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Campus Comms Unplugged
Our podcast, Campus Comms Unplugged, hosted by Toby Roe, explores the challenges and opportunities shaping the future of marketing and communications in business education. We aim to overcome barriers faced by marketing communications professionals in business schools and help them make a bigger impact with their campaigns.
Each month, we feature insights from leaders in the field. We cover topics such as strategy, messaging, artificial intelligence (AI), international student trends, and more.
Episode 8
In our eighth episode, host Toby Roe spoke to Magdalena Wanot and Andrew Crisp, to unpick the findings of our latest joint research into the challenges for marcomms teams at business schools.
Magda is the Director of Marketing & Communications at EFMD, the global, non-profit, membership-driven organisation dedicated to management development. EFMD has 980 institutional members from across 95 countries, and a network of 30,000 management development professionals. Magda develops and overseas external communication for all EFMD management development network’s activities, projects and services.
Andrew Crisp is the Co-founder of CarringtonCrisp, a specialist business education consultancy. CarringtonCrisp has worked with over 200 institutions in more than 40 countries and is well known for its research studies. These include Tomorrow’s MBA, The Future of Lifelong and Executive Education and The Business of Branding, which examine the latest global trends in the business education marketplace.
Magda, Andrew and Toby discussed the key challenges for marcomms teams in business schools today – and suggested ways to overcome them. They included the expectation to deliver campaigns even thought marcomms is being left out of strategic decision-making. They also examined how budgets have not kept up with increased workloads, the difficulties of differentiating business schools, and the advantages and risks of using AI.
If you would like to download the Knowing Me Knowing You study, it is available on the EFMD website by clicking HERE.
Key takeaways
- Marcomms teams need to help shape decisions, not just communicate them. Ideally, they should be involved in programme development from the outset. This way, they can bring audience insights and recommendations before decisions are finalised.
- Expanding ambitions need a clear strategy and realistic resources. Business schools are promoting more programmes to more audiences and markets, but budgets have not necessarily grown to match. Financial pressures and conflicting priorities can also push teams towards short-term activity that delivers limited value. Marcomms leaders should use planning conversations to connect proposed activity to institutional goals. They should also explain the resources needed and agree which activities should take priority.
- Differentiation depends on human stories and distinctive strengths. When schools use the same AI tools to create similar material, it can seem like they are producing more, but without a reason for audiences to engage. Teams can focus on authentic stories about students, alumni and their experiences, alongside the school’s particular areas of expertise. And rather than making wide claims about AI, for example, explain how it connects with an established strength such as finance or sustainability.
- Measuring everything is not the same as demonstrating impact. Teams face growing pressure to show ROI, yet collecting more data does not automatically mean that school is progressing. Short-term demands can leave little time to interpret findings or use them to influence decisions. Instead, identify the measures that matter to institutional objectives, and agree what should change, or stop, as a result.
- Changing audiences require more targeted messaging. Business schools serve learners at different career and life stages, but their communications do not always reflect that breadth. Imagery and messaging aimed mainly at younger students may fail to connect with executive education and lifelong-learning audiences. Teams should review content for each audience, checking whether it addresses the factors that matter to them – such as cost, teaching format, location and cohort – and ensure that relevant information is available across channels.
In their words
“Sometimes we measure everything, but with short-term, conflicting priorities, we don’t really have the time to sit down and think strategically about how we act on those indicators. What do we do with this vast amount of data? How do we translate it into influence or a strategic conversation with the school’s leadership? We have insights into some of the products and programmes the school runs, but how can we use those insights to implement change and identify what needs to go?” – Magda Wanot, Director of Marketing & Communications at EFMD.
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