Transcript

Bennie F Johnson 

Hello, and thank you for joining us for this episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. In our episodes, we explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations of individuals that flourish at this intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We hope to introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know.

Through our thought-provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, my special guest on the eve of our AMA Marketing Higher Ed Conference, it’s none other than Brian Rosenberg. Brian is currently a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. But from 2003 to 2020, he served as the 16th president of McAllister College. He is the author of an incredible book, “‘Whatever it is, I’m against it:’ Resistance to Change in Higher Education,” published last year by the Harvard Education Press. He serves as an advisor and a director for the African Leadership Institute and is a member of a board of multiple foundations. Prior to serving in his president’s role, he was dean of faculty at Lawrence University and a professor and chair of English at Allegheny College. He is also the author of two books and many articles in Victorian literature.

Brian, welcome to the podcast.

Brian Rosenberg 

Thank you for having me. You made me sound much more impressive than I am.

Bennie 

My friend, you are indeed impressive. But we’re going to jump right into resistance, whatever it is, I’m against it. So when we think about higher ed, you know, these are some of our oldest institutions in our country. And it’s their spaces in which new knowledge is constantly created. But yet, it’s a space in which we always see anchored resistance to change. Talk about that conundrum for a second there.

Brian

Yeah, well, it’s a great question because it’s exactly the conundrum that led me to write the book. And it’s a conundrum that I’ve wrestled with throughout my entire career. You have an industry made up of people who are predominantly defined as progressive and focused on social change. And in their own disciplines, they’re always trying to push the boundaries of knowledge and change old ideas. 

Bennie

Hmm. Right.

Brian 

So these are not people who in most of their lives are resistant to change. In fact, they embrace it. Yet when it comes to their own industry and in their own workplace, they are, in fact, pretty conservative. 

Bennie 

Right. Mm-hmm.

Brian 

And in looking for the answer to that puzzling question, what I arrived at is that when you see something that is that pervasive, it tends to relate not to individual temperaments, but to cultures and structures that somehow prevent or create resistance to change. And that’s what I found in higher education. I think the age of the industry is directly related to the fact that it is so change resistant. Higher education tends in many ways to be very backward looking.

Bennie 

Hmm, let me think about it. And yet higher education is under for lack of a better term under assault in every way you can think about it from market pressures to economic realities to questions of why it exists. It seems like change could be a solution for these moments. 

Brian 

It could. 

Bennie

But yet still resist it.

Brian

It could. Change, even when there are enormous pressures on people, tends to be hard. People don’t like it. And what I have found, though, is that when you are in situations of constraint, it can produce innovation. So I think innovation in higher education, change in higher education, is not going to come from places like Harvard and Columbia.

Bennie 

Right. Mm-hmm.

Brian 

You know, those institutions are, they can keep doing what they’re doing for pretty much as long as they want to do it. Change in education, I think, is going to come from two places. Institutions within the United States who are under a whole variety of pressures. And this relates directly to marketing and to audience and to the desire of a market for your product. 

Bennie 

Right. Okay. Right.

Brian

And then from outside the US, where people are working in situations of dramatic constraint and simply cannot afford for a whole variety of reasons to do things the way that they’ve always been done at American colleges and universities. I think what we’re going to see is an example of what some economists sometimes refer to as reverse innovation. It’s not going to come from the top. I think it’s going to come from the bottom up.

Bennie 

Right. So, you spent a period of time as a college president. When you think about the change that you’ve witnessed externally, describe for me, you know, what the challenges were when you took the reins in 2003 and when you left in 2020, what was the difference?

Brian 

I would never have said in 2003 or at any point during my 17 years as a president that the job was easy. But I will say now looking back that it was easier than it is now. And I think there have been a couple of really consequential social and cultural changes that account for that. One is the rise of social media.

Bennie

Mm-hmm. Wow. Okay.

Brian 

When I was a new president in the early 2000s, there was no Facebook, there was no Twitter, there was no Instagram. If someone was mad at me, they had to either actually pick up a pen and write me a letter or send me an email. And so I felt like I had some space to make mistakes. Anytime you take on a new big job, there’s a learning curve.

Bennie 

Right. Right. Hmm. Right.

Brian 

Many of us will look back on our early days in a new job and say, boy, I wouldn’t have done that had I known a little bit more. And so clearly, I think I became better at my job as I learned how to do it. And I had the space in those early years to do things maybe that were not perfect. Now, when not just college presidents, but all of us are under a different kind of scrutiny.

