Normalisation of and resistance to consumer behaviour in higher education

Five years ago in the conclusion to an edited book we challenged the stakeholders of higher education (HE) to be more reflective of the potential consequences (intended or not) of the processes outlined in The marketisation of higher education and the student consumer (Molesworth, Scuillion, & Nixon, 2011). In introducing this Journal of Marketing for Higher Education special edition on HE and consumer behaviour, we ponder what the papers submitted – and most particularly the six selected to appear here – tell us about the current state of such reflections. What appears most prominently is a schism. We witness both acceptance and normalisation, but also rejection and resistance. The normalisation of marketisation means that a consumerist discourse is increasingly ‘taken-for-granted’ in many of the practices and routines of a university, and in the language used by managers, tutors and students. From this position marketing theory is ‘naturally’ developed to better inform such a situation. Researchers then ask questions about HE marketing effectiveness, and about student-consumer attitudes in order to make claims about enhanced recruitment, student experience and satisfaction. Indeed in our own institutions there are daily reproductions of such normality in requests for information for various external systems of measurement, in concerns about and celebrations of students numbers, in warnings about any dissatisfactions in our customers, in talk of journal outputs as a proxy of research, and in increasing requests made in the name of the student experience (which range from answering their emails the same day to facilitating frequent satisfaction surveys).

In practice of course many of the tutors we see around us – especially those not directly involved with either marketing research or pedagogic research – may adopt various coping strategies, accepting but also bracketing out, downplaying, or avoiding those aspects of marketisation that they dislike. Here resistance sometimes emerges as overt challenge to policy and to managerialist processes, where the very idea of students as consumers offends a tutor’s belief in their role and/or the purpose of HE. Marketisation may be ubiquitous but a metaphorical line is created: ‘not in my classroom, not at the expense of my scholarly subject’. However, others and perhaps the majority of those new to the system, accept – however reluctantly – that their university needs to attract students or jobs are at risk. Like it or not the student as a consumer must be acknowledged in teaching performance assessments, league tables, promotional positioning and, increasingly in various online forums and promotions. We also note a final group of tutors who may actively embrace student-consumer behaviour by focusing on the positive outcomes attributed to marketing actions – from widening participation to impressive new facilities. Indeed a senior academic involved in pedagogic research at one of our institutions confided that they felt the student was not nearly enough of a consumer, implying that if they were they might get a much better educational experience. A question that arises then is: what is the role of marketing scholarship in negotiating the tensions in the various positions, and the subsequent practices within a marketised HE sector?

This task is undertaken in the specific papers in this special edition. We start with a paper from Melodi Guilbaut that calls for HE to reconcile its future to the process of marketisation. Indeed Guilbaut argues that contemporary notions of customer co-creation mean we should champion consumer behaviour in our students. This is an important argument because as the paper explains, much of the complaint about students as consumers relies on a consumer subjectivity that marketers have long abandoned (if indeed it ever existed). If the trend in marketing is to work with consumers to generate value, and alternatively (we might add) to govern their behaviour rather than accept their sovereignty, then the worst complaints about students as consumers may seem to fade.

The debate, of course, does not stop here. The next three papers offer what might be considered a normalised perspective. In essence the starting point for these authors is an established global, commercial HE sector where useful questions are about how we best use, fit and adopt marketing practices to maximise organisational efficiency.

Marcelo Royo-Vela and Ute Hünermund illustrate the normalisation of university brand equity as an important measure and also consider innovation in interactive, online communication approaches as a way to influence student decision-making, hence also normalising the move from student selection to recruitment via persuasive messages, based on ‘image’. Muhammad Jan and Djihane Ammari also consider online advertising as an important tool for influencing student choice. Here we may further recognise that the acceptance of students as legitimate targets of marketing is also very much an international issue, with the tensions in marketisation absent for many outside the UK who have not experienced the trauma of recent policy change. Indeed HE is now understood to be subject to global competitive forces (Royo-Vela and Hünermund also include international recruitment in their study). Lili Gai, Chunhao Xu and Lou Pelton take the need to engage with international audiences via online media further still, recognising the internet as a source of netnographic data on student-consumers as well as a marketing platform. This article also highlights how in this global market, the Chinese student-consumer is an especially important segment to focus on for marketised Western universities. What is implied here is that in HE marketers perceive a global audience as a customer base, where some are deemed more important than others, and with little recourse to either pedagogy or equality of opportunity in making these judgments about international market opportunities.

