The 2019 college admissions bribery scandal revealed uncomfortable truths about elite higher education and its conspicuous consumption. In this chapter, I explore the legal implications of treating higher education as a luxury good reflecting wealth and status. Like luxury goods companies, elite universities are regarded as owners of luxury brands. Just as companies such as Louis Vuitton, Ferrari, and Hermès own brands that enjoy a high level of exclusivity and serve conspicuous consumption, so too do elite universities. In the minds of many, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale are analogous to Louis Vuitton, Ferrari, and Hermès. This “luxurification” of higher education, however, perpetuates class division and violates the right to education.

Online education both does and does not radically transform higher education and higher education brands. On the one hand, providing courses online potentially allows universities to reach a worldwide audience, helps them globalize their brand, changes the cost structure for both students and institutions, and could reshape the competitive branding landscape among universities. On the other hand, university brands are surprisingly regional, low student–faculty ratios are still necessary for truly high-quality education, and the online competitive landscape might ultimately simply replicate reputational hierarchies forged over decades in the world of on-campus education. Thus, although the idea that online learning will completely “disrupt” the higher education model and existing university branding hierarchies is almost certainly overstated, online education will inevitably become more and more integral to universities, and over time the distinction between on-campus and online education is likely to become increasingly blurred. As a result, online education brings both promise and peril for universities as they manage their brands while increasingly adopting online education modalities. This chapter first provides an overview of the online education landscape in higher education. Then, it outlines some of the core issues that universities must address as they consider and implement online education strategies while managing their brand.

It is hard to reconcile the research university’s supposed reason for being – the reasoned pursuit of knowledge – with its methods for building brand awareness and equity. Just like pitches for other luxury goods, the selling of higher education depends on irrational appeals devoid of information and marketing missives meant to hug the line between legally protected puffery and outright fraud. Although universities have always borrowed from the selling strategies of the commercial sphere, in recent years, there has been a sea change in the prevalence and degree of less-than-truthful content in higher educational self-promotion. How do university constituents – administrators, professors, students – interpret this gap between their institutions’ traditionally understood role and the logic of today’s academic branding strategies? The chapter chronicles the main rationalizations these actors deploy to reduce the tension between academic mission and academic marketing. By telling themselves that their school’s advertising efforts can be quarantined from the university’s larger purpose or actually provide tangible and truthful information to outside audiences or are a necessary evil, university constituents reduce their internal dissonance but fail to confront the realities of academic branding.

Higher education misunderstands branding. Fears that embracing branding leads to commodification show the problem. When higher education institutions strive to meet ranking systems’ metrics, they take the path to commodification and cede power to outsiders. Branding, however, does not force such an outcome. Instead, applying the logic of branding to the realities of higher education today opens a way, especially for public institutions and systems, to define their purpose. This change can free schools from traps set by following systems that quantify education in the hope that it can be analyzed in economic terms. This chapter explains problems with ranking systems and examines California’s approach to higher education as a template for a broader understanding of education.

This chapter begins with a message about the importance of diagnoses before developing a marcoms campaign. We then use the idea of communication barriers to help explain why creating an effective marcoms campaign is so challenging, before providing a broad understanding of what integrated marketing communications (IMC) is and why it is used. The chapter discusses both the theory and practice of achieving integration and synergy, and how synergistic effects come about. The managerial application of integration is also discussed, and its complexity is brought to life with the award-winning case of 'Magnum Gold?!' This chapter also provides a nine-step IMC planning model, including the importance of understanding how consumers make decisions. The consumer decision journey is suggested as a useful model, illustrated with another award-winning case involving the Korean car maker, Hyundai, which broke into the consideration set of United States car buyers during the global financial crisis.

We have now come to the end of the book, with much discussion and a lot to absorb along the way. As we noted in chapter 1, the philosophy that marcoms campaigns must be both effective and efficient underpins this book. To be effective and efficient, many elements need to work together. This integrative review chapter provides an overview of the lessons you have learned in this book, summarised into different core themes. Yet this knowledge is useless if they cannot be implemented. In this chapter, we also discuss why IMC implementations have often failed. Finally, we conclude with a word on ethics in IMC and a look into the future of marketing as it becomes more technologically driven.

The chapter is about brand positioning, one of the most important concepts in advertising. We can think of positioning as akin to impression management, first discussed by sociologist Ervin Goffman in the 1950s. Impression management means that we present a certain image of ourselves to others, which serves a functional (or instrumental) purpose. In Goffman’s terms, brand positioning is an impression we want to evoke in the mind of the target audience about the brand. In creating this impression, we also sometimes re-create an impression of competing brands, and this is where the topic of positioning becomes especially interesting. Ultimately, positioning is about creating an impression that allows a brand to differentiate itself from its competition. The objective is to create brand associations that will predispose people to choose the brand over others, and ultimately to build brand equity. If all subsequent executions are well implemented, then consumers will come to prefer a brand over the competition. This, in essence, is the ultimate goal of positioning and branding.

The aim of this chapter is to give the reader a better understanding of the principles of influence in personal selling. Personal selling is especially important for high-involvement purchases. The chapter outlines the steps involved with special emphasis paid to effective presentation and handling of objections, including multi-attribute reframing, selling the ‘improved value’ and selling the ‘vision’. Also discussed in this chapter are the subtle, yet powerful principles of compliance seeking tactics. For long-term success, though, a sales agent needs to be trustworthy, and we discuss the factors that make a sales agent more trustworthy. We then present a model that summarises the many paths that lead to effective persuasion.

Humans are social animals: we influence and are influenced by each other. Traditional models of marketing communications do not place much weight on social influence, but with the rise of social media and social commerce, companies are beginning to take this form of communication seriously. This chapter presents a way of thinking about IMC that incorporates these modern communication methods and the broader principle of social influence. The chapter starts by providing some context: it outlines how information flows and introduces some basic principles that govern behaviour in social networks. It then delves into the more substantial issues: what social media is, what its four core characteristics are, and how organisations have exploited these. This is followed by a close examination of certain types of social communication, such as WOM, buzz and viral marketing. The emphasis throughout the chapter is on understanding the preconditions necessary for what we call ‘viral contagion’ to occur. This leads to a discussion of social commerce.

This chapter and chapter 6 are about advertising, which is a paid form of communication by a sponsor. The aim of this chapter is to give the reader a better understanding of creativity and its importance to advertising. Although advertising is only one marcoms tool, it is the most important tool for brand (re)positioning. However, for advertising to be effective, it must possess the creative power to cut through the noise and clutter. The chapter explores the importance of advertising creativity and sets out how to get it right. This is a complex area because our processing of a creative ad can be completely hijacked by unintended associations, which are not uncommon when we attempt anything original. To minimise this, a marcoms manager needs to understand the theory of advertising creativity, as well as how to nurture the emergence of the creative idea, which must be guided by a creative strategy summarised in a creative brief.

In chapter 6, we discussed what an advertising creative idea is and how to increase the probability of finding the big idea. But what happens after that? Ideally, we should pre-test the idea (see chapter 12). But to do so, we need to first create the ad, sometimes called ‘execution’. Things can still go wrong if the creative idea is not well executed, no matter how good it is. For instance, if the copy is difficult to comprehend, the humour is irrelevant, or the celebrity chosen does not fit the brand and so on. The aim of this chapter is to discuss how executional tactics can be used effectively. The discussion centres on what creative execution means and explains the difference between creative execution and the creative idea, stressing that executions must be guided by the creative idea. Under some circumstances, the creative execution is also the creative idea. We will also discuss different types of executional tactics and how to use them properly.