Bennie 

Right.

Brian 

It is almost impossible to make a mistake or to have a natural learning curve without people being all over you. So I think that social media microscope that presidents are under now, any leader is under now, has made the job more difficult. I also think that the broader colleges and universities have always reflected the society of which they’re a part.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right.

Brian 

Despite the walls around them and the isolated campuses, they don’t exist in isolation. And I think it is unquestionably the case that over the last couple of decades, society has become more fractured, more divisive, less civil. You just need to look at our politics. And that’s reflected on college campuses.

Bennie 

Right.

Brian 

It’s reflected in the way external audiences view colleges and universities, and it’s even reflected in the kinds of discussions that take place on college campuses. It’s just a more challenging time. We’ve had some really powerful and important racial reckonings since I became president. McAllister College is four miles from where George Floyd was murdered. 

Bennie

Right. It’s up there.

Brian 

Events like that have a profound effect on the way people think about what a college community should do, its relation to issues of social importance and social justice. So all of these things, it’s a cliche to say there’s a perfect storm, but all these things really have come together to make the job of trying to lead these very complex institutions even more difficult than it has traditionally been.

Bennie

So recently in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, you talked about a very important measure, which was trust. And this kind of change in trust in higher education. When you think about this kind of perfect storm, how has it impacted the way that stakeholders have trust in the institutions, whether students or parents or faculty? 

You know you really think about it, a campus of higher education is an incredible ecosystem of all these different communities and stakeholders together. But it’s brought together by this sense of trust.

Brian

For a long time, higher education was among, I think, the most universally respected industries, institutions in the United States. It was a source of pride. America was generally seen as having the best higher education system in the world. We had the most diverse system in the sense of having many different entry points. We had community colleges, public colleges, private colleges, big, small.

Bennie 

Right.

Brian 

And college, of course, was seen as a way to increase one’s opportunity for social mobility. And some of those things are still to some extent true. But we’ve seen a number of developments over the last 10 years in particular that I think have changed things. 

First of all, as every survey shows, people just have less trust in institutions in general. It’s especially true among younger people whether it’s political institutions or business institutions or educational institutions.

Bennie

Right. Mm-hmm.

Brian

There is a kind of profound dissatisfaction with and distrust of the way institutions behaved. And by the way, it’s something that I really resonate with because I was for years a scholar of Charles Dickens. And one of the messages that runs throughout Dickens’ works is that institutions can dehumanize people.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right. 

Brian 

And you have to be very, very careful when you become part of a bureaucracy or an institution not to lose your humanity. And so this is nothing new, but it’s become, I think, intensified over the last decade. Frankly, we’ve seen institutions fail people. The income inequality has grown, and the sense that my life is going to be better than the lives of my parents has gone away.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Brian 

And so it’s not surprising that you’ve seen this loss of faith in institutions, including higher ed. And then I always come back to the really fundamental issue of cost. The bottom line is college had just become too expensive. And I think underlying a lot of the dissatisfaction with higher education is the fact that it costs so darn much.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Okay. Right. Right.

Brian 

And that that cost excludes a lot of people who might want to go to college from going. I’m not someone who believes that everyone should go to college. I think everybody’s path is different. I think for some people college is the right path, for other people it’s not necessarily the right path. I do believe, however, that anyone who wants to go to college should have the opportunity to do so. And right now people look at what’s happened to the cost.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Brian 

And they basically say, why can’t you guys get that under control? And so, yeah, there are political factors, there are social factors, but I think underlying it all is just a real dissatisfaction with the inability of higher education to be financially accessible to more people in the country. And that drives a lot of the anger.

Bennie 

Yeah, you know, I often think about it as it’s a broken promise, right? It’s one, whether it’s articulated or not, it’s a broken promise that for generations you thought if you do X, the equation would equal Y, right? But in the space in which you see that broken where it is more expensive for me to go and my outcomes don’t equate to this output that I have at the beginning.