The conclusion of these three articles seems to be that universities must now create a global footprint online, and especially on social media. Indeed social media may be the key platform for student recruitment. This opens up questions of the conflation of educational and marketing content both of which may be undifferentiated on social media. It also highlights that in the adoption of marketing to secure brand reputation, universities are thrown straight into the latest digital marketing approaches and need to grapple not only with a global audience, but also with the one that is interconnected, sharing and circulating reviews and information about all aspects of education in similar ways that tourist destinations and hotels re-reviewed. These papers will no doubt ring true with those at the forefront of university marketing and student recruitment and also those academics that venture online to see what is said on their behalf and about them. Indeed these contributions may further sensitise us to the complexity of the global online space in which universities now operate and feel they must compete.

If at this point it looks as if marketisation is inevitable, the last two papers illustrate potential resistive positions to such normalisation, or what the authors consider a corrosive effect of accepting students as consumers. Whilst they too offer recommendations for action, perhaps their most important contribution is in reimagining the space and place that a university could (should) occupy in society. Joseph Cunningham brings us back to the campus as a marketised space and so also to the normalising role of the university as a space for consumption and the production of consumers. Here we see a critique that the university is not just engaged with external branding and persuasive communication in recruitment, but increasingly conflates education with consumption, rapidly reproducing the consumer ways of thinking that the previous papers suggest require the adoption of marketing principles by universities. Thus not only do universities turn their focus on commercial activities, but also actively produce students as products, and as carriers of both the university brand and a broader consumerist culture. Cunningham resists this idea and calls for new spaces in the university that are produced as free from consumerist logics and that foreground the critical and reflective aspects of education.

Andre Pusey’s contribution picks up this call, describing student activism as a challenge to the processes Cunningham articulates. He provides an example of how a re-politicised, non-consumerist university space may be produced. Here we see a compelling reimagining of the university that seems ironically absent in its marketised forms (subject as they are to external market pressures that demand conformity to the same consumer logics). This seems a very different sort of co-production project than the market forms of online user-content production and dissemination that serve to brand the university.

Such resistive narratives distance themselves from the everyday weight of the systems and structures of HE to offer a reflective vantage point but are also easy targets to those who see impracticality in what they demand. Nevertheless, such approaches demonstrate how contemporary critical marketing theory that is capable of producing resistance to established marketing practice, is also an important disciplinary role. The almost ironic possibility is that in critiquing the student as a consumer, and with it the application of established and emerging marketing concepts, such projects can actually do much to invigorate future universities.

Our view is that one important role for a special issue is to stimulate debate in a field. Our selected articles do this both directly and individually in the contributions they make, but also collectively in the way they represent the various positions that academics may take. We also hope that this variety of positions can use the Journal of Marketing for Higher Education as a forum where the debate may continue. Marketing scholars, especially those that bridge the boundaries of consumer research and pedagogic research may be best placed to provide nuanced and informed theories of what happens when students are seen as consumers, and so are able to articulate theory in ways that may improve, expand, challenge or confirm the practices of those concerned with HE marketing.

The final inclusion in this issue is Hanif Haghshenas’s review of Higher education consumer choice by Jane Hemsley-Brown and Izhar Oplatka (2015). This is perhaps a good illustration of what we mean. As Haghshenas notes, this text does not just present choice as an apolitical aspect of marketised education, but it reflects on implications of choice for widening participation and social mobility. The conclusion is that as we consider the student as a consumer we might recognise their needs, values and actions as distinct from other consumer behaviours. For us this leaves open the possibility that as we study marketisation in education we may do more than just translate marketing into university processes, but also reflect more broadly on markets and their purpose, and on consumers and their subjectivities.