After the furore surrounding my last blog, I thought I’d continue the discussion with a HE case study featured in my forthcoming book Advertising: A Practitioner Perspective.
Open days are a big deal in higher education. They are the semi-regular shop window where prospective students and members of the public can visit campus and get a feel for the university and whether it might be the sort of place they’d like to enrol.
These events are especially important for undergraduate recruitment as in the UK at least a full-time student on a three-year programme can be worth in excess of £27k. Even more if they choose to live on campus for any of the three (or more) years of their study.
This is why universities invest so much money in open days. From food and drink to entertainment, promotional merchandise, and the cost of staffing, open days are a major expenditure for any university. It is therefore absolutely critical that they are done ‘right’.
However, sometimes, university marketing teams forget the purpose of open days, or indeed, what their prospective audience might be looking for…
Universities at war
In my textbook chapter on Integrated Campaigns (Ryder 2026), I talk about two universities based fairly close to each other in the city of Canterbury (UK). These are Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU), and the University of Kent.
Every year, the two universities take out billboard (poster site) ads along the main road that runs across the city in the hope of trying to attract attention to their upcoming events. One year, CCCU tried to re-brand its open days as ‘Answers Day(s)’ in an attempt to stand out. Here is what the campaign looked like from the main road:
As you can see, Kent’s approach is fairly standard. Nothing unsurprising, though nothing exciting either. Meanwhile, CCCU has tried to cast itself in slightly different light to Kent, by suggesting that you might well find some ‘answers’ at CCCU that you won’t find at the University of Kent.
However, there is a problem.
Let me explain…
If you’ve got the answers, then what is the question?
At the heart of the CCCU campaign is a central premise that university open days are unsatisfying, and that CCCU has something to offer that other universities don’t.
All well and good, you might say, but what is it that CCCU has to offer? Unfortunately, the university just couldn’t say.
Here’s a screenshot from the landing page that I took around the time of the campaign[1]:
For those of your who have read some of my other blogs, you will be familiar with the concept of ‘noticeboard marketing’. This is a term I coined for the type of marketing that assumes the ‘problem’ for marketers to solve is one of information flow.
We can see this approach clearly in the screenshot above. Beneath the web banner (or ‘hero image’), there is a table of events, with links to ‘book now’.
That’s it.
You either book, or you don’t. And you don’t even know why you should book in the first place.
A lack of joined up thinking
There are simply far too many issues with this campaign for me to write about in a single blog. However, it’s another good example of how sometimes HE marketers miss the mark, and maybe don’t quite understand the many different facets of marketing that all need to link together if they are to be effective.
In this case, someone clearly had a bright idea. I can certainly see how the ‘Answers Day’ campaign might make some sense on an abstract level. However, that’s where the bright idea ends. Unfortunately, the team involved with this project didn’t think about how the campaign might work in practice; or even how the campaign might work in relation to the English language.[2]
When I first saw this campaign in Canterbury, I thought it would make an excellent example for my book, as it is wrong on so many levels. And it would seem that CCCU management agrees with me. Since finishing the book and sending it off to print, the university has decided to discreetly forget all about Answers Day(s), and return to sanity.
However, things remain far from perfect…
A short note on university brands
In November 2024, Canterbury Christ Church University launched a new brand, accompanied by a brand-new logo. Not a crest like so many other universities seem to be adopting, but rather a basketball ‘beating heart of opportunity’.
Some two years later, and the new brand still hasn’t fully bedded in. A cursory glance at the website reveals a problem:
At the time of writing it’s not quite clear whether the Augustine House library building has been updated with new signage, or whether the university simply hasn’t taken a new photo and updated its website. Either way, to have a clash of branding like this on one of the university’s primary landing pages is not a good look.
To me, it suggests that the marketing problems at CCCU are far deeper than just a poorly judged ‘Answers Day’ campaign.
But that’s a discussion for another day…
References
Ryder, M. (2026). Integrated Campaigns. In M. Ryder & M. Hargreaves (eds), Advertising: A Practitioner Perspective. Bloomsbury Academic, London, pp. 252-266. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/advertising-9781350454408/
About the author
Dr Mike Ryder is a lecturer at Lancaster University, where he is Programme Director of the MSc Digital and Social Media Marketing. He is editor of Advertising: A Practitioner Perspective (2026), published by Bloomsbury.
[1] Eagle-eyed readers will notice that this is not the same image as the one included in Advertising: A Practitioner Perspective. The reason being that we weren’t able to include this direct screenshot in the book – so I had to create my own mock-up instead. However, I am more than happy to post the original image here, as it was public domain, and accessible to anyone with an internet connection at the time.
[2] I talk about this a little bit in my book chapter. In short: Open Days are plural, while an Answers Day is a singular event, that claims to provide a ‘plurality’ of answers. You can see the linguistic contortions the marketing team are trying to work around with the heading ‘Answers Day Dates’ alongside multiple individual ‘Answers Day’(s), some of which take place on the same day. It’s an absolute shambles.