It’s Welcome Week at my university. Also known as ‘Freshers’ Week’ in some parts of the world, this is the week in which we welcome new students onto campus, to register for their course and take part in events that introduce them to university life.
As I arrive on campus ready to start a day of teaching, I expect to find walls plastered with posters for student societies and events for our new students. After all, this is Welcome Week – the most exciting and vibrant time of the year.
But instead of posters for our students, instead I find campus overflowing with advertisements for… a postgraduate open day.
There are postcards everywhere. Every single desk in my Faculty building has a small red postcard announcing our upcoming postgraduate open day, alongside a date, a time, a location and a QR code. There are so many postcards that it’s almost impossible find a free space to work without having to first clear away handfuls of postcards by either moving them onto another desk, or simply just putting them in the bin.
And it’s not just the desk space either. Every single flat surface in my faculty building has some form of print media announcing the open day featuring the same information: date, time, location and a QR code. Even just coming up to my office this morning, I spotted one by the elevator, one by our staff kitchen, one next to the toilets, one inside the toilets, one by the stairs… you get the idea.
And all of it – absolutely all of it – is completely pointless.
Let me explain…
Absurd advertising
Welcome Week at any university is typically a week for new students – i.e. students who have already decided to come to university to study for either an undergraduate or postgraduate degree. These students have already made their purchase decision.
The students the university marketers really need to be targeting are either those who are either entering their final year of undergraduate study, or those who aren’t already students at the university. Neither of these groups will be on campus during Welcome Week.
And let us not forget precisely when these ads are being placed. They have been placed at the beginning of the academic year. And when do final year undergraduates make their decision about whether to continue to postgraduate study? Not in the first week of term, that’s for sure.
Things get even worse as we unpick the campaign further… Who is the open day for? Well, open days are typically for people who haven’t ever visited the campus before. They are a chance for the university to showcase its staff and its facilities. Open days are not typically for people who have previously spent two or more years already making full use of said facilities.
And then let us consider the message. Or rather, lack of message, because frankly, there isn’t one. Rather, the whole ‘campaign’ launched by my university’s overly enthusiastic recruitment team does not contain a single reason for anyone to want to come to a postgraduate open day! Even if we ignore the fact that the event itself is pretty much pointless, the whole campaign hinges on the fact that an event is happening, and that people will therefore want to come.
This is a classic case of what I call ‘noticeboard marketing’. The university marketers have assumed that the lack of event registrations is a problem with information flow rather than a problem with the event itself – or indeed, the way it has been marketed.
It’s almost as if the people running the campaign haven’t quite thought things through…
A lack of joined-up thinking
I don’t want to be too harsh on my university here. This isn’t a problem limited to just one single university. Rather, it is symptomatic of a much wider problem with higher education (HE), and the way that universities market themselves to students and their parents.
For many years here in the UK, universities were able to attract students on the basis of the fact that ‘they will always want to come’. So, they offer a ‘product’ (a degree), and students will apply for it because ‘well, why wouldn’t they?’
However, times have changed, and many universities – especially here in the UK – have been sleepwalking to disaster for years. A part of the issue is one of recruitment and retention. Many HE marketing teams comprise members who have come from other roles within the university – many of which may not have been marketing focused. Either that, or they may have transferred in from a local school or college. Typically, these marketers may have reached their positions by conforming to expectations and simply ‘doing what they have always done’, as universities tend to be quite conservative (with a small c) in nature. They have also, critically, almost never had to face any sort of accountability for their marketing performance.
And this is really the crux of the matter. In the world of HE, the results of poor marketing take many years to be felt. At which point, those responsible have either moved on, or moved up the food chain, while those in senior leadership positions are left scratching their heads and wondering what on earth happened.
If I were to sum up the issues in HE marketing in a few short points, it would be as follows:
- Poor recruitment
- Lack of accountability
- Poor workplace culture
- Lack of real-world (non-HE) experience in key positions
- Many senior figures resistant to change
- Not enough people asking the right questions
- A failure to understand the changing market
- Lack of strategic vision at all levels
I don’t make these points lightly. I have worked on both sides of the marketing fence – both as a professional marketer, and also now as an academic who teaches marketing and has published a book on advertising. These observations are just some of the many issues facing us in HE, and why so much HE marketing appears to be so bad.
Lessons we can learn
So what can be done?
Universities aren’t going to change their fortunes overnight. Really, what we need is a complete change of culture in the professional marketing of universities – a complete change of thinking, from bottom to the top. It starts with people asking the right questions, and being empowered to ask them at all stages of campaign design and implementation. It also requires an understanding of brand building, and how messaging affects the way people respond to, and interact with, a brand.
While the core problems with university marketing are not going to change quickly, we do need to start adopting a more market-focused, ‘real world’ perspective. This isn’t about ‘doing what we’ve always done’, but rather, asking whether what you’ve always done was really the right thing to do – and then asking how you might measure effect, so that you might know whether your money was well spent.
These are all fundamental things that many professional marketers take for granted. And yet they are things that often get lost in the world of higher education, where there is little accountability for marketing decisions, and where senior leaders rarely seem to understand the importance of brand building for long term success.
My colleague Mary Hargreaves and I cover all of these issues and much more besides in our new book Advertising: A Practitioner Perspective (2026). The book draws on contributions from established experts at every stage of the advertising process, from account handlers to creative strategists, brand builders and more. Unlike other textbooks in the field, Advertising: A Practitioner Perspective is packed full of real-world insights from people who have actually been there and done it in the world of advertising. From Molson Coors and Manning Gottlieb to the BBC, we have experts who know what they’re talking about, sharing their expertise to help shape the marketers and advertisers of the future.
Needless to say, I might have to send a copy to my own university’s marketing and recruitment team…
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.