![]()
I. Strategy
Opportunistic Marketing in Higher Education
Thomas J. Wonders
James F. Gyure
There was no visible enrollment crisis at our institution, a degree-granting undergraduate college on a regional campus in a multicampus university system.
In fact, the full-time enrollment of over 2600 was an all-time high, and part-time enrollment was sufficiently large to make the Full Time Equivalent figure a record one. Admission applications were up slightly after three years of modest decline. Classrooms and advising schedules were full. All campus housing was over capacity.
One popular major, in keeping with national trends of student interest, was consistently oversubscribed. Its popularity and career-orientation drew frowns from faculty in more traditional liberal arts areas who felt more and more relegated to teaching service courses for the popular major. Another academic area was experiencing exceptional growth after a decade of declining or plateaued enrollment. But a previously large and robust division was suffering a severe decrease in enrollment largely due to several years of declining numbers of freshman applications for its programs. Faculty in that division, their ranks swelled by a period of power and growth, were restless and anxious to act, worried about potential cuts. Outside that division, faculty complained with increasing volume about crowded classes and excessive advising loads. Retention was consistently high, but no one knew if it could be counted on to continue. With more students than ever applying for financial aid, complaints increased about excessive procedural delays in financial aid processing.
In addition, there was muttering among faculty that the three years of reduced admission applications had lessened somewhat the academic quality of the student body. There were university mandates for more minority students. The general feeling was that the solution was probably to be found in admissions. Recruit better students. Recruit more minority students. Admit fewer students to the popular major, and recruit more students for the declining major.
In other words, there was an enrollment crisis at our institution. Admittedly, it was a type of crisis many struggling institutions would have welcomed in lieu of the wholesale decline they were experiencing. But the implications for us were no less complex or serious.
What we needed was a coordinated strategic marketing effort to clarify goals, unify strategies, and utilize resources efficiently.
However, since the total enrollment situation was sound, and it appeared that we had escaped the dramatic enrollment decline threatened by demographic forecasts for the early 1980âs, we could find little support for our call from the Admissions Office for strategic marketing. Among many other situations, we were victims of the superficial but widespread belief that marketing was what you reluctantly did as a last resort if you were rapidly losing students. Even at that, marketing was considered just a matter of advertising and beefed-up recruiting.
The enrollment experience we have described including a reluctance to accept contemporary management forms, may be common enough to have become higher educationâs own form of âMarketing Myopia.â But our course of action is as yet unusual. Out of necessity, we undertook activities we now call âopportunistic marketing,â methods we believe can be successfully applied to a variety of similar enrollment situations, especially at small to mediumsized institutions, and can be undertaken by many institutional offices and departments.
The Reluctance Scenario
During the last fifteen years, proponents of strategic marketing and enrollment planning have made significant inroads in higher education. Schools with declining enrollment have been kept open. Colleges with erratic enrollment trends have stabilized. Institutions have focused their goals more sharply. Much has been written and presented about the concepts, practices and success of strategic marketing and enrollment management. However, there are still many institutions where strategic marketing and enrollment planning are considered suspect, activities somehow inappropriate for higher education, or not worth the work they require and unlikely to be successful anyway.
Marketing, in the non-profit sector, is still widely confused with advertising or public relations. The tremendous growth in the use of certain marketing techniques (such as direct mail) in new student recruitment will sometimes comprise an institutionâs total attempt at strategic marketing. Such techniques are necessary, and to an extent, effective. But many institutions will satisfy themselves that using direct mail in admissions or hiring a publications consultant for viewbooks and brochures constitutes marketing. Too often, administrators can use these efforts to placate those objecting to the âcommercialâ nature of marketing, acknowledging that itâs a necessary evil in recruiting, but limited, thank goodness, to its proper place. After all, they might plead, havenât these same faculties and administrations suffered a full list of management models, from MBO to PRMS, with little change or innovation to show for the effort?
If no immediately threatening enrollment problem exists, or the problem is not causing panic, or a potential problem is masked by lack of research or analysis, many senior administrators and faculty see no reason to engage in marketing activities, and more importantly, in strategic planning activities. Even in the presence of an obvious need for enrollment planning and marketing, there will be senior administrators and faculty who are unaware of, disinterested in, or resistant to, such activity.
