Brand U: Marketing the Alma Mater

For colleges, developing a brand strategy is one way to stand out in a competitive marketplace

By Jane Porter

This is the second of a multipart BusinessWeek series on the business of colleges.

You won't have to wait for college viewbooks filled with overgrown ivy and smiling students to make it to your doorstep next application season. Nowadays ads for schools are everywhere you look. For colleges and universities, there's no shame in playing the marketing game. That's what the University of California, Los Angeles made clear in its latest national marketing effort: "UCLA, Unabashed."

This past spring UCLA made its first major media buy when it began advertising the "UCLA, Unabashed" slogan. The campaign included full-page advertisements in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, each featuring quotes from an influential alumnus or professor on what they think makes the school unique. The branding campaign was designed to highlight the school's specific strengths to help it stand out in an increasingly competitive market for top student applicants.

Two decades ago, the concept of developing a brand identity for a college was largely a foreign notion.

For a long time, "marketing" at colleges and universities consisted simply of replacing outdated photographs in the school catalog with new ones. But today the concept of university branding—long looked down on in the academy for its streamlining and simplifying business principles—is essential on college campuses. Consulting agencies have seen a rise in interest from college and university clients. Stamats, an Iowa-based higher education consulting firm, said school branding proposals doubled from 20 to 40 in the last year. "Fifteen years ago, you would never hear the word 'branding,' maybe at 1% of the campuses," says Jay Williams, president of Atlanta-based higher education marketing firm Stein Communications. "Today you hear it at 100% of them."

Funding Pinch

With the U.S. college-age population projected to decline sharply over the next 10 years, competition for students is steadily growing among the country's nearly 4,500 colleges and universities. Financially, the need for support from benefactors and alumni is increasingly important as states cut back on funding. Plus, attracting and retaining top faculty continues to be a challenge as schools poach professors from one another. All these pressures combined with the numerous ways in which schools can get their message out—from snail mail and online ads to Facebook and YouTube (GOOG)—mean schools are recognizing the need to take a more strategic approach to branding than ever before.

"The institution is not behind an ivy-covered wall any more. It has thousands of touch points available on the Internet to untold constituencies all of the time," says Kathleen Dawley, president of Maguire Associates, a higher education research and consulting firm in Massachusetts. "It's more apparent that without some management and institutional command about their message, it's all over the place."

UCLA is a case in point. Stepping onto the campus four years ago, one could spot more than 100 different logos around the school and in publications sent out to students and applicants. The inconsistency came from a lack of schoolwide marketing efforts and it meant that every department more or less could do as they pleased when putting together their advertising materials. This resulted in confusion about what made UCLA any different from all the other public universities out there, says Don Popielarz, head of Highlands Strategic Planning Group, a New Jersey-based research marketing firm hired by UCLA to research its marketing efforts. "People know that it's a good school, but they have no specific ideas about what it does," Popielarz says.