206 Strategic Leadership
Branding
A proponent of branding and integrated marketing claims that “At root, a
brand is the promise of an experience. Understanding and communicating the
validity of that experience to target audiences are parts of the branding process”
(Moore 2004, 57). From this it is clear that branding and marketing depend on
a complex strategic task that precedes it, which is “understanding... the validity of
the experience.” The validity of soda pop, a coffee shop, or an automobile is one
thing, but the validity of an educational experience is quite another. The word
“experience” does not mean the same thing in describing products and educa-
tion. Products are experienced through functional use and consumption, while
education involves an intangible process of intellectual and personal transforma-
tion. Products are infinitely modifiable to meet the desires of the customer, while
education sets standards that learners can only satisfy through changes in their
capacities and knowledge, based in good measure on their own will and motiva-
tion. Especially since branding has its origins in selling consumer products through
repetitive and sometimes deceptive mass advertising, if we omit the essential step
of discovering and articulating an institution’s authentic identity, its purposes
could be reduced to whatever the inventiveness of marketing chooses to make of
them. One of the responsibilities of strategic leadership is to ensure that education
is not reduced to commerce.
These considerations offer a clear perspective on the use of the methods and
language of marketing in higher education. The terminology that we use matters,
and not just to spare the sensitivities of the faculty. Language conveys a system of
thought and values. An authentic university generates and conveys knowledge
as a public good and is constructed around a different set of values and purposes
from those used by businesses that sell products and services. The issue is whether
the methods of thinking and decision making used in business can fit that world
of thought. Some business practices do fit, including the methods of marketing
and the tools and concepts of strategy, as we have been at pains to show. To do
so, the language and the relevant processes of management can and should be
translated into the idioms, values, and methods that illuminate educational issues
and university decision making. If that happens successfully, then the methods of
integrated strategic marketing can bring new insights and disciplined processes to
the work of admissions and other departments. Yet some terminology, like the use
of the word “customer” for student and “brand” for identity, image, and reputation,
resists translation and cannot be made into central strategic concepts without
distorting the meaning of education.
THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE
Whereas admissions is often at the center of institutional planning documents,
student life is rarely at the core of institutional strategy. Ever since the doctrine
of in loco parentis was swept away in the late 1960s, a vacuum has existed in the