I found this article had some really great insights into the buying decisions of different levels of products from a new home down to fast food check it out…

AUSTRALIAN universities are champions of reason and evidence, yet when it comes to marketing they rely too heavily on management intuition and folk-lore. University marketing plans reflect old theory that was not built on established facts of buying behaviour, and university marketing practices are often a mixture of tradition mixed with a dollop of whatever is the latest marketing fad

Meanwhile marketing scientists have been studying real-world buying for more than 50 years.  Patterns in buying behaviour have been observed that hold across many different product categories and countries – even the social sciences have empirical laws.  Laws that hold for”big” decisions like mortgages, holidays and cars, and university degrees.  Consumers and industrial buyers, turn out to be very habitual, naturally adopting quite strong loyalties, even if they care little and know little about the brands they buy over and over.  These habits allow them to get on with life, with less stress and without having to think too much.  We all prefer to think of ourselves as adventurous yet tonight we will probably eat for dinner something we ate last week, and the week before.

Consumers migrate towards, and stick with, things that are easy to buy.  They prefer to buy quickly without much cognitive effort.  They care about good quality and low prices, and getting something they will like, but that doesn’t mean they want to spend large amounts of their precious life working out what would be absolutely best for them – let alone constantly reappraising this decision.  Instead they are happy to satisfice, and to employ heuristics such as buying the one that is most familiar.

The implications for marketing are profound.  Brands are built by reaching many people, all sorts of people, and getting small bits of knowledge into their heads.  Nothing deep, just important things like what the brand does (e.g. it’s a car), what it looks like, where it can be bought, when it might be used and so on.  Successful brands deliver on their promises, they are easy to buy, and they advertise so they are less likely to be forgotten. Differentiation plays a surprisingly minor role – KFC competes head-on with McDonalds in spite of one selling fried chicken and the other burgers.  What largely distinguishes large from small brands is that larger brands have greater mental and physical availability, they are in more people’s heads and they are physically easier to buy for more people.

Australian universities are in a retail business, much like department stores but selling a professional service (so customers buy people interaction).  On-line shopping is now part of the business, but most customers prefer to do most of their ‘shopping’ by coming onto campus – and so they choose a campus that is convenient to them.  So demand for courses (and hence cut-off entry scores) is concentrated on the CBD’s of the major cities, campuses that are serviced well by public transport and close to other shops that students value.  Yet compared to major department stores or shopping centres Universities don’t do a good job of providing parking and signage.  They are like stores without a name on them and no obvious entrance, let alone a glass window display to show what they sell.

The main reason shoppers enter a store is that they have a product in mind to buy and they believe they can find it inside that store. That’s why department stores spend most of their advertising showing their products.  Universities in comparison spend too little of their advertising budget telling the market about particular degrees, showing a preference instead to advertising themselves as a concept, and the general idea of doing a degree, or they advertise their schools.  When degrees are mentioned they aren’t always easy to understand.  “Learn advertising at X” is easy to understand, yet Bachelor of Advertising hardly exists, instead it’s Bachelor of Media & Communication, or Bachelor of Commerce.

Universities waste too much of their advertising budgets on rather pointless attempts to differentiate themselves.  Thousands of marketing committee hours are spent coming up with positioning statements like “learn, think, do”, “live, learn, thrive”, and “making life happen”.  Few staff, let alone the students or other customers of the university, learn these slogans before they are changed (again).  Unsurprisingly, a survey of staff of 180 US universities showed that their most common response to their own uni slogan was embarrassment (McKnight & Paugh 1999).

Universities waste too much of their media budgets buying media that reaches other university administrators rather than students and industry. While other mis-placed practices centre around thinking that the world cares about obscure detail and bureaucracy, e.g releasing press releases that contain jargon and acronyms, and boasting of receiving government grants (worse, doing this in communication to alumni along with requests for donations).

Marketing is not easy, it requires professionalism and creativity, and like any discipline its principles work best when they are based on scientific knowledge of the empirical world not intuition.

Professor Byron Sharp is director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia. He is author of “How Brands Grow” (Oxford Uni Press, 2010) which documents empirical laws in marketing. In September Professor Sharp will speak at the Universities Australia Marketing Conference in Sydney.

Definitley some food for thought there…

“To your future prosperity”

James