The Upside of Selling Your Soul

Hey, you, riding the subway. Old Dominion University has the perfect graduate degree for you. You there, scrolling through your Facebook feed, the TESST College of Technology wants you to get “A Fresh Start for a NEW FUTURE.” And you, sunbathing on the Jersey shore, check out that banner that Kean University hired a plane to tow, making sure you know about its “World-class education.”

Prospective students might be tempted by those pitches, but for many in higher education, they send a different message: Education is a product. Students are customers. Institutions are brands. Colleges are selling their souls.

But these days, maybe selling your soul is a smart thing to do.

Done right, marketing goes beyond mere sloganeering to offer colleges an exercise in clear-eyed assessment. If what a college is selling is the essence of what makes it unique, marketing can reinvigorate the campus, draw students, shore up the bottom line, and improve the institutional reputation.

Done wrong, it can waste money, time, and good will. Bad marketing, or an effort that rings inauthentic, risks foiling a college’s best promotional and fund-raising tool: satisfied alumni. Major shifts in mission or programs in pursuit of quick gains in tuition revenue could dilute a college’s credibility. It’s possible for an institution to sell its soul and gain nothing.

Marketing in its most basic sense is nothing new at American colleges. For-profit institutions like Kaplan Inc.’s TESST College, in Maryland, have, of course, advertised heavily for years. Look under the hood of almost any enrollment office at a nonprofit college and you will find a dedicated promotional machine. In many cases, however, that machine hasn’t been significantly rethought or retooled in a decade, if not longer.

As the number of high-school graduates begins to wane and the value of a bricks-and-mortar higher education comes under fire, colleges are becoming more aggressive about marketing to help them stand out in an increasingly competitive market. But rolling out a new logo and beefing up social-media budgets is not enough for most institutions to meet their challenges. Successful strategic marketing involves a series of existential questions: what an institution is, what it does, what it wants to do in the future. And success requires acting on the answers—even if they aren’t those that administrators and faculty members were hoping for.

Strategic thinking happens at different levels at different types of colleges. Some selective places, like the University of Chicago and the College of William & Mary, have added a new position, in effect a chief strategic officer, who takes a long-term, holistic view of institutional needs and goals. At small and medium-sized private colleges, where tuition dollars make or break annual budgets, marketing is proliferating as a response to short-term challenges and in planning for long-term survival.

Nearly half of private four-year colleges now employ a communications-and-marketing administrator who reports directly to the president, according to a 2013 survey by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. About one-quarter of public four-year institutions do. Analysts at Moody’s Investors Services, a credit-rating agency, have confirmed “an uptick” in the number of colleges hiring chief marketing officers, says Edith Behr, a vice president at Moody’s. And a growing number of institutions, she adds, have said they are “re-examining and restating” their missions.

An embrace of marketing can reap tangible rewards. For example, two years after the University of Maryland at College Park began its first major marketing campaign, in the early 2000s, the number of freshman applications had jumped by 25 percent.

Marketing Your College

Yet some colleges have been reluctant. In a world where ratings and returns on investment are taking over conversations about higher education, talk of branding and marketing can fan fears that commercialization is polluting the academic enterprise.

Some experts on the economics of higher education also warn that marketing contributes to the continuing rise in college costs. Possible benefits and competitive pressures aside, colleges that spend more money on marketing are “building in a layer of cost that would not otherwise be there,” says Robert E. Martin, a professor of economics at Centre College, in Kentucky.

But Paul J. LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, says that some colleges balk at marketing out of disdain. Their resistance, he says, is based less on current competitive realities than on the longtime example of elite institutions: “The ‘good’ schools don’t have television ads, right?”

Southern New Hampshire does have television ads, and it stands as higher education’s current Exhibit A for marketing success. Five years ago, it was an obscure private institution in a region with a declining number of high-school graduates. It had started an online-education program aimed at working adults, but in 2009 its enrollment of traditional-age students fell 5 percent below expectations, creating a $3-million hole in that year’s budget.

Mr. LeBlanc had already approved some test marketing for the online program, paying for eight weeks of television ads in places like Milwaukee. The university soon received calls from prospective students there who wanted to know more about a New England college that they had never heard of.

The president then went to the Board of Trustees and got nearly $2-million to roll out a television-advertising campaign for the online-education program. If the effort paid off in a flood of new online enrollments, he told the board, Southern New Hampshire might be able to close its budget gap. If it didn’t, the deficit would nearly double. The board said yes.

