Part Two: Brand – The discipline that dare not speak its name
University leadership often assumes that reputation, academic excellence, scale, rankings, and/or research strength will somehow convert into meaning in the minds of audiences.
It’s a myth. The challenge should be understood more as:
How do we ensure that when our institution comes to mind, the right meaning comes with it?
Byron Sharp’s idea of mental availability has become one of the most influential concepts in modern marketing. Brands grow in part by being easy to notice, recognise, and recall when choices are made.
Friends, clients and colleagues have understandably been drawn to the intrinsic logic of mental availability. But is this the sole solution for higher education, where being remembered is only part of the job? And how should the perennially misinterpreted 'brand' discipline be understood by leadership teams?
So I’ve explored the relationship between Sharp’s work and thinkers such as Kevin Lane Keller, Douglas Holt and Dr. Marcus Collins, who place greater emphasis on the associations, cultural contexts and systems of meaning through which brands are understood.
As academic as this sounds, trust me, it’s entirely practical and will determine how you position, promote and behave as an organisation. These are leadership issues, not just for the marketing team.
A university, School, institute, or research centre is not an empty name waiting to be retrieved from memory. It most likely arrives carrying associations, stories, experiences, symbols and expectations. So people do not simply remember institutions. They interpret them.
Rather than treating Sharp, Keller, Holt, and Collins as competing theories, for me, they illuminate different stages of the same process, the last being how they matter to the individual.
Mental availability asks whether you come to mind
Meaning asks what comes to mind when you do
Mattering asks whether any of it is relevant enough to influence what happens next
That distinction is particularly important in higher education, where decisions are often consequential, identity-laden and complex. Choosing a university, joining a research community, accepting an academic role or forming an institutional partnership can involve much more than recognition. People are also asking:
What does this institution stand for?
Is it for people like me?
What role could it play in my life or work?
Why should I care?
My argument is not that mental availability is unimportant; quite the opposite. Institutions need to be present in the minds of the people who matter – their audiences.
But presence without meaning has limited value.
The strategic role of brand is to create coherence between the signals an institution sends, the associations people store in memory, and the meanings they construct from them.
Because being easy to remember is not the same as being worth remembering. And ultimately, the job of brand is not simply to make an institution more available.
It’s to help it matter more.