Where the brand is everything

In a crowded landscape, it pays for business schools to spell out exactly what they stand for, reports Nicholas Pyke

The University of Durham has what you might call a sub-Oxbridge image: cathedrals, posh students and pretty colleges. The Durham Business School is aiming for something rather different, as readers of the Financial Times and the Economist have been finding out. There, staring out from the adverts, is a gritty American financier called Graham Moffitt, vice president at the Bank of America, and below him the tough-sounding legend: "Made in Durham".

This is rebranding with a vengeance, and in the world of the MBA it seems everybody is consulting the PR people. The prestigious Imperial College Management School has recently changed its name to the sharper, more corporate Business School, Imperial College London, and will rebrand again next year when it becomes the Tanaka Business School, after its wealthy benefactor, Gary Tanaka. The City University Business School has also relaunched itself as the Cass Business School (following a major donation from the Sir John Cass Foundation).

Even the giants are at it. The internationally renowned London Business School (LBS) for example, is no longer relying on carefully crafted brochures or even a collection of sharp Web pages to make the right impression. Prospective applicants are instead encouraged to look at a series of online "documentaries" featuring interviews with staff and students so they can get a flavour of the place. Warwick University's business school, one of the success stories of the decade, is also feeling the need to overhaul its image, aware that Oxford and Cambridge are intent on muscling their way into an already tight market.

And it is this hunt for students, their pounds, dollars and yen that is driving the business schools into the arms of the marketing departments; the more so as the corporate world is currently reluctant to splash out on staff training – or anything else. If the top schools are concerned, the situation is even more acute for the smaller players and new entrants in the market. Britain now has more than 100 higher education institutions offering MBAs, many of them cheek by jowl. Branding appears to have become crucial as a way of distinguishing one from another.

Professor Paul Draper, director of the business school at the University of Exeter says that the market falls roughly into three: the international players such as LBS and INSEAD are followed by the major national draws such as Warwick and Cranfield. And then there are the more local and regionally based schools, often attached to the newer universities.

"There's a strong desire on the part of Exeter to move into business in a fairly major way," Professor Draper says. "And the question we've been asking ourselves is what can we do about it." At the Exeter business school thinking has been dominated by the product itself, rather than the marketing drive. It is far from convinced that time spent traipsing round higher education fairs, or money spent on advertising campaigns is likely to pay off. Instead, Professor Draper says they have concentrated on niche positioning to create what they hope is a successful brand.

The university already has strengths in the study of finance and leadership, along with an alumni base described by Professor Draper as "50 years of management school graduates from southern England going off into the City and the media". The result, they hope, is a small to medium-scale programme catering for City high-flyers and others in a similarly elite position. One important decision has been to limit course numbers and concentrate on European applicants, rather than hauling in the applications from the Far East.

Manchester University's approach to rebranding its business school stands in contrast to this. Again the academics, students and prospective students were consulted, but the primary result has been a change of image. The "old-fashioned" black and red logo has been banished and replaced with a purple square, containing the name of the school. As the school already had the country's first professors of corporate creativity, corporate social responsibility and – very much to the point – corporate reputation, it felt the course itself was on the right lines, so it turned to what it describes as the visual identity. Now it is looking at revamping the website to make it more direct. With online applications increasingly common, the internet is now seen as a key medium for selling MBA courses.

Durham's approach has gone further still. The image of this Durham graduate, Graham Moffitt, suggests wealth, power and status, says Colette Knowles, the marketing and development manager at the business school.

After months of consulting its alumni and prospective students, the ancient university of Durham concluded that, while its academic and social reputation remained major assets, the people who paid thousands of pounds for an MBA did so for fairly basic reasons. "People were doing MBAs for career progression: for money, for power and the position that they wanted," says Ms Knowles. It appears to be working: after just eight months of the campaign, she says there has been a 17 per cent jump in interest.

Careful branding is all the more important as, in marketing terms, business schools are scrimpers. Where most firms would look to spend 5-8 per cent of their turnover on promotion, business schools are spending half that, she says. That said, there are limits to what even the most lavish promotional budget can achieve in the current climate. "One of the challenges we have is that people increasingly see their MBAs in terms of what they want to get out of it. We need to match people's expectations with job opportunities, yet the recruitment market is really struggling. We're raising expectations with all our marketing campaigns – and we need the recruitment market to deliver," says Ms Knowles.