The Enrollment Management Review

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THE ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT REVIEW

Volume 22, Issue 2Winter, 2007

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Editor: Don HosslerAssociate Editors: Larry Hoezee and Daniel J. Rogalski

IndianaUniversityCenter for Postsecondary Research and Planning

It has been some time since the Enrollment Management Review focused on issues related to market research, marketing, and branding. This issue begins with ashort essay on branding and marketing and then reviews four articles on topics related to market research and marketing.

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Marketing in Enrollment Management

Recently, branding and marketing have re-emerged in the buzzword lexicon for higher education as many colleges attempt to recruit more students, enhance their fund raising efforts, and strive to create more positive institutional images among their key stakeholder groups. In recent years bothChange Magazine and the Chronicle of Higher Education have carried lengthy articles on branding and marketing. Coordinated marketing efforts have much to offer colleges and universities, as evidenced by the long history of successful efforts implemented by admissions and institutional advancement departments. The concept of branding, however, is a more recent introduction to higher education. It focuses more on a global institutional strategy (of which marketing is a part). Fickes (2003) observes that branding is more than a name. It is what an institution means to potential and current students, donors, alumni, and other important institutional stakeholders.He notes that branding and positioning play important roles in today’s student recruitment and it helps to achieve institutional goals. Good branding requires good market research to develop a unique understanding of the institution which informs the development of positioning statements to achieve institutional goals.

In a short piece on marketing and branding in the Chronicle of Higher Education (April 30, 2004) Rick Hesel delineates the five key constructs of branding. They include: focus on product, center on well-defined long term strategic goals, make key decisions about goals and strategies based upon empirical data, integrate every overarching activity around these strategic goals, and commit to these goals for the long haul. Robert Moore (Change Magazine, April/May 2004, pp. 56-61) focuses more specifically on branding and adds to Hesel’s list. Moore writes that differentiation and positioning are also key attributes of effective branding. Moore observes that campus stakeholders (faculty, administrators, and staff) should be involved in the process of finding distinctive differences in institutions and then positioning the campus on these differences. He too argues for the use of surveys of alumni, current students, faculty, and staff to identify the unique characteristics of the institution’s culture and student experiences to help identify the most salient characteristics of the brand of a college or university.

Hesel also offers a strong critique of the typical marketing and branding efforts on many campuses in the following section of his article in The Chronicle:

Every few years expensive marketing materials are discarded and others created, with administrators and marketing consultants churning out new brands, themes, and images at an alarming rate. Not only is this wasteful, it is counterproductive. With comparatively meager resources to invest in marketing and branding, and a transient audience that turns over every few years, consistency and longevity are essential ingredients of a successful college marketing effort. (p. B9)

Fickes, Moore, and Hesel all indicate that marketing and branding activities must be consistent across efforts to raise development dollars and in recruiting students. All communication efforts with stakeholder groups must emphasize a consistent brand.

While market research and marketing strategies can be universally applied to for-profit and nonprofit organizations and service, and production-oriented organizations, we posit that applying the principles of branding can be more complicated. In higher education, the majority of branding examples offered in the literature focus on small to mid-sized private colleges and universities. These institutions typically have more focused missions, tend to be residential, and tend to have a smaller range of academic programs and services. It has been our experience that as institutional size and complexity increase, branding efforts also become more complex. If campus policy makers are not careful, efforts to create a unified brand can even be harmful to individual schools or programs within a large university system. It is much easier to talk about a set of concrete, focused, and strategic goals for KalamazooCollege than the University of Texas. Kalamazoo, for instance, strategically focuses on the curriculum and the ways in which Kalamazootransforms student lives through a small student-faculty ratio, a unique curriculum, and strong study abroad programs. Reaching out to prospective students, alumni, and donors with this focused set of messages is, as Moore advocates, an “achievable and believable goal.” (p.59). At the University of Texas at Austin, however, key stakeholders includea diverse array of groups: the legislature, the Board of Trustees, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, alumni, donors, prospective undergraduate students, prospective graduate students, and so on. This stakeholder diversity requires messages to be customized as much as possible in order to attain the desired impact. For example, branding efforts to build support for increased legislative funding are likely to focus on the university’s contributions to economic growth. The marketing activities associated with this effort are likely to be noticeably different than those associated with efforts to recruit undergraduate students. The likelihood of developing a unique undergraduate curriculum and building support among large autonomous faculties in schools of business, medicine, arts & sciences, and agriculture, for example, are not strong. As institutional size and complexity grow, we posit that branding is more likely to require a more segmented set of activities. There may be an overarching movement to integrate branding and marketing across an array of efforts to reach many diverse stakeholder groups;however, this is more likely to be a behind-the-scenes administrative task rather than a visible supra-branding effort. Efforts to identifyunified marketing messages that are part of a comprehensive branding effort at a large and diverse research university might very likely result in messages that are so abstract that they are meaningless.

