MARKETING HIGHER EDUCATION A periodic electronic Newsletter to help you market your school, community college, college, or university. Vol. XII, no. 3, March, 1998 -------------------------------------------------- TABLE OF CONTENTS Risk & Courage in Marketing Higher Education by Robert "Bob" S. Topor & Professor Elizabeth "Liz" Pollard Higher Education Cultures, a Study in Differences by Robert "Bob" S. Topor & Professor Elizabeth "Liz" Pollard -------------------------------------------------- Risk and Courage in Marketing Higher Education. by Robert "Bob" S. Topor & Professor Elizabeth "Liz" Pollard This is an actual e-mail message I received from a professional friend whom I admire greatly because he is often right on target. He was responding to an article Professor Pollard and I wrote about mission statement evaluation (February, 1998). I feel there is a lot of wisdom in this short message. Read it. What do you think? ****************** I just read your piece on mission statements. As usual, you are right on target! But remember, it takes courage to put yourself in a distinctive category. Colleges and universities say they are distinctive (with all accompanying cliches), but when you try to articulate this distinctiveness for them...they run like hell from it. God forbid that their colleagues should see their new mission statement and kid them about it at one of the alphabet-soup organization meetings. As education institutions, we encourage our students to take risks, to invite change. After all, we say, that's what college is for. But, as college administrators, we run screaming in the opposite direction, loath to take our own advice for fear of criticism, of being "wrong." Keep telling it "like it is." Some people are listening; others had better listen. ****************** What my friend was warning me about in his message is a topic I want to discuss here. It is RISK and COURAGE and how those ideas apply to the marketing work you and I are doing. I have found, as I am sure many have, that marketing ideas and concepts are often met with cold blank stares. Or, in the worst cases, with stares of contempt and suspicion. Often administrators and faculty argue that the only concern should be the quality of the educational experience. All else doesn't matter, they say. If you believe (as I do) that being good is not good enough, if few know about it, you will run into problems as I have throughout my career. I have intentionally put myself out there, addressed meetings of faculty and others on behalf of my belief in marketing. I have taken risks. I have made enemies. I have been criticized and put down. But I firmly stand by my premise: Higher education needs marketing. It is not the other way around! (marketing needs higher education). The irony in this is that we have to EDUCATE ourselves about marketing and its usefulness and appropriateness for our business of higher education. I believe in the idea presented by H. G. Wells: "human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." I truly believe in the VALUE of higher education. I am sure my partner Professor Emeritus Liz Pollard does too. Here are her views on the subject...... Professor Liz Pollard: Bob is right, I do agree with him about the value of higher education. I stand behind it one hundred percent, and I reinforced that position many times in my twenty-six years in academia. There were times it seemed like a thankless task, especially when I was advocating something new, whether it be online teaching or automated library systems. I was doing something different from my colleagues, most of whom either refused to cooperate in promotional ventures or saw them as wasted effort! You see, I came to the marketing of higher education from the other side of the fence, the academic one. I often heard from academic colleagues considerable resistance to marketing in higher education. Somehow, they expected large classes of students to materialize without publicity, and the idea of selling their offerings was repugnant to them. The risk of stepping forth and promoting what they had to offer was something someone else would have to take, but that someone got no help from them! They were playing it safe, but at what cost to their institution and their careers? Was it lack of courage or misguided principles? I think perhaps both were involved in some cases. Some faculty were afraid of being considered "pushy" if they stepped forward to promote their offerings. Some were laboring under the misguided notion that the intrinsic value of higher education would sell itself. No publicity was needed! Some were under the impression that the state, or the foundation, would find the money to provide materials, equipment, and salaries, without telling the world about what the institution was doing! Some simply saw marketing as someone else's job, and were loath to be considered "commercial." Without the cooperation of the academy, of course, marketers have little or no information on what they're trying to promote. In point of fact, I often found the public delighted to learn about the new things we were doing. They enjoyed reading or hearing about new teaching methods, new research and research systems, and they found it a point of pride to know what their local university had to offer! Their support for the institution increased in direct proportion to the information they gathered from local media. Of course, the media got their information from experienced marketing professionals in the institution. Opportunities and benefits arose as a result of publicity which would never have existed without courageous cooperation from the academy! Not only that, but faculty who cooperated in marketing efforts became highly popular in the community and commanded higher salaries as a result! Most of all, it was their students who benefitted from the increased support of the public, as additional resources materialized because the public knew what was being done with them - and all because a few people dared to be different, to step forward and tell the community what the institution was doing and what its needs were to do a better job! ********** Bob Topor * Topor Consulting Group International Higher Education Marketing Evangelist Web site: http://www.marketinged.com E-mail: topor@marketinged.com & Professor Liz Pollard * Smoke Signals Enterprises Web site: http://www.smokesig.com Email: lpollard@smokesig.com ********* NOTICE: As a subscriber to this electronic newsletter, you have permission to reproduce and use this article on your campus. All others please note ©1997, Topor Consulting Group International. Comments about, or requests to reprint should be directed to Bob Topor at topor@marketinged.com. ********** -------------------------------------------------- Higher Education Cultures: A Study in Differences. by Robert "Bob" S. Topor and Professor Elizabeth "Liz" Pollard I have always been fascinated with the cultures prevalent in higher education. The ways people behave and work together or don't work together has always fascinated me. I have seen the results of higher education culture first hand, sometimes with wonderful experiences. Other times with the most pitiful and bothersome displays of human injustice and nastiness. I feel I am a STUDENT of higher education. I spend parts of each day reading about higher education. I subscribe to every higher education journal, newspaper, and computer network forum I can find. I am always on the lookout for a good book about higher education. I recently worked on a marketing consulting assignment at a private, old, Catholic university on the west coast. This is a school, formerly an all-"girls" school, that was originally run by an order of sisters. Their new President (a lay person) feels she wants to move the school to an