What Is the Product? And Who Owns It?

For a few years, we’ve been talking about marketing and communications needing a seat at the table discussing the product. That marketing needs to be involved earlier and operationalized into institutional decision-making. I am a big proponent of this idea. I’ve said the same thing myself. But lately, I’m thinking we are not addressing the root and we’re going about this the wrong way. Before we can ask for a seat at the table, we have to answer an essential question: What, exactly, is the product?

For a consumer brand, the product is well defined. Take Nike as an easy example. Its flagship running shoe, the Pegasus, drops its newest version soon. Nike knows what the Pegasus is—42 years of iteration, and when version 42 drops, there’s a product brief, a press release, a media kit and a go-to-market plan. The product team owns the product. Marketing is at the table and can run (I’ll never apologize for puns). It’s not simple, but the boundaries are clear. And going above and beyond, Nike dedicates their entire About site to the product, as they’ve defined it in its many forms. Imagine a higher ed version of this.

But higher education lacks this clarity. Ask what the product is at any college or university in the country, and you’ll get a different answer from everyone you ask.

Is it the degree conferred? Is it the graduate who goes on to enter the workforce, earns more and contributes more? Is it the research and the new knowledge created, the breakthroughs that reshape industries and save lives? Is it the public-private partnerships that strengthen communities? Is it social mobility? Is it the student experience itself: student life, residence life, academic support, career services? Is it the capacity to reason, to question, to contribute to a democratic society?

The honest answer is that it’s all of those things. Which makes defining it nearly impossible and defining its ownership even harder.

Case in point: There are roughly 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States, each with its own scale, ideology, philosophy, pedagogy, governance structure, culture, athletics, health care, safety, operations, budgets, community relationships and more. At one institution, the provost may own the academic product. But I’ve worked with a few institutions where a dean or two had more real influence than the provost. At another, the VP of research may be setting the agenda. At another, it’s the president, but that’s often defined through a very inclusive strategic plan that never gets at the heart of the product. The org chart and the actual power structure are often two completely different things. So, when someone says, “Marketing should have a seat at the table when it comes to the product,” you have to ask: Which product? Whose table? Because in most cases, that table doesn’t exist as a single, convened body with a clear owner and a shared definition.

Like most industries, the product itself doesn’t sit still. Take programs as an example, arguably the most scrutinized element of what a university offers. The question “Why on earth did we/they start offering that?” gets asked constantly, usually after the fact, from inside and outside the institution. New courses aren’t developed in marketing meetings, and often they don’t arrive with demand studies gauging real market interest or cost tolerance. Sometimes they emerge because of a new dean or an endowed faculty member. Sometimes because of corporate need or regional pressure. Sometimes because a field has evolved and the curriculum needs to catch up. That last one is a deeply academic process, and it should be. But all of it means that one of the most consequential elements of the product—what students actually learn—is being shaped in rooms that marketing will never be in, sometimes rooms that aren’t even on campus. Extrapolate that out across every other dimension of the product, and we start to understand the scale of the problem.

Marcomm’s most honest and defensible argument for involvement isn’t a seat at the product table; it’s ownership of the packaging. It starts with the work to ask the questions: Does somebody want this? Do we know who that is? Will they pay for it? What’s the benefit—for them and for the institution? Is it differentiating? And how, under our brand, can we present it in a way that’s true and compelling and valuable and distinct? That may be the easier part, which is scary because it is not easy. The really arduous task for the CMCO is getting leadership to understand, and buy in to the fact, that these questions need to be asked with regularity.

There’s a framework buried in those questions: one simple enough for a campus community to understand when marcomm needs to be at the table—and clear enough to understand when it doesn’t. Marcomm knows it shouldn’t be designing curriculum, setting research agendas or evolving the student experience. That’s not their expertise. But effectively packaging the product, in all its complexity, is, and that’s a full-time strategic act. Get that right, and the conversation about needing a seat at the table becomes irrelevant.