Brian 

Yeah, I totally agree. Another way of thinking of it is as a broken contract. Essentially, colleges and universities have a social contract. Most of them are nonprofit. And they’re nonprofit because they are supposed to be serving the social good. That’s why they don’t pay taxes. They don’t pay property taxes. For the most part, they don’t pay taxes on their endowments. So they enjoy a lot of benefits by virtue of being nonprofits.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Brian 

And the return on that is supposed to be that they are serving the social good. And when you see the fact, particularly at a lot of these elite institutions, that there are more students from the top 1 or 2% of the socioeconomic spectrum than there are from the bottom 50%, it’s fair to ask, are these institutions upholding their social contract? That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.

Bennie

Right. Right. Right.

Brian 

Colleges and universities are not supposed to be designed to perpetuate inequality. They’re supposed to be designed to create access. And it’s not that they’re totally failing at that, but they’re not doing as good a job as they should be doing. And I think as they were doing probably in the period of expansion at the end of the Second World War when you had things like the GI Bill and other programs that make college more affordable.

Bennie

Right, and made it an opportunity on that journey, right, that you could go in and you could see the benefits of that. 

BREAK

Bennie

So when we think about this kind of eroding trust, and it’s really been accelerated in the past 10, 20 years, what do you think are the ways in which colleges and universities can start to rebuild this trust? Or is it just a moment loss?

Brian 

No, I think it’s, you always have to have hope. I think at the root of it again is the question of whether colleges and universities are really willing to take a look at the practices that they have always stuck to and to change those to increase the ability of more people to access higher education.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Brian 

Higher education may be the only industry that has actually used technology to increase costs and not to decrease costs. And so whether we like it or not, we’re going to have to take advantage of all the technological changes that have happened over the last 10, 20, 30 years and say, is there a way to use these to bend the cost curve to make higher education good but also less expensive?

Bennie 

Right. Right. Yeah.

Brian 

Higher education is also going to have to be more transparent. this, again, I thought a lot in advance of our conversation about the question of marketing and how higher education talks about itself. Higher education is incredibly opaque to most people. People don’t know how much it costs.

The closest analog, I can draw us to the airline industry. Everybody on the plane is paying a different price. And you have no idea whether the seat you’re paying $400 for, the person next to you is paying $1,000 or $200. You have no idea. And you have no idea why. But you have no choice. You have to get on the plane. 

Bennie

Right. Right.

Brian 

In the case of higher education, people do have a choice. They don’t have to go. They don’t have to pay. And it’s incredibly expensive. So higher education pricing is incredibly confusing and opaque to the consumer. And that’s never a good thing. So another thing that higher education could do to improve its reputation is to be just more transparent about what it actually costs, how financial aid works, why it costs what it costs. Most people have no idea about those things. And that is not a good way of connecting with your audience.

Bennie 

Especially not over the longer term, right? If you start to think about that and you set the social discussion about college, you get a generation who turns off because of the price and exclude it. The next generation sees that group not go and have the same space. And then you start to build this dissatisfaction, right? With the experience that you have.

Brian 

We’re seeing that in most states. We are seeing a decline in the number of students, the percentage of students who are choosing to go to college. In Massachusetts and in the city of Boston, which you think of Boston as appropriately an education city. Boston has the highest concentration of colleges and universities in the country.

Bennie 

Right. Mm.

Brian 

The percentage of students who attend public high schools in Boston who go directly to college has declined over the last 10 years from about 67% to 54%. 

Bennie 

Wow.

Brian

That’s staggering. So students are choosing not to go. And one of the reasons they’re choosing not to go is that it’s too expensive. But a related reason is that they can’t understand, they’re not given the information to be able to figure out what it actually costs. In some cases, it doesn’t cost that much.

Bennie 

Right.

Brian 

And when that is communicated clearly to people, it has an impact. So again, to use Massachusetts as an example, over the last couple of years, Massachusetts has passed a couple of laws which has essentially made community college free. And what we’ve seen this year is a big spike in the number of students going to community college. 

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Oh wow. Right.

Brian 

Because the messaging was clear. If you are below a certain income level, this is free. And so that clarity has led to people choosing to go.

Bennie 

And I’m going to ask in that program, is it similar to some other states where you do your two and community college and you’re given almost a fast pass lane access to the state’s four year university?

Brian

Yes, so it’s become much easier to go from the two to the four-year colleges. What we need to work on now is also making it easier to go to a wider range of colleges. So there’s no reason why it should be difficult to transfer from a community college to a private college. And right now, it’s very difficult. But yes, it’s become much easier in Massachusetts and in many states to make that transfer for students who want to get the bachelor’s degree. And steps like that can help both with public trust and with the number of students who choose to attend.

