Mario Barosevcic from Emerge Education shares his thoughts on building and owning a unique market position.
A guest post by Mario Barosevcic, Principal at Emerge Education.
So, you want to build a new university or reinvent your current university and were wondering where to start?
If you are like me and wake up with questions about how to build and develop a differentiated, scalable university for the 21st century, then this is an article for you. Or if you are just curious and want to find out what traits we hope the university of the future will have, then please read along too.
In this piece, we pull all of these innovations together and create a strategic framework we believe should inform the development of top universities.
Informed by the key challenges in the sector, there are 4 sets of strategic questions and differentiation angles that universities need to carefully consider. This blueprint sets up these questions, covering student experience, outcomes, price and audience, and provides an extensive suite of potential answers. Before digging into these questions and the details, a few high-level notes on differentiation.
The one-sentence differentiation test: Does your university pass it?
The question we often like to ask university leaders is: If there was just one sentence you had to describe your university — what words would you use?
If you could not use the name of your university or its location in this one-sentence description, would prospective students, and even alumni, know who you were?
“Most universities fail the one-sentence differentiation test and even the whole paragraph test.”Mario Barosevcic
So many descriptions focus on what universities have (inputs), rather than who they are for, how they deliver value and what they can help you achieve (outcomes). If you are a new challenger university or an existing small, financially struggling university, and you cannot answer this question persuasively, the odds are against you one day building a recognisable brand, a sizeable audience and long future.
Not so strong university brands and offerings:
Differentiated university brands emphasise very clearly who they are for (Foundry: working adults worried about automation; Quantic: modern leaders interested in business) and what they uniquely offer (Foundry: skills and knowledge for jobs that won’t be automated; Quantic: the mobile-first business school of the future). You read the taglines and the detail about the offer and you can tell whether it is an offer for you, that will help you achieve your desired goals.
The four key brand dimensions
In the busiest and most competitive market in the world, we have developed a framework below that will help you think about differentiation, develop the building blocks to pass the one-sentence differentiation test and enhance your chances of success. The key strategic choices challenger universities face can be captured across the following 4 dimensions:
The student experience is so much more than just attending lectures, participating in extracurriculars and using new facilities the university has invested millions into, rarely asking students for their opinion. The majority of university promises today are that of ‘everything to everyone’ with a mass-market environment of endless concentrations, majors, degrees and courses, as well as millions of facilities and extracurricular programmes students are thrown into and expected to sink or swim through.
If you are looking to build an innovative challenger university brand centred around the student experience, we believe you need to focus your attention on creating a student-inspired, personalised, adaptive and pedagogy informed experience with a practical and relevant curriculum that is up to date and connected with the demands of the real world.
If delivering strong student outcomes is a key pillar and promise you want to deliver, then it is critical to ensure your offer is objectives-focused, employer informed and offers focused modular degrees and better assessments. If employability is a key priority for your students then you should start treating employment as the norm, while offering modular career off-ramps (eg getting a job in 1 year without needing to study for the full 2 or 3) or thinking of education as an employment extension (eg by offering it to employees and fitting around the FT work).
Many universities have limited marketing knowledge and capability and often rely on third parties to attract students and once students show up on campus. When defining your target audience; it is important to ask: “Who am I offering this experience and outcomes to and how am I tailoring towards different and changing demands?”. When you are prioritising target populations, think of offers specifically suited towards life stages, passions, geographies and desired outcomes. Once you have really determined your target students, make sure that every word you use in your promotional materials speaks to them and every channel you use is a relevant channel that your end users visit.
While there are many large universities by revenue, there are not many large universities by number of students. University is either very expensive or very regional. Ask yourself what scale and impact you want to achieve. If the answer is greater than ten thousand you really need to rethink the role of campus and faculty, that contribute to more than 80% of university costs, through a technology-first and often cheaper and more flexible proposition that appeals to a mass audience.
The solution in building a strong challenger university brand is not in embracing all of these areas but finding the right combination of focus themes and subthemes that differentiate your university and help it deliver on its mission. In an incredibly busy market, building a new impactful university is probably one of the most exciting and yet challenging feats of entrepreneurship.
To support founders and university leaders in this quest we have created a full strategy guide on this topic here. Do follow us here as well if you’re interested in the future of education and technology and want to stay up to date with key new developments in Europe and the biggest library of resources for education technology founders.
