Presenting graduate destinations, alumni endorsements, and starting salaries are well-established within HE marketing messages, but the credibility of marginalised subjects appeared to be
undermined by the dominant public understanding of direct lines from courses to specific careers at the expense of understandings of transferable skills to a broad range of careers. In addition, while there was a high incidence of online responders within my dataset being predominantly supportive
149 of HE in principle, the emphasis frequently leant towards the importance of science and the
professions over the arts and humanities.
The reader responses and corresponding reader votes are positioned here as shared understandings that can serve as a proxy for peronsal knowledge. The investigation shows that within public forums, human capital understandings of the purpose of university are dominant at the expense of validity of arts and humanities subjects. The responses revealed drivers of marginalisation, dominated by the interlinked themes of perceived lack of links to careers and offering poor value for money; students as consumers are increasingly rejecting both in the decision-making process.
The data analysis revealed opportunities to improve representation of marginalised subjects by addressing the negative perceptions. Messages which need greater prominence include the balance between short term return on investment and longer term personal satisfaction goals, the existence and application of transferable skills, the long-term view of being a graduate and having a degree.
5.5 Summary
In this chapter I reported an exploratory methodology influenced by RRC to investigate reader inferences of authored content. I invoked online responder voices from 31 articles and forum posts across three online platforms, to articulate public perspectives on marginalised arts and humanities courses. Online keyword searches were used to locate texts within the boundings of the case study (see Section 3.3), and provided a way of capturing shared-understandings of marginalisation in the public domain. Although the initial data selection process sought to cover marginalised student commentary as well, there was little engagement with this topic in the responses. Nevertheless, the thematic analysis of the data added value to the existing market intelligence corpus and advanced the initial theorisation (see Section 3.3) through providing evidence of human capital-dominated motivations for study, the consumer-orientation that seeks value for money, and the disruption of corporate messages within social media. I used qualitative analysis to ascribed experiential and
150 assumed authorities to responders of the content. I used quantitative analysis to ascribe a power rating to how strongly the responses resonated with readers who use online voting systems. The reader responses demonstrated consumer attitudes towards having a degree, requiring value for money and a return on investment realised through strong graduate career prospects, invalidating some subjects by their lack of obvious affinity to employment. They also indicated national cultural and curriculum shortcomings which fail to inspire academic inquiry beyond secondary school.
Of particular concern for marketing were the possible power and influence of students, graduates and parents articulating negative views. Typical HE market research is drawn from a number of highly credible sources, and students and graduates are used as brand ambassadors to validate corporate stories. Indeed, I elicited stories from students (see Section 4.1) to consider their value for use in frontline accounts of marginalisation. I demonstrate here that online reader responses
positioned as the ‘court of public opinion’ can provide an additional source and style of market intelligence outside corporate control. These ‘insider’ responders, professing an experiential or assumed authority to add credibility to their responses, contribute in ways which can undermine corporate accounts. The endorsed opinions of reader responses, combined with ideas generated in the student and tutor interviews (see Chapter 4) will now be taken forward to the next chapter and used to inform the development of a package of prototype marketing resources.
Chapter 6
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6 Resource development and testing
The data analysis of the ‘missing voices’ of HE marketing intelligence in Chapters 4 and 5,
provided me with a set of ideas to carry forward to the ‘working with resource’ phase of DBR (see Figure 3.1). This moves me towards answering the research question ‘How can marginalised aspects of HE recruitment marketing be accommodated within mainstream practices without jeopardising the needs of core target audiences?’ to be answered within the boundaries of the case study examining Lorem’s existing core marketing practice. I commence this chapter by mapping these ideas to the triangle of marginalisation and translating them into design principles to be incorporated into marketing messages (see Table 6.1). These messages are then incorporated in a prototype package of promotional resources. I cover the iterative nature of the package
development, in collaboration initially with the original research participants, which later expanded to encompass additional academic and administrative colleagues. This expansion happened both through word of mouth and formalised committee structures (see Appendix 2). The resource development was interspersed with testing and evaluation, for which I also include details. I also include a summary of new and ongoing activity which was directly influenced by the findings, but which took place after the fieldwork had been completed.
This chapter concludes with a discussion on how DBR methodology has differed from standard marketing practice in Lorem. I demonstrate how the research process has brought about a
collaborative model of working where resource development serves to mediate conversation and develop new approaches to recruitment marketing.
6.1 The consolidation of market intelligence derived from the empirical data