How to Position Your College

Categorization in Higher Education Marketing

Just like any product or service, prospective students and parents use categories to relate to colleges and universities.  We know this innately because we all use categories as short-hand to talk to one another about different schools.  Is it a small school or big school?  Is it a 4-year school or a 2-year school?  Is it private or public?  Is it for-profit or not-for-profit?  Is it a professional or trade school?  Is it expensive or affordable?  Is it online, in-person, or hybrid?  Is it asynchronous or synchronous?  The list goes on and on.

As prospective students encounter your institution, what boxes do they put you in?  What categories do they use to talk about you?  If you’re like most schools, the short-hand for talking about your institution combines one or two categories to help people who haven’t heard of you to relate to you.  They might size you up as “a state school,” “a small liberal arts school,” or even a “commuter school.”  Others that help us orient include “party school,” “football school,” or “religious school.”

The marketplace will use this short-hand to categorize you without you having to do any work at all.  After all, most of this information is available with a quick Google search if all else fails.  The problem, though, is that there are thousands of “state schools” and “small schools.”  That’s a big drawer to get tossed into.  And we all know what happens to things in big, crowded drawers:  they get lost and they get forgotten.  In some sense, they disappear.  This is where positioning comes in.

Placing Your Institution in a Smaller Box

If the goal of positioning is to establish a place where you can be most competitive, we would serve ourselves well to borrow the X/Y thinking from the cruise line example to get ourselves out of the big box categorization that befalls so many institutions.  If all we’re known as is either a “state school” or a “small school” in a particular geography, then we know we have a job to do.  What dimensions of an X/Y axis will allow you to do that?

You want to pursue your approach to this X/Y axis knowing that, if done properly, the combination of factors will create a place of distinction and differentiation for you and render others competitors in a place where they can’t reach you or hope to compete.  You’ll also want to be mindful of your right-fit-student:  that student that thrives at your institution.  After all, effective positioning contemplates a particular person—not every person.  And you’ll also want to think about the three hurdles in higher education marketing:  ensuring it is differentiated, relevant to customers, and sustainable in the long term.

A good place to start is contemplating your competitive set and beginning broadly in terms of where most of them, including you, would fit in the upper-right quadrant.  Perhaps you’ll find that most of the schools in that group are affordable schools in Georgia.  Or perhaps they are liberal arts schools in the Northeast.  Starting with broad strokes will set the stage for drilling down to more specifics.

From here, evaluate which differentiating factors or dimensions could be combined in a way that puts others in other quadrants leaving your institution alone in the upper right quadrant.  Once you’ve done that, challenge yourself with these tests:

• The three hurdles in higher education marketing – is your positioning differentiated, relevant, and sustainable?
• Alignment with your right-fit-student (RFS) – is your positioning likely to resonate with the student personas that typically thrive at your institution?
• Market size – does your positioning leave you with appeal to a market large enough to attract the size of classes you seek?  In other words, are there enough prospects in the market that will resonate with this positioning?  In any positioning exercise it is important to be sure you don’t position yourself out of business!
• Values alignment – does the positioning align with your institution’s values and mission?

Working through these challenges will help to ensure that the positioning you’ve chosen isn’t just unique but that it fits within the broader context of the institution’s strategy.  If your positioning checks these boxes and you’ve neutralized competitive institutions into other quadrants, your positioning is likely a very powerful tool to leverage.