aggressive marketing posture. For example, most internal staff complain that the local community still thinks this school is single sex (they are not) and undergraduate only (they are not) and a school only for Catholics (they are not) run only by Catholics (they are not) and taught by sisters and priests (they are not). This is a school with a major image problem! At one of our meetings, the President, a wonderfully progressive woman, cited a book she had read called "The Four Cultures of the Academy" by Bergquist, ISBN 1-55542-431-7. The title caught my attention as well as the subject matter she quoted. The publisher, Jossey Bass is conveniently located here in San Francisco so, with a phone call, I soon had the book in hand. I'm not sure how I had not discovered this book before, given my zeal for higher education answers to tough questions. The author describes four distinct cultures and cites examples of case studies for each. It is a wonderful book. For the first time, looking back over my career, I was able to categorize the environments in which I found myself. I was able to define environments at many schools where I had consulted, including this school. I was much better able to understand the President, and in this case, the hurdles before her. It helped define how difficult my job would be at this academy (very difficult). Bergquist describes four cultures: collegial, managerial, developmental and negotiating. It is very important for you to know in which culture you find yourself. By knowing, you will be able to anticipate how new ideas (such as marketing), will be accepted (or not!). Cultures vary considerably. I recommend this book to you. It has been around for a while (published in 1992). I have added it to my master Bibliography to recommend to others. I think you should read this book. I would be interested to hear back from you to find out if you found it as useful as I have. Let me now ask Liz to add her thoughts to this article. I know she has experienced many of these cultural differences. Professor Liz Pollard: I'm not familiar with Bergquist's work, I'm sorry to say, but from Bob's description, it sounds as though the author has put his finger on some important concepts. Indeed, the cultures at different institutions may be quite different, and they affect the way the institution works. At a given institution, however, the culture may change with a change in administration, causing a shift in emphasis and managerial styles throughout the institution. During my academic career, I saw shifts between presidents affect the way my institution approached its managerial problems and even education itself. I also saw differences in culture between colleges in the university, as well as in the institution as a whole, and even sometimes between departments in the same college! Such differences and changes can be very confusing to faculty and staff, and they certainly affect the education of an institution's students in subtle ways. I can only guess at the definitions of Bergquist's four cultures, but the names suggest possible characteristics, many of which I've seen at work during my academic career. The collegial culture is built on the historic idea of the academy in higher education and suggests that colleagues support each other and behave professionally in all instances. Decisions are generally made by the faculty as a group, on the democratic model, and the administration generally supports them, absent imperative reasons to do otherwise. This is probably the ideal way, at least in the eyes of most faculty and many administrations, to run an institution of higher education. However, it requires that faculty be consulted on important considerations, and therefore time consumed in decision making, and the result may not be as efficient for administrations to deal with as some other styles. The managerial culture suggests the institution is run like a modern business, with all decisions coming from the top down. In the worst manifestation, this culture becomes authoritarian, and faculty opinions, and often the interests of students, get lost in the shuffle. In its best iteration, the administration consults with the Faculty Senate or other representative body and sometimes the student government as well, and draws on the collective expertise and opinions it finds, but is not always bound by those in its decisions. The other two cultures are often variations on one or both of the first two. Developmental cultures often are in a state of flux and may tend toward either collegial or managerial, or maybe both. There may, in fact, be a constant tug of war between factions who feel the institution should be run in one or the other of the first two styles, but the most important influences in this kind of culture are usually the availability of funding and personnel to carry through its intended goals. The stresses of underfunding or understaffing, or both, often create significant struggles and a drain on existing resources in developmental institutions. It may, in fact, be the hardest culture to work within! The negotiating culture, it seems to me, is really a variation of the managerial, drawing heavily on the style of labor/management relations. Unions may become involved heavily, and must be taken into consideration in every decision. Factions who feel they have a stake in the institution, faculty, staff, students, and others struggle with each other for the allocation of resources. Negotiation takes the place of careful deliberation and may, if not handled carefully, overshadow the function of consultation between elements of a university. This culture can be really contentious, since factions tend to become mired in their own self-interests in the worst iterations of it. It can be terribly unwieldy, depending on a number of other factors, not the least of which, again, is the availability of resources to go around. For the marketing professional, it is essential to know which culture is involved in a given promotional effort. The cultural style will affect all decisions. In the collegial style, for example, there is likely to be considerable resistance to marketing at all, since it is seen as "cheapening" the academy. In the managerial culture, the administration may be in favor of marketing, but there is still likely to be some resistance from faculty, especially if the culture has disintegrated into an authoritarian one. In the developmental institution, the shortage of resources will make it extremely difficult to get anything done of a marketing nature, although marketing becomes even more important in order to supplement funding! In both this style and the negotiating one, there is likely to be a struggle between factions, sometimes very bitter, for the resources available! Thus, it becomes especially important to determine which culture you are involved in when you first accept a marketing position or take on a marketing job for an institution. Without this knowledge, you may become hopelessly entangled in internal politics and dissension! ********** Bob Topor * Topor Consulting Group International Higher Education Marketing Evangelist Web site: http://www.marketinged.com E-mail: topor@marketinged.com & Professor Liz Pollard * Smoke Signals Enterprises Web site: http://www.smokesig.com Email: lpollard@smokesig.com ********** NOTICE: As a subscriber to this electronic newsletter, you have permission to reproduce and use this article on your campus. All others please note ©1997, Topor Consulting Group International. Comments about, or requests to reprint should be directed to Bob Topor at topor@marketinged.com. ********** -------------------------------------------------- SPECIAL OFFER For Marketing Higher Education newsletter subscribers ONLY. 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