Why Tertiary Institutions Still Market Themselves

Dr Sandra Grey of the TEU asks in this release:

“Why would tertiary institutions spend all this public money promoting themselves when many of them are complaining that they have too many students already?”

And seems to present a compelling point. The bums on seats funding incentives of the early 2000s have been reduced. Why spend money attracting students they can’t enroll? But if one thinks hard one can come up with a few reasons why this is happening.

The most important I think is this; universities despite funding changes, are still competing for students. However, they aren’t competing for bums on seats anymore, they are in competition with one another for the good students. I am deliberately being vague by what I mean by good.

Now that enrolment caps are in place, it means that institutions have to target those of academic talent, poster girls and boys to put on glossy brochures, model students from disadvantaged minority groups more aggressively to get them at their institution and not somebody else’s.

There’s more to this. Consider institutions that have university status compared to those that do not. Due to the fact that people often want to go to a “real university” it means that the local polytech has to do a lot to convince a prospective student of its value compared to uni in the big city, especially to the good students who have more choices.

So why are universities spending big money on marketing? Because they want to maintain their image and prestige. Out of all the tertiary institutions in New Zealand, there are only eight universities, and they want to keep up appearances.

They do that by trying to attract the good students of course, but Auckland and Otago in particular have been battling it out for a long time to be the “number one” university in New Zealand. Auckland trying to keep its place in the TES rankings (and running that 1 motif in all its glossy brochures) and Otago going for the PBRF for all its got.

You couldn’t have gotten better ad placement

I was reading this story about the man who defrauded ASB Bank and spent quite a lot of it on expensive prostitutes. Now ASB is targeting one of the prostitutes to try and get some of their money back. Although I don’t see how they would succeed, given that he was a high powered bank employee so him spending a lot of money on a girl wouldn’t raise suspicions in and out of itself.

What was very interesting was the ad that was run at the bottom of this article.

The ad that was run is for one of ASB Bank’s competitors. And to top it all off, features an alluring woman used in Rabobank’s campaign as the other woman bank you have on the side.

Given my previous statements about the weariness I have about the use of eye candy in marketing, one might have expected me to let this one slide. But the juxtaposition of this was too compelling to ignore. And in the interests of full disclosure, I am a customer of Rabobank. Not because of the eye candy in their marketing, but because they have the best rate.