The experts in non-profit marketing argue strongly that true marketing and genuine planning cannot take place until senior leadership is firmly in the camp of the marketers. George Keller and Philip Kotler, among others, have articulately and forcefully portrayed the crucial role of the college president in strategic marketing and planning processes.
In addition, the issue is complicated by faculty perceptions of marketing. In the contemporary profit sector, there is no need to convince a CEO or important VP of the importance of marketing. In higher education, however, faculty generally believe that they should have an integral role and opinion in institutional matters, and most college presidents agree. Therefore, their concerns that the integrity of educational efforts will be sullied by methods borrowed too liberally from the profit sector create one of the most significant barriers to the adoption of strategic marketing. These concerns are not likely to be alleviated by a persuasive presentation or two because, as George Keller convincingly explains in Academic Strategy, institutions progress incrementally and with elaborate debate far more often than through bold, dynamic decision-making (even when there is sound research to support the decisions.)
In 1979 Philip Kotler predicted that the next decade would witness the acceptance of marketing as a major function in the nonprofit sector. But he also noted that acceptance might be limited at first to a tolerance of functions like promotion and advertising, and outlined how leadership should implement marketing in nonprofit institutions. We do not believe, though, that in the decade since, we have witnessed broad acceptance among college leaders, or widespread implementation of the full marketing function.
And so, if the senior leadership isnât convinced, or is afraid of strong faculty opposition, or is involved with other important activities such as fund raising, who convinces the top administrators? It isnât likely to be a Director of Marketing, since an institution that is reluctant to embrace marketing in the first place probably doesnât have a Director of Marketing.
Unfortunately, the traditional method seems to be one of waiting until some major enrollment problem reaches a sufficiently critical stage to warrant bringing in a consultant. In fact, many experts contend that in the majority of what we call reluctance scenarios, marketing and planning methods are accepted only when brought in from the outside, and that outside consultants will typically be brought in only when a crisis threatens. There is even the suggestion that some top administrators consider the selection of a consultant a more appropriate leadership act than conducting marketing internally, whether in response to the lure of âexpertise,â or a desire to preserve integrity by keeping the actual process at a distance. An administrator can always claim reluctance and regret, right before he or she hires the top consultant available.
There is, however, another way, especially for certain types of institutions. It is the internal marketing of non-profit marketing itself. It is a method we call âopportunistic marketing.â
Opportunistic Marketing
Opportunistic marketing operates on the premise that a key office, or a group of active administrators working together, can effectively introduce marketing activities to an institution where nonprofit marketing is resisted, or at least not formally embraced. If the very nature of decision-making in higher education is largely incremental, a reactive approach rather than a proactive approach, then opportunistic marketing seeks to take advantage of that reactive mechanism by repeatedly creating situations to which the decision makers must react. In a broad sense, then, opportunistic marketing is instructional, object lessons at the institutional level. The marketing methods may be traditional or innovative, structured or spontaneous; the projects can be substantial or limited. But in all cases, the actions should produce a result which demonstrates clearly the successful use of marketing methods and principles. When opportunistic marketing succeeds, the reaction will be an acknowledgement that a marketing effort has been made, and an agreement that it has worked.
In the second of his âexcellenceâ books, A Passion for Excellence, Tom Peters enthusiastically and repeatedly argues for âthe messy world of innovation.â He champions the entrepreneurial employees he fondly calls âskunksâ and âcheaters,â who put innovationtion and the potential for new and better quality ahead of routine and precedent, who risk failure in testing out new ideas, who strive to improve their organization by refusing to accept the lowest common denominator as the best they can do.
In Re-inventing The Corporation, John Naisbitt presents characteristics of what he calls the âre-inventedâ corporation. Included in his list are: a switch from top-down authoritarianism to networking, with more lateral resource-sharing; intuition (as opposed to mere numbers-crunching) being held in higher regard; larger companies adopting more of the values of smaller companies; and a stronger encouragement of entrepreneurship. Naisbitt refers to entrepreneurship within a corporation â the creation of new products and the revitalizing effects of new marketsâas intrapreneurship, a concept particularly appropriate here.
Tom Petersâ Thriving On Chaos extends several of his excellence theory themes, including a proposal that innovation within a structure is best served by what he calls âlightning-fast small starts,â and by âpilotâ projects. He argues that these pilot projects, tested again and again by âline operators,â should be championed by key executives, âsoldâ to everyone who has any bearing o...
