Building a well-defined brand is crucial to the success of any organization. This, too, is pivotal in building brand affinity. The ideal goal of brand affinity is to have consumers so passionate about your brand that even if (for whatever reason) the product you’re selling is out of their reach. The easiest way to illustrate this idea is luxury fashion companies. Many people cannot afford to buy from Coach, Louis Vuitton, or Gucci, but will go through inexplicable trials and tribulations to purchase just the cheapest item available just so they can identify with the brand. This scenario is not unique to luxury fashion, though. We see the same situation play out in an industry where what’s being sold isn’t even tangible – higher education.
For the sake of proximity, we will use the University of Miami (UM) as a successful example. In Miami, when football season arrives, everyone is suddenly a Miami Hurricane. Why? UM has done a great job in building a brand that everyone wants to be associated with. Come game day, whether folks went to UM or not, droves of people don their UM gear and head out for the game. You can’t tell a UM fan that they are not part of the hurricane family. If you’ve ever been to UM football game, you’ve likely heard, from the depths of the student section, that iconic line from Mean Girls: “she doesn’t even go here!”
This opens the conversation to another topic, also associated with branding. What matters most when building a brand in higher education? In the case of UM, although they have the academic rankings to back it up, their primary lure for enrollment is football and the experience of being at UM games. Tailgating and experiencing UM football games is at the core of what UM sells. Does this then mean that sports team rankings can outweigh the importance of educational value in higher education?
This proves that marketers in higher education need to be sure to market all aspects of a university and/or college experience. Marketers in this industry have the undaunting task of turning the intangible – an education – into something tangible. Marketing the college experience could be an appropriate tactic when marketing to a large, undefined audience. For some marketers in higher education, especially at younger universities with teams that aren’t as established, this could prove to be a real challenge.