QUT marketers make a strong case in a new paper for organisations ensuring customer-contact staff understand what brands stands for.

“When employees perceive brand signals to be clear, credible, and consistent, they are more likely to be aware and more confident of the brand promise and their specific roles and responsibilities required to fulfil the brand promise with customers,” Emma Karanges, Kim Johnston, Ian Lings and Amanda Beatson, write in the Journal of Brand Management.

While Ms Karanges and colleagues do not deal with education institutions, their thinking strikes CMM as eminently applicable to universities, which have multiple relations with students as customers (enrolments, libraries, services and so on).  And the need for a brand that staff understand surely extends to academics. No, it does not mean students are customers in the classroom, but brand values surely cover teaching and learning strategies and university attitudes to attrition and student outcomes.

If so, then universities, just like other organisations with clients and customers, need to have brand values that staff can endorse and act on. As the QUT team writes; without brand understanding, “the ability and willingness of employees to enact brand citizenship behaviour that aligns with organisational values, and the brand promise, is doubtful.”

Which is a problem for Australian universities that do not have a brand promise that goes beyond the usual anodyne statements about life changing opportunities for students. These are what every university promises and what individual staff members can’t deliver on their own.