Bennie 

Right. And I think in sort of conversation, it expands your network and alumni base as well. We talked about moving beyond just the small core group that continues to be repeat customers, if you will, at top universities and opening up the space. 

I’m going to pivot a bit because this is about technology. It reminded me of a conversation that I had and our change resistance. And I’m going to keep the school, the guilty nameless here, but I was in a conversation with a head of technology for a major university. And he said that he put together the platform to do the first online learning for the school. It may have been like 12 years ago. And when he did it, he said, it’s not the technology, it’s going to be the staff and the professor adoption that will determine when this gets delivered. And he thought that it would take them 10 years from that time from the launch before it would happen. I think his story was it took them eight and it took the pandemic to be the final accelerating point. And he said the university had the software, the infrastructure and the programming laid out to take their classes online, but they had the human resistance for those eight years. And it took something like the pandemic to actually move them across the board. And when we talk about kind of resistance to change, that story just seems out to me, like the technology is there. The ideas are there, but the human factors.

Brian 

The problem is not, the challenge is not technological. The technology exists and the pedagogy even exists to do effective online teaching. I’m not someone who would say that online teaching should replace all in-person teaching. I spent most of my career at liberal arts colleges. There is in fact nothing quite like getting a small group of people together in a room to talk about history or literature or sociology.

Bennie

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right.

Brian 

I mean, there is a profound value in that. But we also have to acknowledge that it is not necessarily scalable. I would love nothing more than to be able to provide a Macalester education for every student in the country. But I can’t. And so what I have to ask myself is, all right, what can I do to provide a good education to as many students as possible? And as you said, the problem is not the technology.

Bennie

Right. Right. Mm-hmm.

Brian 

The problem is not the pedagogy. The problem is adoption by the people who need to use those things. And that’s more cultural and anthropological than it is technical.

Bennie

Right. Right.

Brian

People, we all tend to believe, and I’m not claiming I’m better than anybody else. I’m just saying, we all tend to believe that the things that work for us must work for other people. 

Bennie

Right. Right. Right.

Brian 

So, you know, you and I, I’m older than you, but you and I probably went to traditional places and we sat in classrooms and we listened to lectures and here we are and we had successful, we’re having successful careers and we say, well, it worked for me. And so most faculty members who are teaching have gone through a system like that and they said, look, it worked for me. And so I’ll just keep doing that because it’s going to necessarily work for the next group of students. 

And the problem is, you know, it’s become very expensive. There’s a lot of evidence that some of those things that all of us went through weren’t particularly effective. But getting people to look at the evidence and change their assumptions based on their own experience is really hard. You know, it’s really more about psychology than it is about, than it is about technology.

Bennie 

Right. That’s so true in that space. Well, I want to pick up on something you mentioned before about, you know, good ideas and innovation coming from everywhere. And in particular, coming from outside of the traditional lines of large institutions. I want to talk about the work you’ve been. You’ve been involved with the African Leadership University for a period of time. And you talked about this kind of mentality of startup universities on the continent in Africa. Talk to me a bit about the work you’re doing there, what it represents, and some of those key lessons of a startup mentality.

Brian 

Yeah, so this is, you know, we all have these things that happen in our lives that are just kind of serendipitous and but also have a profound impact. This is not something that I ever would have predicted that I would be doing in my post presidential years. But I became friendly with a social entrepreneur named Fred Saloniker. He’s a graduate of McAllister, graduated before I was president, but we got to know each other.

Bennie

Mm-hmm. Right. Mm-hmm.

Brian 

And Fred really is one of the great social entrepreneurs on the continent. He was born in Ghana, lived in several African countries, came to McAllister, got an MBA from Stanford, was headed for the normal, he literally did have a job with McKinsey. He was headed for the normal Stanford Business School track. And he just said, you know what? This is not what I want to do. You know, what I want to do is go back and make a difference on the continent.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right. Mm.

Brian 

And so first he started a high school and then he started a university. And he asked me to come in and help answer what remains an incredibly hard question. And that is on a continent with the youngest population in the world, the median age in Africa is 19, median age in the US is 38. 

Bennie 

Hmm.

Brian 

The most underserved continent by higher education in the 8% of high school graduates in Africa go on to a college or university in what is now the poorest continent in the world. How do you make a difference? How do you provide more education of quality to more students at a price that they can afford? 

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right. Right.

