Putting Your Brand to Work: Rankings and Reputation
Education
In the “Putting Your Brand to Work” blog series, I’ll explore four of the most important uses of brand in higher education, and some best practices for each.
Among the most common expectations placed on university MarComm offices is to improve the institution’s rankings and reputation. By now, we all know that rankings such as the annual U.S. News “Best Colleges” are deeply flawed. But we also know that many leaders in higher education continue to be preoccupied with these same rankings. And most often, when they mount an effort to improve their standing, they assign the task, at least in part, to their MarComm offices.
If your president or dean is determined to pursue higher rankings, there are several best practices worth following, to maximize the impact of your brand and ensure that you don’t fall victim to the harmful unintended consequences that often come from playing the rankings game.
First, if you can, gather some data. In theory, higher rankings might help increase student enrollment, but do you have any real-world data demonstrating that rankings actually impact the decisions of your own prospective students and parents? Likewise, rankings might help theoretically to drive fundraising, but outside the nation’s most elite colleges and universities, the donor communities supporting higher education tend to be far more interested in the local impacts of their giving than they are in any national ranking. Is that the case at your institution? These kinds of questions are worth asking.
Second, it’s important to remember that no matter how tempting it might be to assume that rankings are partly a product of better marketing and communication, the reality is that a university’s standing is determined far more by what it does than anything it says. Your brand can play only a limited role. U.S. News, for example, employs a peer assessment score that comprises only 20% of its final rankings. In other schemes, reputation will be even less important. It’s entirely appropriate to utilize a brand and marketing campaign to bolster your reputation, and you can do this whether your institution pays any attention to rankings or not. The key is to conduct this kind of campaign by aiming at those stakeholders who matter most—namely, the students, businesses, and communities that you serve—regardless of the impact that their perceptions might have on your college rankings. (Again, having real-world data can be helpful here.) What you do to serve these groups, and how they value your efforts, will do much more to improve the institution’s enrollment, fundraising, and reputation than any performance in a U.S. News survey.
Finally, one clear role that your brand can play is to serve as a guardrail in helping you avoid the worst consequences of pursuing rankings in higher education. Among the most pernicious outcomes of the rankings game is its tendency to encourage colleges and universities to pursue strategies that run counter to their institutional mission and core identity. U.S News, for example, tends to reward those institutions that are most selective in their student recruitment, which tends to privilege applicants with greater wealth and academic preparation. If your university’s brand is built on concepts such as access, social justice, or economic mobility, then pursuing higher rankings might well come at the expense of the kinds of first-generation, economically challenged students and communities that your mission calls you to serve. It’s worth bearing in mind how much of your brand value you might sacrifice in the pursuit of higher rankings.
To summarize, if you’re asked to mount a campaign to improve your rankings and reputation, it’s best to approach the effort with a simple philosophy in mind: first, do good work and measure its impact as rigorously as possible, then be strategic in bragging about it to the right people. Where you wind up in the rankings should be an afterthought more than a high-priority outcome.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to work with university leaders to maximize the impact of your brand, let me know. Email me at [email protected] and we can talk about best practices for helping your college or university to genuinely live your brand. Or you can visit BVK’s Brand Academy for Colleges and Universities to explore how to develop and leverage your brand. You can read more about BVK’s work in shaping peer perceptions in higher education here, here, and here.
We also offer a free presentation called Beyond “Telling Our Stories Better”: How to Work with University Presidents, VPs, and Deans. You’ll receive practical, step-by-step guidance for how to engage your campus leadership in ways that build trust, broaden their understanding of marketing and communications, and yield genuine partnerships that facilitate your work. To learn more, download our Presentation Overview.