This critique of brandingis not meant to dismiss the potential efficacy of such efforts. It is intended, however, to identify some of the nuances of branding, marketing, and the latent problems associated with them if they are applied too simplistically. Almost all discussions of branding exhort those involved in such efforts to identify the core products of an institution. As institutional size and complexity increase, this can become a daunting task. Careful delimiting of branding efforts with an eye toward how to best coordinate the follow-up marketing activities associated with those efforts may be an important part of branding at large universities. Textbook branding and marketing efforts focused on an entire campus are more likely to be successful at smaller colleges.

References:

Fickes, Michael. (March, 2003). Solving the Branding Mystery.College Planning and

Management, 6(3),16-20.

Hesel, Rick. (April 2004). Know Thyself: 5 Strategies for Marketing a College. The

Chronicle of Higher Education, B9.

Moore, Robert. (April/May, 2004). The Rising Tide: Branding and the Academic

Marketplace. Change,36(3), 56-61.

Appleton-Knapp, S. L., & Krentler, K. A. (2006). Measuring Student Expectations andTheirEffects on Satisfaction: The Importance of Managing Student Expectations. Journal of Marketing Education, 28(3), 254-264.

Market researchers spend considerable time and resources attempting to determine consumer expectations regarding a wide variety of products and services and then gauging whether those expectations have been met after purchase. While colleges and universities have several measures available to gauge the relative satisfaction a student has with her/his educational experience, many institutions have little sense of the expectations students bring to their college-going experience and the extent the fulfillment of those expectations impact students’ sense of satisfaction with their experience. We include this article more for the implications of its methodological focus than for the direct utility of its findings for enrollment managers. The results of these studies demonstrate that research on student expectations and satisfaction may be more complicated then is often realized.

The authors of this article carried out two separate studies that examined the role student expectations played in satisfaction with a particular course and investigated whether there was a difference in the relationship between expectations and satisfaction for students asked to recall their pre-course expectations at the end of the course and students whose expectations were measured prior to the start of the course. While the article speaks specifically to student course expectations and satisfaction, the results provide interesting food-for-thought for enrollment managers interested in the relationship between student college-going expectations and student retention, persistence to graduation, and satisfaction with their educational experience.

Knapp and Krentler ground their studies in the expectancy/disconfirmation paradigm. The paradigm encompasses four constructs: expectations, performance, disconfirmation, and satisfaction. Disconfirmation is the term given to discrepancies between a student’s expectations and perceived reality. The authors point out that there are three possible disconfirmation outcomes: zero disconfirmation results when perceived reality meets expectations, positive disconfirmation results when perceived reality exceeds expectations, and negative disconfirmation results when perceived reality falls below expectations. The authors carried out two studies with a cohort of students in two separate semesters. In the first semester, the student cohort was asked to complete a course evaluation survey administered at the end of the semester that asked students to recall their expectations for the course and then respond to scaled response statements regarding their satisfaction with five course-specific issues. The second study, which was administered during a separate semester, gathered student’s actual expectations concerning the course at the beginning of the semester. In addition, the second study was designed to gather student perceptions regarding satisfaction at three different points in the semester to reduce the potential bias in responses.

While the results of the studies raise many interesting issues regarding student assessment methodologies, for the purposes of this review, the most relevant result was the implication that depending on when assessment occurs, levels of student satisfaction can actually shape recall of expectations. This was particularly evident with the results of the second study. In the second study, students’ post-course assessment on whether their expectations were fulfilled did not match their actual levels of positive or negative disconfirmation gleaned during the semester. The actual levels of positive or negative disconfirmation were measured by comparing the students’ actual expectations prior to the course and their perceptions of the course gathered during the last week of the semester. This result raised questions concerning the expectancy/disconfirmation paradigm model as students whose expectations were negatively disconfirmed ended up expressing moderate satisfaction with the course after it was done.

An understanding of how student expectations affect satisfaction is valuable for enrollment managers because they can exert some control in influencing students’ expectations about their college-going experience through the messages conveyed in admissions promotional materials, campus visits, and interactions with admissions representatives. For those enrollment managers interested in researching the relationship between student expectations for college and their satisfaction with the experience, the reviewed article indicates that attention must be paid to when and how student responses are collected as hindsight bias can color results that can be truly informative for improvement of institutional practices.

Bohling, Timothy, Bowman, Douglas, LaValle, Steve, Mittal, Vikas, Narayandas, Das, Ramani, Girish, & Varadarajan, Rajan. (2006). CRM Implementation: Effectiveness Issues and Insights. Journal of Service Research, 9(2). 184-194.

