Nothing is more common to a higher ed marketer than faculty and staff lamenting that their institution is a hidden gem and that it must do more to tell its story. Intuitively, everyone in the room knows that a student’s college choice starts well in advance of filling out an inquiry form or applying, and that it’s not an entirely (mostly?) rational decision. Yet when it comes to funding the kind of long-term brand-building efforts that could help tell the university’s story at scale, the conversation usually turns to exactly how many new students that effort will produce.
It’s an entirely understandable question. For tuition-dependent institutions, it’s never been more important for to make every marketing dollar to work as hard as it can. At the same time, the question is unanswerable, in the same way that it’s impossible to say how many more tomatoes you’ll get if you water and fertilize your garden a bit more.
It’s connected, but it’s upstream, and it depends.
And that’s where the conversation often stalls: uncertainty makes brand feel like a luxury rather than a necessity. But while we can’t answer the question in the narrow sense (“How many students will this campaign produce?”) we can answer it more broadly. Recent research is beginning to draw a clearer line between how students perceive a brand and how it performs on key enrollment metrics.
Moving from Brand Vibes to Enrollment Impact
This past year, our colleagues at ADV Market Research conducted a groundbreaking study linking brand to enrollment. They started by measuring brand clarity across 35 colleges and universities, focusing on how well prospective students understood the type of student who attends and the kind of educational experience offered. Then they compared those clarity scores against a range of enrollment metrics.
ADV’s findings were surprising. While clearer brands didn’t correlate with overall application or enrollment trends (there are just too many confounding factors), they did correlate with healthier enrollment outcomes like:
- Higher net tuition revenue
- Better student retention
- Higher draw rates (This metric shows the percent of admitted students who choose enroll and suggests relative market position.)
- Lower discount rates.
Beyond enrollment metrics, brand clarity was also strongly connected to one other factor: overall advertising spend.
What does this mean for your institution? First, clarifying what your brand stands for in the eyes of your prospects won’t necessarily unlock an avalanche of new matriculations. But we now have empirical evidence that clearly links an institution’s brand to its desirability, admissions efficiency, and level of investment in promotions.
So clearly, clarity matters. But there’s a catch: clarity is perishable. Brand messages don’t compound like an investment account, they decay.
The Treadmill of Constant Forgetting
The human mind might be a miracle of biology, but it’s also surprisingly leaky, especially when it comes to things like brands. We can model this out mathematically and we can see the commercial impact that happens when brands stop renting space in the public’s mind. That means remaining relevant and visible in the marketplace at scale requires constant upkeep.
Brand isn’t a savings account, it’s more like a treadmill. You have to keep moving, or you fall behind. And while there’s no guarantee that any single brand-building effort will deliver a measurable bump in applications, there‘s a near guarantee of what will happen if you do nothing: your brand will slowly fade from memory, the clarity of what you stand for will erode, and your competitors will happily take the up the space you failed to occupy.
That’s why the institutions that wait for perfect certainty or pin their hopes on one big splashy short-term campaign tend to find themselves in slow decline.
Feet in the Mud. Eyes to the Stars.
Higher ed marketing will always face pressure to prove its worth in short-term numbers, and that’s okay. Without short-term impact, there may not even be a long-term for some of our institutions. But the most enduring changes will come from balancing short-term pressures with the longer-term project of building a brand that students remember, trust, and want to be part of. That’s slow, imprecise, and occasionally messy work. But it’s also what shapes the future of your institution. So, if you’ve got work to do on that front, now’s the time. And if you’d like a helping hand along the way, reach out.
