Higher Education: Marketing Lessons From the World’s Biggest Youth Brands

How can higher education institutions mirror the marketing success of leading youth brands?

Marketers in higher education don’t enjoy the same freedoms perhaps as those in other categories. Being relatively under-resourced and having to market to a new audience at the start of every 18-month campaign cycle can be restrictive.

A key challenge in attempting to build connections with young people is that there are thousands of brands appearing in their feeds and occupying a greater share of their engagement. Despite the fact that going to university is a major life moment, it’s easy to be very ignorable in the scroll.

So what marketing lessons can universities learn from the world’s best youth brands? Borne’s Head of Strategy, Chris Bosher, focused on this area for his ‘Beyond the Bubble’ talk at a recent UCAS conference. Here are his five ideas to unlock new opportunities.

Don’t be afraid to look back

Nostalgia thrives in tough times. We live in an unstable period, and the idea of something that is rose-tinted, safe and stable is very attractive within that context.

“What we’re starting to see now is how big brands are starting to respond to this as a way of building that connection with audiences.” Chris says,

“It’s not just the world’s oldest brands that are deciding to tell the beginnings of their story in order to connect to a younger generation. Some of the brands that we think of as being the most modern or the most youthful are looking back and using that as a way of building with audiences.”

Game developer Supercell did this with a campaign for a new iteration of Clash of Clans. A potential weakness of their product is the lack of origin story – so they made one up for the announcement.

“Their campaign invented a 40-year journey of evolution for the game,” Chris says. “They made a documentary about its fabricated history and created merchandise that never existed. The audience adored it, partly for the strangeness and the novelty of the idea, but also because it connects to what they want.”

Triggering a sense of nostalgia is an interesting principle for higher education, Chris suggests. “Do I expect that most people have the resources required to create a fake documentary and launch a merchandising range from the nineties that never existed? Absolutely not. But universities have fascinating origin stories. They have extraordinary ideas, communities and discoveries that have been made over the journey of the organisation.

“Lots of brands already play in the space of alumni and leverage them as an asset. But I would ask this question: what is the origin story of a university team? Where did it come from? Who’s been there? Why is that good? How can we connect with today’s cohort by engaging in the journeys of the past? It’s potentially a really interesting way to tap into that principle.”

Play, create and collaborate

How can universities push their brands into different spaces? How do they connect with people that are already celebrated by the audiences they’re trying to connect with?

A straightforward way to access an audience is to work with someone who’s already done it.

Organic social is an absolute key component of the marcomms mix, Chris says. “We’ve seen higher education get much better at working with creators, particularly student influencers.”

“We’ve seen this notion of collaborative creativity play out online, but not yet to the lengths that we see it in the private sector or indeed in some of the world’s most successful youth brands. And the reason it’s really important to be thinking about creativity and collaboration is because, to this generation, creativity is currency.”

All young people are content creators now and as a result, the people who are more successful at it are celebrated by their peers: “What this then drives in terms of brand behaviour is a constantly evolving way of mirroring some of that body language around collaboration and creativity in the way that they connect with young audiences.”

Take Gucci, for example, which now has a gaming academy. “They wanted to get into gaming because that’s what their young audience is into,” Chris explains, “but they knew the best way to get into that space was through collaboration. And now Milan’s arguably most famous fashion house has a professional esports team.

“It’s a great example of a luxury brand that’s trying to both straddle past and future, and recognises that the value of their brand is the payback over the lifetime of a consumer.”

The other thing about collaboration is that it takes you into really unexpected spaces – such as the Empirical x Doritos Nacho Cheese spirit crossover.

Doritos consistently performs really well as a youth brand, Chris underlines: “It’s very highly thought of among young audiences who are starting to engage in certain other aspects of adult life, including drinking. So, while Doritos-flavoured vodka sounds objectively relatively disgusting, it’s a fascinating way of taking the brand and moving into a different space.”

“They’ve created something distinctive and buzzy for a young audience, which is rightly celebrated because of the original nature of that collaboration.”

Get really, radically real

Gen Z has grown up in a time of extraordinary information of conspiracy, of failing institutions and the global ramifications of that. It’s no wonder they’re cynical and find it hard to trust what you say.

You might be able to demonstrate competence and credibility, but if you’re seen to be selling overtly then you risk being perceived as in it for yourself.

One way that brands have been able to overcome this is by being radically honest about what they do and why they do it, Chris says. “Clearly signalling a lack of self-interest is one way of immediately building trust.”

“The F*ck Oatly website is a great example of this. It’s an archive of all of the negative things that people have said about Oatly, some of it hype and trolling and some of it factually accurate.”

“By telling people that there is a place where you can learn all the bad things about them, they sidestep cynicism. It’s a brilliant way of building trust within a young audience, particularly for a brand that’s very much on a soapbox about the evils of its competitors in dairy milk.”

Successful youth brands have the agility to flip a perceived weakness into a perceived strength. So how can higher education mirror this behaviour? “A university might be worried about how accessible it is from a transport perspective, but maybe that could be seen as a benefit.” Chris points out.

“Leaning into things that are inherently negative and which could be flipped into a positive is one way of scoring points with audiences.”

Fame is the aim

Student recruitment is a short-term goal, but that’s where the bulk of higher education marcomms resources are invested. The problem with that is that you then don’t invest in building brands over a long period of time.

Are there decisions that could be made to try and grow university brands in the long-term as well as perform in the short term?

Higher education could learn a lot from Porsche in this regard, Chris suggests. “It’s inefficient for Porsche to advertise, because they’re going to end up talking to lots of people that can’t afford a Porsche. But in doing so, they’ve built high levels of desire for a product that most people are not in the market for.”

“You do that consistently over time to the point that when people are in the market, then that will be the brand they aim for. And that is absolutely true of universities too.”

“Universities with the strongest brands in the UK are also the oldest. They’ve had a thousand years through reputation and other forms of brand building to enjoy the point where they’re no longer recruiting, they’re selective universities. That is the power of brand.”

“It is not simply a function of where they sit in a league table, as there are other ways of driving desirability. One of the things that the world’s best youth brands understand is that investing in being famous, in being seen and liked and connected in the long term and in the short term is the most effective thing you can aim for.”

Easing pressure on a fragile generation

We can’t talk about connecting with other young audiences without recognising that they’re a fragile generation, Chris says. “And you would be too, if you’d grown up in a world of completely under-legislated use of social media, with the impact of covid on a young person’s education and personal development, and the perception of entering the job market at an economically unstable time.”

“One of the things that we can see in youth brands is how they change the way that they connect with young people because of that.”

Iconic brands are changing some of the components of their product in an attempt to make it resonate with this audience. Chris points to Nike as a brilliant example of this.

“For almost all of Nike’s history, it has been about athletes, prowess and ‘Just Do It’ – this big, rallying cry to perform. But Nike has shifted from performance to play with its ‘Play New’ global platform.

“They’ve had to change because a young generation has a very different view of what success looks like, and different resilience when it comes to the pressure of performing. It still captures some of the great athletes in the world, but it is an alternative way of rallying people based on the changing attitudes of a young generation who are simply not up for that level of pressure anymore.”

Youth brands use their insight into fragility to become an antidote to it. “With Nike, it’s not about completely removing any sense of performance from the brand, it’s about using play as an antidote to pressure,” Chris adds. “It’s about recognising a fragility and finding a useful way of connecting with young people.”

Faced with an audience experiencing so much fragility and instability in their lives, are there ways in which higher education can alleviate some of that pressure and be an antidote to those feelings without being the black-and-white read on how to solve that problem?