Brian

And one thing you do know is you don’t do it by building more Harvards. You don’t do it by, mean, where does the cost in higher education comes from? Two places, primarily… People and physical plant. Those are the cost drivers. So if you’re going to reduce the cost, you have to figure out how to do it with fewer people and more technology and less reliance on physical plant. 

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Brian

And you also have to figure out how students can be not passive participants in the learning process, but sort of the directives of their own learning journey if they’re going to have fewer faculty members. 

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Brian 

And so you know, working with ALU has been, you know, we’ve tried to, right now the cost of a bachelor’s degree at ALU, full cost is $3,000 a year if you pay a full price. So, you know, compare that to McAllister where the full cost is $83,000 a year. 

Bennie 

Mm. Wow.

Brian 

And it’s much more experiential. So a lot of the learning takes place not in the classroom, but outside the classroom through internships and doing things. We know from evidence that people learn more from doing than they do from listening. So we’ve tried to take what we know about technology and about experiential learning and create an education that is both very effective and affordable. Is it the same as going to Columbia or Harvard or Macalester or Bowdoin? No, it’s not.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Brian

Is it a heck of a lot better than either nothing or really low quality for-profit institutions that are coming in? Absolutely. And so we’ve grown from when I joined ALU four years ago, there were about 800 students, there now about 2,500. And the average college graduate in Africa takes five years to find a job that requires a college degree. Our graduates have taken on average six months.

Bennie 

Right. Yeah. Wow.

Brian 

So it’s been hard work and you make a lot of missteps. But the thing about a startup, as opposed to a legacy institution, is that you start with a green field. You start with nothing. And you get to build what you want, which is, I think, less difficult than changing something that’s long established.

Bennie

Mm-hmm, right. Mm-hmm. Right.

Brian 

And you also have to pivot more quickly. Now, there have been times at ALU in the years I’ve worked with them where we know, this isn’t working. And so we just stopped. We made a pivot. And when I try to think about pivoting at McAllister or Harvard or Columbia, it’s almost impossible. 

Bennie 

Right.

Brian 

So it’s this really fascinating marriage of a startup mentality and an educational mentality that you tend not to see in American colleges and universities and I think that’s where the innovation is going to come from.

Bennie 

I think you’re right. You know, I’d love to ask this question for you of, what advice do you have not for incoming college presidents, but what advice do you have for new college CMOs, for marketing leaders who are coming in both serving the brand, the community, and the president? What advice would you have for someone taking that role today?

Brian 

I thought a lot about that question as well, in part because I am going to be speaking with those people at your meeting in a couple of weeks. I think, first of all, one of the things that people have to remember is that at the end of the day, the challenges of higher education right now are not a marketing problem, it’s a product problem. People always want to blame the marketer. That was my experience at McAllister.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right.

Brian 

If a program doesn’t have enough students, or if the students aren’t coming, it’s either the fault of marketing or admissions. That is, you’re not selling it well enough. And it is certainly possible to do a bad job at marketing. It’s possible to do a bad job in admissions. But more often than not, the problem is the product, not the marketing. 

Bennie

Yeah. Right. Yes, yes.

Brian 

And so make sure as a marketer that you are in frequent, regular conversation with the people who are delivering the product so that they understand what the market wants. Colleges tend to be extraordinarily insular. And I’ll give you an example at McAllister. For years, we based our marketing around the fact that we were a very international institution. 

Bennie 

Mm. Mm-hmm.

Brian 

McAllister was one of the first colleges in the country to admit students from all over the world and so all of our marketing really focused around McAllister as being this global institution. And when it came time to revise our admissions material, we did some market research. And what we found out is the market didn’t care. And they didn’t care mostly because everybody was saying it. And so it just became noise. What the market cared about was the fact that we were a small liberal arts college in a metropolitan area, 3 million people.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm, right.

Brian 

And most of those colleges are in small towns or in very small cities. And students right now, a lot of them want to go to school in a city. So that unique position of being a liberal arts college in a bigger city was something that was advantageous in the market, that the market wanted. And we switched around all of our marketing material. 

And our admissions materials went from looking like those at any other college campus with lots of leafy greens and pretty buildings to showing the state capitol and the Minneapolis skyline and the Mayo Clinic. And it’s like, here’s where you’re going to school. We wouldn’t have known any of that if we had not done market research. And then the people who did the research had to go to the rest of the community and say, look, this is what your students want. This is what your customers want.

