MARKETING HIGHER EDUCATION A periodic electronic Newsletter to help you market your school, community college, college, or university. Vol. XI, no. 6, June, 1997 -------------------------------------------------- How to market your secondary school, community college, college or university... Commonsense Rules for Higher Education Marketing Differentiation by Robert (Bob) S. Topor A rose is a rose is a rose... How do you differentiate your school's offerings? After all, aren't all educational services essentially the same? How does one program differ from another? Isn't English 101 the same whether it is part of your school's curriculum or part of the competition's? How can you find out, from your users, your target audiences, what differentiates your school and its offerings from others? What are the key ideas you have to consider when you think about differentiation? How do you determine conmsumer perceptions? There are some key ideas that you need to consider as you work to differentiate your school, its programs and activities from others. These key ideas form a "matrix" you can apply to any aspect of your school's marketing whether you are attempting to build an overall image or whether you are working to market a new course. The service itself Inherent in the service, whether it's an academic service, development, alumni or any other of your academy's offerings and outreach, is the idea of differentiation. No two things are alike. That includes higher education and all the activities that comprise a school like yours. The basic elements; courses, teachers, students, majors, departments, have characteristics or attributes and benefits. Users may perceive some of these characteristics as valuable and desirable. They may have marketing "value-added" characteristics. This idea of adding value to your offerings is very significant because value relates to the perception of quality, pricing and cost. People will pay more for something if they perceive it to have extra value. Some institutions are beginning to realize that this idea of value added is an important tuition consideration, for example. "Customer" services The way services are delivered and how users interact with your academy may add (or detract) to user perceptions of quality and value. Does your academy have the ability to differentiate itself based on the idea of service? Service and quality often go hand in hand. Rather than thinking of your school's offerings as "commodities," think of the ways you can vary services in order to achieve differentiation. Some of the ideas may be "cosmetic" (name, identity, logos). Others may be more basic (services' and offerings' structure, organization, composition). Distribution channels How do people use your offerings? What are the channels of distribution? Are your offerings easily accessible? What times of day? Of year? Consider what you could do to influence HOW people get access to your "wares." This idea, in itself, can allow for powerful differentiation. Communications Often the most "visible" part of marketing, communications can be used to differentiate. Consider that your target audience may have unique motives and perceptions. How can you build on those motivations and perceptions through communications? For example, it may be a mistake to deliver a cheap, low quality, poorly written and designed newspaper if you are attempting to appeal to an upscale alumni audience to attend a 35 year reunion and related Caribbean cruise. Equally wrong to deliver a very expensive looking printed brochure to attempt to appeal to a student audience interested in developing an on-campus recycling center. The point is that communications (and the feelings they evoke) must match the offering as well as the expectations and attitudes of your target audience. Communications play a critically important role in making the marketing match! They can add to the "connection" or detract from it. Pricing A word of caution: Although many "marketers" think of price first (what else could be more important, they rationalize) it's best to think of it last. Price, after all, is the easiest thing for your competitors to duplicate. Competing on pricing (or even the perception of relative cost) is very dangerous. It's the one thing most easy for your competitors to duplicate. Location Often overlooked from a marketing differentiation point of view, location of your services can be very important. There are advantages and disadvantages to your school's location. It's most important not to make assumptions about location. Find out how members of your target audience feel about your school's location. Focus group market research is a good way to get information about positive (and negative) perceptions of your school's location. Use that information in your communications for differentiation. Combining differentiation strategies Most top-notch higher education marketers use a combination of differentiation strategies based on information about intended audiences to set their academy apart from others. Some are even astute in tailoring their offerings to meet market demand. Others are excellent at anticipating market demand. We find that this anticipation strategy is easier to do for some types of institutions than for others. Community colleges, for example, are often more flexible in being able to tailor offerings based on market needs. Universities are often more "locked in" and do not have the ability to easily tailor offerings to meet expectations. Services, products and institutions of higher education are known by their differences; not their similarities! Think differentiation. Web Sites as differentiators A problem I have always encountered in higher education is IMITATION. Many "marketers" are creatively bankrupt. They do new jobs only after they have studied (copied) and imitated work done by others. This is a form of self-destruction. Why would you intentionally attempt to make your project look like others? I see this happening with web sites, just as it has with technological predecessors (catalogs, viewbooks, search mailers, etc., etc.. and etc.! There is a danger that at some point in the future all higher education web sites will look the same. And all will be marketing failures as a result! How can you avoid that? First, do not start with imitation. Start with trying to discover how your offerings are different, unusual, non- traditional! Discover the value of differentiation. It's that simple! -------------------------------------------------- Libraries as Differentiation Points for Your Institution by Professor Elizabeth (Liz) Pollard When you are looking for value added services to differentiate your school from others, consider technology as used in your library as a starting point. Most colleges and universities have jumped onto the bandwagon of the Internet and its possible uses at their institutions, and some interesting things have been done with it. Not the least of these involves libraries! Libraries - Libraries are often the first area of a university to adopt technology to increase the value of their services. In an era of shrinking budgets for both materials and personnel, sometimes technology offers the best, if not the only, possibility to continue the level of service a university needs! No library has the funding for huge collections of journals these days, or the space to house them. Neither can it add the personnel it needs to process the issues into the collections and service their use! What has the library on your campus added to augment its collections and services and make them more valuable to campus users? Growing Collections - For example, look at the ways in which technology helps augment the collections in your library. It can't add more books and journals to the shelves, of course, but it can provide the mechanism for users on your campus to share the resources of other schools "virtually." We may even be approaching, slowly but surely, the day when shared resources among many libraries will be the only way any academic library can keep up with the rate at which knowledge is exploding! Networking - Membership in networked consortia makes it possible for many libraries to deliver documents, at the click of a mouse and the whirr of a printer, which are housed on some other campus, perhaps on the other side of the state or the far side of the world! Use of databases on the Internet and the World Wide Web, or in their CD-ROM versions, identifies resources which are not available in your library's collections. Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery services provide copies of these materials to campus users either free or inexpensively, but the service may be slower. How have the public service areas of your library drawn on these resources to add value to their collections? What networking arrangements have been made to increase the number of volumes of use to your faculty and students? A database on CD-ROM of, say, 500 additional journal titles to those to which the library subscribes already may add as much as 10,000-12,000 full text issues of current journal articles per year to your library's resources! These full text titles are also available to users without the aid of Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery services. The use of the CD-ROM is often free to campus users, minimizing the cost of otherwise expensive resources! Users can save them to their computers, print them out, and use them! Distribution - With terminals strategically placed around campus and access through the campus network, databases like these become a valuable added resource for researchers! If those same terminals have access to the Internet and the World Wide Web, users may find a world of information open to them that could not possibly be housed in the campus library! The number and convenience of such services that your library has provided, and the majors and degrees these services support, becomes an added value item that should be considered in your marketing efforts! Libraries are only one area to look for what technology on your campus has added to the value of its offerings and services. There are others, including alumni offices, financial aid offices, career planning and placement services, and distance learning programs. Investigate these resources and use them to enhance the programs you are marketing to potential students and faculty, and other markets! -------------------------------------------------- Original posting: 7/3/97 Marketing Higher Education Newsletter is published by Topor Consulting Group International (http://www.marketinged.com). Newsletter posted by WEBB Internet Marketing & Consulting (http://www.firstchapter.com). copyright 1997 Topor Consulting Group International