University marketers should accept that their brands mean whatever academics want them to, if qualitative research on the thinking of business researchers in two Australian and two UK business schools applies.

A learned reader recommends Sanne Frandsen (Lund University, Sweden), Manto Gotsi (Westminster Business School, London), Allanah Johnston and Andrea Whittle (Newcastle University, UK), Stephen Frenkel (UNSW) and Andre Spicer (University of London) who write in the European Journal of Marketing that “branding emerges as a slippery, loosely bounded concept in (academics’) discourse, sometimes used in connection with reputation, image, ethos or values.”

This is significant, they suggest, as all four schools invested in branding and saw faculty “as key to delivering brand promises.”

The problem for brand-message keepers and custodians is that academics think the brand should mean what they want, when they think about it all.

The researchers found three responses among interviewed academics to their school brand; ignorance or irrelevance, ok if it advances their careers, a “veneer” separate to “true values’ of school.

This is very bad for branding given; “academic faculty embody the university brand through their research, teaching and wider engagement activities. As such, they can ‘make or break’ any brand promise,” the researchers suggest.

But rather than attempting to convert academics to the faculty faith the researchers argue marketers should make the most of what they have and “allow rather than deny the multiple logics circulating in university settings, leaving the brand open to pluralistic interpretations.” If only because they do not have much choice.

“Top-down sense-giving efforts at branding will elicit more faculty resistance, turning more ambivalent or even positive responses to branding towards more cynical positions.”