The acquisition, implementation, and use of constituent relationship management tools (CRMs) are becoming increasingly common on college and universities. Thus, it seems timely to look at the implementation of CRMs. This article reports on the efforts of a research team that surveyed nearly 100 businesses to identify effective strategies for implementing a constituent relationship management tool. A CRM can be used for many purposes including effective marketing. The group found several factors account for a successful implementation.

Good CRMS allow campuses to segment markets and follow up with communications that can be tracked historically. Businesses and postsecondary institutions which focus on marketing their brand may leverage the CRM functionality to build relationships with a broad audience,carefully tailoring their message to each respective market segment. A community college might focus different messages on different segments such as dual enrollees, traditionals, non-traditionals as well as students interested only in personal enrichment.

Successful CRM implementation requirements follow several broad patterns of support and activities. The adoption of a CRM occurs most often when a single division champions the cause. After adoption by the unit addressing a niche cause, the application of the tool then morphs into resolving other challenges. The confidence of those using the tool increases over time and as more challengesare presented, the group looks across the capabilities of the tool to see if it may help there as well.

Another key to implementation relates to how senior management connects the CRM tool to organizational viability. If they see the functionality as critical to organizational success, then the tool will receive implementation support. For this alignment to occur, managers need to see how the CRM initiative ties to company goals - particularly the recruitment and retention of customers and employees.

The article goes on to show how larger organizations seem better suited to link the overall marketing strategy with the CRM strategy – a key to effective implementation. This type of success would lend itself to future resource commitments necessary for software upgrades and related training. The authors conclude that areas, such as marketing, must look for metrics to measure the return on investment to continue the existence of this tool. They also suggest customer churn, revenue per customer, cost-to-serve customers, and localproject-based metrics are indices one should track.

Like other marketing tools, CRMs inherently possess potential that enrollment managers may leverage. This study helps an enrollment management team consider related CRM implementation issues that will need to be addressed before the tool is ready to be fully utilized.

Goldgehn, L. A. (2004). Generation Who, What, Y? What You Need to Know About Generation Y. International Journal of Educational Advancement, 5(1), 24-34.

As institutional enrollment management efforts have become increasingly sophisticated, so too have the market segmentation techniques that drive current admissions marketing and communications strategies. Today, of all the different student market segments enrollment managers appeal to, the group that arguably garners the most attention in the literature is Generation Y or the Millenial Generation. Generation Y refers to the group of 70 million teens and young adults born between 1981 and 2000 that comprise the pool of traditional-aged undergraduates as well as young adults seeking graduate programs.

Goldgehn’s article attempts to synthesize a wide variety of literature regarding Generation Y in an effort to compile a comprehensive profile that can be used to improve marketing and communication efforts aimed at this particular student segment. While lacking rigorous empirical sources to support several assertions made concerning Generation Y, the article serves as a good review of the commonly held wisdom marketing consultants marshal in support of customized marketing efforts aimed at this student segment. The first half of the article is broken down into several small sections that discuss the current status of Generation Y, highlights their strength as a consumer entity, views on product brands, their personal values, their views on peers and mentors, and, lastly, their views on higher education. The second half of the article provides recommendations on what institutions should do to market effectively to Generation Y.

According to Goldgehn, Generation Y students approach their college choice process in much the same way they shop for accessories; their final choice is often influenced by what the individual determines to be most fashionable, hip, and image-defining. The author points out that Generation Y students are research-oriented individuals who seek out information to confirm what they hear and see and are not easily influenced by flashy marketing schemes and advertisements. Having grown up in a heavily technology-driven environment, Generation Y spends a considerable amount of time on the computer checking e-mail, chatting with family and friends, and browsing a variety of Internet sites. Given their comfort and sophistication with technology, Generation Y students have high expectations for institutional websites and count on them to be up-to-date, easy to navigate, and informative. Complicating the characterization of Generation Y is the author’s converse assertion that Gen Y’ers are also heavily influenced by and routinely seek peer approval when making decisions. In addition to peers, Generation Y also looks to adult mentors to provide expertise when students need to be “tipped” toward pursuing a particular course of action.

The author suggests that colleges and universities can no longer rely on traditional forms of communication when interacting with Generation Y. Institutions should keep in mind four key elements when communicating with Gen Y’ers: be real, be raw, be relevant, and focus on establishing relationships. He contends that institutions that wait until high school to establish a relationship with prospective students are entering the game too late. Not only must institutions reach prospective students at an early age, they must be relevant with their communication. We are uncertain that this is wise advice. Since most students don’t start thinking about college until their sophomore or even junior year in college it is unclear that trying to establish a relationship sooner would be effective.