Marketing – The importance of strategy

I’m often surprised, when looking at university and business school websites and promotional materials, how if you scratch out the name of the institution, it can be difficult to know which one you are reading about.

Some have a strong identity and ethos that shines through. However, most of them say pretty much the same thing – or worse, try to sound like another competing institution. This is a big missed opportunity, often indicating a poorly defined strategy and resulting in a waste of marketing spend.

What is strategy?

The classic definition of strategy is a plan of action aimed at achieving a specific objective. Competitive strategy, as defined by Michael Porter in his 1996 Harvard Business Review article, “What is Strategy?”, is not doing something better than your competitor, but doing something different.

It is changing the nature of competition away from costly head-to-head battles over existing markets and clientele to creating something different, aligning processes behind it, and therefore changing the rules of the game.

Competitive strategy, then, is about creating something that is unique and valuable in the marketplace. It involves decisions about goals and target markets and then making the tough choices to align resources and operations in pursuit of these goals and not other goals. It also involves defining what an institution will not do, which is one of the most difficult – and important – aspects of competitive strategy.

What is marketing and why is it so strategic?

Management consultant Peter Drucker once said: "Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs." I realise that some may take issue with characterising higher education as a business and-or students as customers, but you get the point.

Marketing dovetails with strategy in understanding the overall market and the desires and unmet needs of target audiences. According to the American Marketing Association, “marketing is the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large”.

Creating and delivering offerings that have value for customers, that is, students, and society at large is something universities and business schools throughout the world have done for a very long time.

However, as competition increases, as technology changes how educational offerings are created and consumed and student needs evolve, institutions are forced to rethink whether their resources and operations are properly aligned to offer programmes that are unique and valuable in the educational marketplace.

Worldwide demand for education is increasing, but even in this scenario there will be winners and losers. Business schools that insist on doing more of the same – perhaps only better – may find it difficult in the near future.

How marketing relates to strategy

Most people think of marketing as an outwardly-facing function focused on creating a positive image for the organisation. This is true, but only a small part of the story.

True marketing includes a clear idea of what business you are in and who you are trying to serve, what prospective students and employers value, what people – including those internal to the university – believe about the capabilities of your institution, and how these capabilities can be aligned to satisfy evolving needs.

It begins with research – some internal, some external, some primary, some secondary, some qualitative and some quantitative. A look at hard data on admissions, enrolment and graduation trends, faculty hiring and promotion, research funding, individual and corporate giving and student satisfaction data are appropriate places to begin. From there, look more broadly at educational trends and competitor data to see what can be learned about the institution’s relative position.

Once some of the baseline data has been collected and analysed, it’s time for discussion. What interesting trends come to light? What surprises people? What assumptions no longer hold up? Is this where the university wants to be? What threats appear more prominent now? What opportunities might be attractive for it to pursue?

Stay tuned for more on this subject in the next post.

Margaret Andrews is an academic leader, instructor, and consultant. Academic leadership positions have included vice-provost at Hult International Business School, where she managed a global academic team across five campuses in four countries; associate dean of management programs at Harvard University’s Division of Continuing Education, or DCE; and executive director of the MBA Program at the MIT Sloan School of Management, USA. She teaches a variety of leadership and strategy courses at Harvard DCE and Hult and is also the managing director of Mind and Hand Associates, a boutique consulting firm serving a global higher education clientele. You can reach her at margaret@mind-and-hand.com.