Recently a strategic trend has been surfacing and it is a branding tactic. Tired of fighting the mega-university brand names, small school, colleges and even programs have taken this pathway:
- You listen attentively to your students. You invite more one-on-on information that a research survey would skim over. You follow your students to a particular critical want, or need, one that a certain type of identifiable student wants.
- You embrace that type of student and go overboard in creating a flagship that fits that student perfectly. A flagship is a visible, defined, named concept. You detail that flagship with unexpected care. It may be a course of study, a research project, a real-life lab, an entire program, a star professor with a cause, an add-on to your present curriculum.
- This want, may be something your school does not presently provide. Here is where the small school can win. You make it happen. With incredible flexibility and lightning speed (academia allowing) you develop your flagship including products and customized services to meet this want. In the meantime, the large corporate university has missed the want entirely and even if their discovery process had led to it, a branded solution would have taken five years to implement. Why? Politics, turf wars, miscommunication, slow response, trips through the legal department etc. In the meantime your solution – you name it, you own it – has become a “brand name” solution in an entire student vertical.
Brand strategy, once the sole province of large universities is now the tool of choice for small schools. The truth is that this has been happening very slowly at universities for a long time through happenstance. There are numerous examples like Colorado State University. The have carved out being the “Harvard” of veterinary schools. Of course, the veterinary school brands, markets and enrolls students in a different fashion from the rest of the university. The point is that now with the competition increasing, happenstance is becoming more intentional and driven. We are now touching upon segmented branding which is a sea-change trend, which will be covered in these pages separately.