“We laugh about it now,” Mr. LeBlanc says, “but I think there was a sense of, ‘If this doesn’t work, what’s our next job going to be?’ "

It worked. Enrollment in the online program has grown to 44,356 in the 2014 fiscal year, from 3,131 in 2009.

There are plenty of other online-education providers, including for-profit colleges, that spend heavily on advertising. (Southern New Hampshire declines to disclose its marketing budget.) Mr. LeBlanc attributes Southern New Hampshire’s recent success not only to its marketing but also to the message that it sends out. Summed up, he says, it’s “We care more.”

One ad has featured the college delivering diplomas to online students who lived too far away to attend graduation. It showed emotional introductions of students to professors or advisers they had worked with but never met. Southern New Hampshire hired five full-time analysts to track its marketing data and created its own internal advertising agency. It retained 16 other analysts to work with a data system that monitors student performance on a daily basis, so that academic advisers can intervene immediately and keep harried adult learners on track.

If your message is that you care more, “you’ve got to live up to that,” Mr. LeBlanc says. “You don’t survive very long in the world if people say, ‘These guys are saying this but doing something quite different.’ "

Of course, Southern New Hampshire’s solutions won’t work for every college—or maybe even any other college.

John Lawlor, principal of the Lawlor Group, a marketing firm that works with colleges, says some institutions may decide to pursue a new program on a market-driven basis solely because it’s a fad. Making an aggressive push in online education or adding a graduate program in a hot field may seem like a good way to bring in students and revenue, he says, especially if other institutions have had success with it, but it may add nothing substantive or distinguishing.

Other colleges may do too little. They remain “true to their missions but they’re not relevant,” he says. “You need to have some overlap so you’re true to who you are and yet you’re also relevant to the marketplace. And it can be a dance.”

Calvin College is one of the small institutions trying to figure out the steps.

Forty years ago, as much as 90 percent of Calvin’s student body grew up in the Christian Reformed Church in North America, whose headquarters are not far from the campus, in Grand Rapids, Mich. No marketing was required. “We had an audience in place that we simply had to work through a process to get them admitted,” says Jeanne Nienhuis, director of enrollment communications.

But demographic declines in the Upper Midwest and in the church’s membership have led Calvin to look outside its backyard and its denomination to maintain its undergraduate enrollment of about 4,000. Only a third of last year’s incoming freshmen grew up in the Christian Reformed Church; most of the rest come from evangelical Christian backgrounds.

Calvin’s leaders understand that to reach new potential students in a crowded and noisy media market, the college must know exactly what to say. And what is says has to be compelling.

Over the past year, Calvin developed a strategic plan and rewrote its mission statement, sharpening it from three sentences to 21 carefully parsed words: “Calvin equips students to think deeply, to act justly, and to live wholeheartedly as Christ’s agents of renewal in the world.”

The college has started a branding process and has hired Scott D. Ochander, vice president for enrollment and marketing at Manchester University, in Indiana, as a consultant.

Mr. Ochander says his job is to help Calvin determine its “true distinctiveness.” The college hopes to involve more than a third of its administrators and faculty and staff members, along with at least 10 percent of students, in formal branding exercises over the coming months.

Widespread buy-in on the campus not only makes the branding process better, Mr. Lawlor says, but also makes the message stronger and louder. “You cannot have a strong external marketing effort if you do not have a collective sense of self, internally, so that you project that sense of self externally,” he says. “If we’re not singing out of the same hymnal, we’re not going to be heard.”

Yet professors are sometimes reluctant to join in. Those at Calvin have been wary of the college’s marketing efforts, Ms. Nienhuis says, probably out of concern that marketing is “flip or lacking in nuance or perhaps a little graced with overstatement.”

Sometimes the language of marketing does confound people on college campuses. At the beginning of the fall semester, Tim Ellens, Calvin’s director of communications and marketing, briefed about 30 faculty members on the branding process. As he described it, he referred to PowerPoint slides from Mr. Ochander and peppered his speech with terms like “modes of attraction” and “personality archetype.” The professors in the room seemed to slump in their chairs.

Marketers who work in higher education are well aware that many professors are reluctant to embrace the process, but they have found ways to help sell what they do to even the most squeamish audiences.

