (Request for Proposal):

Proposals should include:

1. Questionnaire design. You may wish to state that you need: The consultant to prepare, in conjunction with your Image Analysis Committee, appropriate questions, scripts and formats to evaluate your school's image for specific groups (list them) such as students and employees by questionnaire, alumni by telephone survey, key faculty by one-on-one interviews. You may include, if you have the capabilities, to say "the survey will be produced and mailed by your school to representative samples of students and employees." You may want to state you will study alumni through telephone surveys to be conducted by your staff, but administered by the outside professionals. Also, if you have the skills and equipment, you may want to tabulate the results internally.

   Empowering you and your colleagues
   Our firm has many ways of working with clients. One of the ways we like very much is what we call the "empowerment model." This gives you and your staff opportunities to carry out some of the project yourselves. It has benefits: You learn how to do the process yourself and can then replicate it for other image studies or for other service analysis. Also it has the benefit of keeping costs down. That seems to be a popular idea these days!

2. Evaluation of questionnaire results. You have heard the saying, "Liars can figure and figures can lie." There's truth to that. An advantage for hiring an external firm is the fact that they are much more apt to be impartial and allow information that may be negative to find the light of day! In fact, studies that skew results for one reason another are useless. An image analysis is not a public relations spin exercise. If you or your committee is afraid of the truth you had better not embark on this sort of study. If, on the other hand, you are willing to accept the bad with the good because you know you can deal with it,go ahead!

   A word of caution here: be careful of outside firms that claim to do marketing research but have other vested interests. For example, firms that sell printing, writing and design services may have other interests in mind when they are promoting marketing research to your institution's leaders. Make sure the professional service you hire to help you is impartial with no selfish, vested interests. Otherwise data may be clouded to the advantage of the research provider!

3. If your study utilizes focus groups you may decide to ask the outside professional vendor to conduct them on your behalf. A report of group findings may be requested. Make sure the provider has conducted focus groups in higher education and has the skills to incorporate knowledge about higher education generally and your school specifically; ask for the report to include analysis and recommendations for implementation of findings.
4. Sometimes, as part of the project, we are asked to analyze and evaluate web site, publication and promotional materials, then report findings to the image analysis committee and, in some cases, to internal communications staff. Materials may include web site, publications, promotional materials, publicity matter, news releases and other forms of outreach communications. We like to do this because this is the bridge between research and practical application... a key idea in our PowerAnalysis process.

So, if you are developing a RFP for external vendors to conduct the study, don't predicate how it should be done (methodologies) but assist by describing objectives and rationale for the study. Let the vendors tell you how they will do it! Let me compare this to having your car repaired: When you take your car in for work, you don't tell them how to do it (unless you are a professional mechanic). You tell them the symptoms, sounds, problems, difficulties, etc. and ask them to apply their skills to repair it. So it is with image surveys!

This, of course, is a good way to determine if your vendor knows what she/he is doing! Don't solve the problem for them. Let them tell you how they will solve it!

Timeline
Your image analysis plan should include a timeline. If you are appealing to outside providers this should include a start date and:

Often a Request for Proposals includes other pertinent data:

1. A description of the respondent's qualifications and a list of similar contracts successfully completed.
2. A description of the personnel to be employed on the study and resume of those with a major role.
3. The amount of in-house staff time estimated for the project.
4. The equipment and facilities to be used.
5. A description for subcontractors, if any, and the percentage of work to be subcontracted.
6. An overall description of the processes involved and a detailed breakdown of the total cost.

Image surveys can be fun... and should be. But don't underestimate the amount of effort, dedication and perseverance necessary to plan, conduct and implement findings from a comprehensive image assessment.

Our firm, Topor Consulting Group International specializes in image assessments of all sorts. We work on large, multi-institution systems of higher education or with modest program areas or mid-size colleges and universities inthis country and in others. We also work in the areas of health care and religion. We base our efforts on our collective skills and experience in higher education and other nonprofits (501.c3's), and, of course, on our reputation. If you are interested in discussing how we might be able to help you, give us a call! Call Bob Topor at his Mountain View office (650) 962-1105 or e-mail Bob at topor@marketinged.com or mail to the address on Bob's web site. Happy successful surveying!