Presentation of Award
Kerry Fulcher, Provost and Chief Academic Officer, Point Loma Nazarene University
The Secret to Effective Marketing Is Understanding Its Strategic Purpose
It is so often heard in faculty or board meetings: “We are the best kept secret.” “If only we could do a better job telling our story.” Institutional leaders are eager to learn how to organize, resource, and measure marketing efforts, which they expect will lead to institutional awareness and greater success in reaching institutional goals. However, such comments reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of marketing’s full strategic purpose, or how it is effectively deployed in higher education.
Teresa Flannery, author of How to Market a University: Building Value in Competitive Environment, will explore what marketing is—and is not—and will demonstrate how, when properly understood and deployed as a strategic function, marketing builds value for institutions in the form of revenue, reputation, and relationships needed to reach strategic goals. She will challenge institutional leaders to develop two different capacities—differentiating from competition and collaborating to tell a collective story—to help their institutions succeed and to change public perceptions about the value of higher education.