Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/56539
"In the for-profit world, there are a lot of benchmarks, particularly for public companies," says Margaret Andrews, founder of Mind and Hand, a higher education consulting firm in Medfield, Massachusetts. "You can tell what percent- age of revenues they spend on marketing. There are no such statistics for business schools." To determine how schools organize their marketing efforts and assign responsibilities, AACSB's Marketing and Communication Council Affinity Group (MaCC) recently conducted a survey of b-school marketers. Andrews was one of the prime movers of the survey, along with Yvonne Martin-Kidd, executive director of marketing and commu- nications and adjunct assistant professor at Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management in Nashville, Tennessee. Says Martin-Kidd, "Another one of our goals was to cre- ate a strong collegial network so that all of us will have some- one to turn to when we need information or another opin- ion." Martin-Kidd, Andrews, and participants in the MaCC group hope to conduct a series of surveys to expand on data collected in the first one. The 30 percent response to the first survey makes one thing clear: There are many marketing and communication professionals who are eager to learn more about how to do the best job for the business school. Skill Set: Generalist The first piece of information gleaned from the survey is that today's b-school marketers must be generalists, comfortable juggling a wide array of responsibilities over a broad spec- trum of media. Branding the b-school? Maintaining the Web site? Communicating with alumni and students? Managing public relations? These are all functions handled, to various degrees, by the b-school marketing department. "Our respondents are responsible for many different things, from ad campaigns to strategy to media relations to Web sites," says Andrews. Considering that 59 percent of survey respondents work in marketing departments with four or fewer employees, she says, "That's amazing." It's tricky to offer absolute numbers denoting which responsibilities b-school marketers handle, because sur- vey respondents were divided into three distinct groups: centralized with budget, centralized without budget, and partially centralized. Those that are centralized with budget handle all marketing functions for all educational programs and decide how the money will be spent, Martin-Kidd explains. Those in departments that are centralized without budget operate in much the same way, but they don't actu- ally control the pursestrings; that power might reside with the program directors. At partially centralized schools, the central marketing function works with marketing specialists in each individual program. As might be expected, those departments that are fully centralized and control the budget tend to have the most responsibilities. For instance, these respondents are deeply involved in determining branding strategy (according to 70 percent); determining overall marketing strategy (53 per- cent); and promoting awareness of new research (40 per- cent). The other groups also are involved in these areas, but not as heavily. But all of them take an appreciable amount of responsibility for a wide range of functions. (Full sur- vey results are available in PowerPoint format at business. baylor.edu/hsb/AACSB_ICAM_2008/.) That level of responsibility isn't likely to drop any time soon, as business schools continue to compete for new stu- dents. "When the marketplace gets competitive, organiza- tions turn to marketing," says Martin-Kidd. Eventually, she believes, business schools will develop norms for their marketing departments, much like those that exist in the consumer world. "You can look at most corpo- rations—say, in the auto industry—and pretty much know what the marketing function is like," says Martin-Kidd. "I think that before too long, you'll be able to look at a b-school and know what that marketing function is like." 40 BizEd MARCH/APRIL 2009