“We don’t have to use the word ‘brand,’ " says Mr. Lawlor. He prefers to invoke Plato. Marketing is “about knowing thyself,” he says. “Who are you?”

Sometimes he tells those he’s working for that he is trying to uncover a college’s “genetic code,” a branding concept popularized by the marketer Scott Bedbury, who has worked for Nike and Starbucks. “People grab on to that, because it’s language that you would use in the academy,” Mr. Lawlor says.

At Manchester, Mr. Ochander has created a “brand cave,” a room papered with materials from the university’s own marketing process: the results of exercises from staff and faculty workshops (like identifying “tattoos,” an institution’s indelible qualities), drafts of branding art, market-research data, and many, many colored sticky notes. The idea is that participants—or anyone on campus who’s interested—can see and understand how the process unfolds.

At Calvin, workers have already installed tackboards on the walls of a converted supply room at Calvin for its own brand cave. The basement room will provide another opportunity to collect feedback from staff and faculty members, including those who may feel protective of the colleges’s values in the face of a marketing push. “Mission values will feed the branding process,” Mr. Ochander says. “It’s not a one-way dialogue.”

The branding process is designed to help the people of Calvin, some of whom have been with the college for decades, figure out who they are, collectively, as an institution. But it also offers an opportunity to think about who they might be.

“We need to remain true to who we are, but we also need to run toward some risk at some point in order to make some gains,” Ms. Nienhuis says. “There’s a bit of a tension between being a traditional four-year undergraduate liberal-arts institution and looking at the marketplace and seeing that there are many different modes of delivering an education now. What’s Calvin’s role in that?”

Once a college has looked inward to better understand itself and its brand, it needs to turn its scrutiny to the marketplace and test that appeal, says David W. Strauss, a principal of the Art & Science Group, a higher-education consulting firm. “Looking deeply into your own navel will tell you what you love about yourself,” he says, “but it won’t necessarily tell you what your external constituencies will react favorably to.”

Loyola University New Orleans is keeping its market in mind as it tries to rebound from a substantial shortfall in enrollment. Last fall it missed its freshman-enrollment goal by more than 250 students. The shortfall in tuition revenue caused a $7.5-million budget gap, resulting in dozens of layoffs and early-retirement incentives.

Demographic challenges present “an opportunity to think about the market and being more responsive,” says Marc K. Manganaro, the provost.

Loyola had already begun the process of creating a new strategic plan, aided by a brand-and-identity study done by the Lawlor Group. The plan emphasizes the importance of experiential learning and of a Jesuit approach to higher education, but it also calls for building stronger connections with the city and focusing more on students’ career opportunities, he says.

The university had already added a “fast track” M.B.A. program that can be completed in a year. It also created a program for foreign-language translation and interpretation, in part as a response to immigration and New Orleans’s diverse population. If the Board of Trustees approves the addition, Loyola would also add two bachelor’s degrees tailored to local interests: in popular and commercial music and in digital filmmaking. “Music has always been part of the heritage of New Orleans, but film is experiencing this incredible boost in New Orleans and Louisiana,” thanks to tax credits the state offers to film producers, Mr. Manganaro says.

Any proposals for new programs at Loyola will have to be accompanied by “market analysis that demonstrates what kind of demand is out there and what are the numbers of prospective students,” the provost says. It is “extremely important that we see new students at our door, so we’re expecting data that provides that.”

Perhaps the best way for a college to stand out in an increasingly competitive market is to, in fact, stand out—be distinctive, find something that sets it apart. After all, colleges’ branding messages often sound so much alike because the institutions themselves are very much alike. It is easier to come up with a creative way to market than to come up with an innovative new form of education.

Strategic marketing may not be able to make that inventive leap for institutions, but it can kick-start the deliberations on how it could be done.

As both Mr. Lawlor and Mr. Strauss observe, American higher education has operated for decades in a way that echoes the message from the film Field of Dreams: If you build it, they will come. The importance and value of a college education had long been considered so self-evident that merely offering it would continue to attract plenty of students. But no more.

“It’s not true that if you build it, people will come. You have to tell them you built it,” Mr. Strauss says.

But telling alone isn’t enough anymore, he adds. You have to build it better.

Correction (10/1/2014, 1:15 p.m.): This article originally misspelled the given name of the provost of Loyola University New Orleans. He is Marc K. Manganaro. The article has been updated to eflect this correction.