Zainab is the marketing strategist at The Brand Education. She works with university leadership and marketing teams to help them solve global branding challenges. We caught up with her to hear her insight on breaking down success barriers in higher education:

We’ve been speaking a lot about how institutions need to think a little more like commercial businesses in order to compete on a global scale. For most institutions, there remain a few challenges to this change in mindset. But there’s one element of the higher education mix around which universities are already functioning exactly like commercial enterprises; the challenges they face.

Budget cuts, staffing challenges, lack of transparency and change resistance are problems common to almost all large organisations. And at the heart of these difficulties lies a fundamental problem – the challenge of aligning resources with the outcomes required by leadership. The solution? Communication.

The ways your teams relate to each other (internal comms) and the way you relate to the rest of the world (external comms) are the mechanics by which your institution leverages its resources to achieve its goals. We apply two key concepts to help overcome communications challenges wherever you find them in an organisation. Let’s take a look at them.

We work with and advise all operational levels within higher education institutions. When speaking with leadership teams on the larger goals of their institution, it’s extremely rare to find a lack of direction or agreement on what needs to be done. That means that the gold is already inside your institution. Our goal is to crack open the egg – to bring out the key vision so the whole team can share in it.

That, really, is the key to authenticity – a concept we talk a lot about here. All levels of your team need to understand exactly who you are as an institution, what you’re trying to achieve and who you’ll need to work with in order to achieve those goals. Not only do you have to have those concepts nailed down, but you need to have communicative mechanisms in place that allow stakeholders to understand and, most importantly, act on them.

This kind of internal brand alignment is something that universities struggle with today – especially those institutions that use historical prestige as a brand lifeline.

Building, or realigning, your communication mechanisms is the first step in leveraging your resources to break down success barriers. But market success depends on more than just your ability to act effectively. You need to make sure you’re doing the correct things. Learning what those things are comes down to how well you accumulate and manage consumer insight.

Traditionally, the path to consumer understanding begins with demographics. In our hyper-mobile, global digital world, traditional classifications like age, location, gender and occupation are often less relevant as drivers of behaviour than abstract ideas like our knowledge, beliefs and community norms. In case you haven’t been following along, the research bears this out, too. This is why we advocate an individual-first, demographics second approach to external comms that puts the global learner at the centre of the brand.

As the data institutions accumulate becomes bigger and more complex, success will come as a result of how well we manage and deploy insight into our target audience – the people we want to work with most.

Brand alignment and consumer insight – these are the keys to breaking down success barriers in 2021. And the universities that do them well will undoubtedly be the ones that succeed. Fortunately, you don’t need massive budgets to get them right; just careful planning and a big, healthy dose of introspection.