Bennie 

Right, right. Mm-hmm. Right.

Brian 

I am stunned by how many colleges don’t do appropriate market research when they talk about themselves, when they decide what they want to build their branding around. So do the research, make sure you know what the market wants, and then communicate that as effectively as you can, both to the leadership and to faculty and to staff so that people know that. The other thing I would really emphasize is that…

You need as an institution to speak with an authentic voice. That is, everything that you put out can’t sound like it was produced by artificial intelligence. There needs to be some authenticity, whether it’s dealing with a crisis or communicating good news. 

Bennie

Right.

Brian 

One of the things that I did four times a year for 17 years, and we had, like a lot of institutions, we had a president’s column in our magazine. And I wrote every single one of them. And sometimes I, and I did not just use them to brag about the college. I used them to establish a particular kind of relationship with the alumni community so that they saw me as a person. So there were times I didn’t write about the college at all.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right. Right.

Brian 

I wrote one column called A Column About Nothing, and the whole point of the column was, don’t have any idea what I’m going to write about. And I took the whole column talking about that. And it amazes me how many institutions miss the opportunity of that column, that communication, to establish an authentic relationship with their audience. Doesn’t mean everybody has to write their own. I was an English professor, ok? So I’ve got an advantage.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Nice. Right.

Brian

But certainly any precedent can sit down with their communications people and say, here’s what I want to say. And give me something that sounds like me and that establishes the relationship I want to establish. And so what I found was that, A, it established trust. And B, when bad things did happen, that you had a foundation of trust to build upon. You can’t wait until a crisis happens to establish trust. You have to establish trust before the crisis. 

Bennie 

Right. Yeah. Yes.

Brian 

So, you I was in a sense fortunate that COVID hit at the end of my presidency. So when I had to deliver a lot of scary news to people, like everybody has to go home, I had 16 and a half years of trust to build upon when I told people that we needed to do this and we will treat you as well as we possibly can treat you.

Bennie 

Right.

Brian 

I don’t envy brand new presidents who had to do that and I don’t envy presidents who didn’t have a relationship of trust with their communities. So, you know, information and authenticity for me are really, really important.

Bennie 

Mm.

Bennie 

You know, I can’t believe I’m looking at the time. I can’t believe we’ve spent our time together already. I’m looking forward to continuing this conversation next week. was just about to ask you another question. I was like, you know, we’re, we’re at time, but I, I love the points of your authenticity building the bank and the relationships for the trust. 

I think that’s really powerful. And as a message for our marketers and collegiate leaders who are listening to this space, I love Brian, how you’re really speaking about the difference between doing what people expect the college marketing voice to do and doing what you have to do from an authentic space in there. Instead of playing the role of, think the marketing leader should say these things versus here’s the unique lane that only we can say, that only we can deliver in this place.

Brian 

Yeah. And I have a small sample, but my experience has been that the marketers more often than not get this. It’s sometimes a challenge to convince the leadership. Authenticity comes with risk. You have to expose yourself in a way that some leaders are not necessarily comfortable doing but I think the risk is worth it.

Bennie 

Right.

Brian 

Because it establishes a relationship that is far more powerful than the typical relationship between an institution and an audience.

Bennie

I think you’re so true. And I would add to that. The risk is no greater than the risk of doing the expected, you know, putting out the route. Anyone could have written it. AI could have generated. I pulled it from the template of what a college marketing person should say. We found and we see in our world is far more risky.

Brian 

Mm-hmm.

Brian 

Just look at what happened when after October 7th and all the institutions that came out with what sounded like boilerplate statements. That didn’t help them and it didn’t satisfy anyone.

Bennie 

Most definitely. Well, I think we’re going to end on this note, but really not an end note, but a continuation for our conversation in a week…

Brian 

Looking forward to it.

Bennie 

To talk about the power of, yeah, power of marketing and whatever it is, I’m against it. How do we work against resistance to change in higher education? How can marketing, how can authenticity, how can strategic advantage and commitment to your true organizational self lead us forward? 

Brian, this has been incredible. Thank you for being a part of this important conversation. And thank you all for joining us for this episode of Marketing / And. Once again, I’m your host, Bennie F. Johnson. We encourage you to find out more about higher ed, marketing from the work from the AMA, both today and tomorrow in our conferences throughout the year. Thank you.