The Marketing Conundrum

Why don’t community colleges do a better job of marketing?

Leaving aside the meaning of “better” in this context, it’s complicated.

There’s an old joke about advertising in which a CEO laments that half of his marketing budget is wasted, but he doesn’t know which half. The joke used to work because the number of media outlets in a given area was limited. Now, it’s infinite, so marketing can be more precise. Paradoxically, that can also make it invisible to people outside the target audience.

When I was a kid, local Rochester television consisted of three commercial stations and PBS. Dick Hill and his daughter Linda used to do commercials for their television shop, Hill TV. They became locally famous because they were staggeringly bad on camera -- their ads verged on performance art -- but they didn’t let that stop them. For years they made one cringey commercial after the next. And it worked, in its way, because we all saw them. You simply could not watch Rochester television in the late '70s/early '80s and escape Hill TV.

Now, entire media universes exist in blissful ignorance of each other. Yesterday The Girl regaled us with her opinion of a TikTok star who has more followers than people who voted for Joe Biden; neither of us had ever heard of her. The readership of print newspapers doesn’t overlap much with the viewership of Twitch. In contrast to the media landscape of the '70s, now it’s possible to be seemingly ubiquitous in one media universe while being utterly unknown in the others. That applies as much to ads as to content.

But even within the new media environment, community colleges face a few challenges.

For one, in many locations, they’re subject to strict geographic boundaries. In my own state, for instance, service areas are defined by county lines. Marketing efforts aren’t supposed to cross those lines. That tends to rule out traditional broadcast media, which ignore county lines. (That’s particularly true in New Jersey, where broadcast media are dominated by New York City and Philadelphia. Why pay for NYC-level viewership or listenership when you’re only targeting one county in central Jersey?) Local newspapers come closer to observing county lines, but their readership tends to be much older than most of our students.

As regular readers know, community colleges tend to have tight budgets. Marketing is discretionary, and therefore it tends to suffer when something has to go.

Community colleges are also in an ambiguous position on the public/private spectrum. They’re public institutions, subject to public scrutiny and public judgment. But they’re also encouraged to behave entrepreneurially, competing for business with other providers, including both private and for-profit providers. Private and for-profit providers can spend as much as they want (or have) on marketing, but we’re under public pressure to spend as little as possible on anything not directly related to instruction. Thin budgets for marketing often reflect well-meaning, good-faith judgments that it’s better to run fewer ads than to hollow out the English department.

Community colleges also have missions and target audiences that are broad enough to make simple messaging a challenge. Those that follow the comprehensive model -- meaning that they include both transfer and career programs -- have to speak simultaneously to high school students who want to save money on the way to bachelor’s degrees, working adults trying to move up in their careers, local and state policy makers, and the four-year schools with which they both compete and collaborate. They work according to the logic of public service, rather than the marketplace, but they have to compete in the marketplace, and they have to do it with less money than their competitors. That’s tough on a good day.

Finally, of course, there’s the ever-present but rarely acknowledged stigma. The #EndCCStigma movement is onto something. But overcoming that stigma is the work of years, and marketing is judged on short-term results.

When I was at DeVry, I saw a very different model. There, far more of the budget went to advertising and recruiting, and far less to instruction. DeVry could do that because it was a publicly traded corporation. It didn’t have to observe county lines, so it didn’t. It blanketed daytime television with ads, drawing from all across media markets. And it could eliminate programs that didn’t turn a profit, rather than carrying them as part of a public service mission. Over time, that meant that quality control became an uphill battle; eventually, even aggressive marketing can do only so much. At some level, quality still matters.

If we had reasonable funding, we could do more conspicuous marketing. Or, if we had reasonable funding, we wouldn’t have to market much at all. But we’re in that annoying in-between space, where we can’t afford an ad blitz and can’t afford anonymity. That’s the conundrum.