How often do you think about your institution’s competition?

This Hot Take was written by Kristin Van Dorn

Working for an agency specializing in higher education means that I work with several institutions at a time. And over the years, my experience with varied institutions has built up. It’s a pretty common experience to come across institutions working on a digital strategy without a good sense of their competition.

Here’s a quick litmus test. Can you answer these questions easily?

• Who are your top 5 competitors?
• What makes these institutions your competition? (For example, are you recruiting the same type of student, or are you recruiting students from the same geographic region?)
• What are your advantages in this competition?
• What are their advantages in this competition?
• What are your key messages?
• What are their key messages?
• How do your key messages relate to your advantages over your competitors?
• How well do your advantages align with what your target audience is looking for?
• How well do your competitors’ advantages align with what your target audience is looking for?
• What data sources are you using to validate your answers?

Okay. How did you do? Did you have great answers for all of these? If so, that’s fabulous!

But, if you struggled with one or more of these questions, don’t feel too bad. It’s likely not a YOU problem. More likely than not, it’s a FIELD problem. Competitive strategies in higher education are under-studied, barely understood, and even more rarely pursued.

You see, we hold up and serve learning communities, and there’s a philosophical purity to learning and discovery for its own sake, without much consideration given to how the other guys are doing it. Academic freedom prevents institutional leadership from getting too prescriptive about how we teach and what we research. That’s why so many mission statements are bland and intentionally vague in higher ed. They kind of need to be in order to encompass all the varied research interests and dispositions of our faculty and students. And our positioning and marketing follow suit.

That’s why most institutions struggle with knowing their competition and measuring their value in the context of their competitive environment. It’s not something we’re asked to think carefully about or build strategies for. I’ve talked about this before, but rather than view our sources of value in relation to what’s needed and available in the market, we tend to view our sources of value based on the level of effort and resources we put into a given idea.

The trouble with that approach is that our environments are changing. Our students are savvy shoppers. They have come of age in an era where information is easily accessible and even overwhelming, but scams abound. And they expect authenticity and clearly defined benefits and features. We need to articulate our value propositions in meaningful ways.

Competitive Advantage #

A competitive advantage is a distinct resource in your institution that you can leverage to deliver better outcomes over competitors. There are many potential sources of competitive advantage in higher education. Think accomplished and engaging faculty, innovative teaching and learning strategies, unique partnerships, and specialized services.

One competitive advantage that might seem “so obvious it’s silly” is your leadership’s appreciation of your distinct resources and their ability to leverage those resources effectively.

Our C-suite leaders need to understand what is unique and special about our institutions. They also need to build a vision and the skills to create unique and efficient combinations with those sources of advantage. They need to see how our operations can bolster our value or hold us back. Otherwise, those advantages lie in waiting for years or fade out.

As digital strategists, we have insight into our markets that surface and shape these advantages. We learn more about our competition and their messaging. We can offer our leadership a better understanding of their assets and how they work within our context.

Here are my top strategies for managing up and onboarding leadership into a competitive frame of mind.

Start tracking what your top competitors emphasize. #

You can start with a quarterly spreadsheet and earmark a morning each quarter to go through your competitors’ websites, media releases, program pages, and advertisements. Make a list of the messages that come up most frequently and note them. When you survey your prospective and newly admitted students, ask them about both your messages and your competitors’ messages. You don’t have to specifically call out your competitors. But, if you had data that showed that one of your competitors was heavily marketing experiences abroad, and you discovered that your own prospects indicated that studying abroad was a top priority to them, you have some serious business intelligence to work with.

Structure and socialize your competitor data and analyses. #

If you send out periodic reports related to search engine optimization or Google Analytics, start including competitor data and analysis reports. Record and provide the steps you take to gather your data, and briefly describe your decision-making process. This will help to substantiate your methods and build trust. If your data collection process is different every time or you spend varying amounts of time on your process, you may have difficulty getting your leadership and key stakeholders to accept your findings.

Identify Resources for Competitive Advantage. #

One of the most important strategies for influencing your institutional leadership and key stakeholders is to be confident about your process, inferences, and recommendations. But data collection, data analysis, and strategy development based on your analysis are all different skills. And unfortunately, they are also sequential, so you can’t just skip to the good part. The trick to building a competitor analysis practice is gaining enough experience to do all three competently and to make progress in skill development.

One way to do this well is to draw in collaborators. Another way, if the resources are not there to draw on others’ capacity, is to be patient with yourself and start small. If you start with small, consistent actions and build up over time, you can build your skill set so that you feel confident sharing your results. Also, don’t hesitate to ask others for their thoughts and intuitions. They may anticipate questions or concerns, spot processes that can strengthen your practice, and help you hone your analytical skills.

The Bottom Line #

Ultimately, you want to influence leadership in the importance of thinking from a competitive perspective and develop an information pipeline and strategic resource management plan to continue generating more competitive advantage. This takes a shift in thinking that will come when leaders see the valuable information that you can bring to the table.

As always, if you are interested in developing a process for researching and measuring your competitive advantages, Bravery can help you benchmark data and provide tools for analysis. It’s the kind of research project I love to work on! So, reach out. We’re happy to talk strategy anytime.