The essence of marketing is inducing an exchange by adapting your communications and actions to what you have learned through research are the priorities and passions of your target audience. If you haven’t studied the preferences and priorities of your audience in an analytical way, you are not doing marketing. Period. You may be doing something valuable, but it’s not marketing.

The occasion for this rant is a recent article in the new CASE Currents entitled Doing the Math: Making the Most of Your Market Research. The piece has the typical Currents form, highlighting a series of successful cases from a range of institutions large and small.

One success story is the project of Heather Swain, Vice President of University Relations at Michigan State University:

Swain is a proponent of projecting an institution’s brand from the inside out. . . . The university completed a comprehensive research project that used quantitative and qualitative methods to reveal how its brand is perceived by various internal and external constituencies. The result, more than 300 pages of charts and reports, pulls back the veil that had obscured stakeholder’s attitudes about the institution.

Having completed the report, her hope is to “unite the university’s many divisions . . . behind a coherent institutional brand.”

This sounds like a very impressive project. Hats off to Ms. Swain. But it does not sound like an actual marketing project. Studying your existing stakeholders is not a sufficient basis for a marketing campaign unless your plan is to market to your existing stakeholders. If your plan is to recruit new customers, (which I do assume is the ultimate goal for most institutions of higher education), you need to study those people who are not yet in your camp, your prospects. Yes, it is crucial to understand attitudes among your current stakeholders but this can never be the sole focus of your research, or the primary basis on which you build your strategy. If you’re going to do real marketing, you need to give priority to attitudes and preferences among your target audience not those already in your camp.