Deakin U’s new student recruitment campaign has a new spin on a standard brand message.
The campaign is based on a perennial of recruitment advertising, that the world is going to hell in Dante’s handbasket and students must study how to stop it. But Deakin U has a new take, with examples of practical improvements that can be achieved now.
Monash U has made save the world with study motif its own with continuing campaigns based on the message, “whether you want to change your life, your career, your community, or the future, it starts at Monash. Join us and leave the world in better shape than you found it.”
It reached peak misery in 2019 when Open Day at the Clayton campus featured 17 interactive displays of dystopian futures, including global warming, food insecurity, super-bugs and cyber-crime, with information on what Monash was about them.
There are still ample variations on degrees as world-saving super-powers at campuses across the country but at least Deakin U’s new campaign includes optimism in the present. “See the wonderful possible” is the pitch, with examples of specific achievements including, recycling fast fashion and doing something unspecified about thunderstorm asthma.
The campaign does not sell on teaching achievements and the pitch could apply for any other university in the country but Deakin U is an early adopter of practical do-gooding degrees.
This may be the genre’s peak because the marketing times for universities are changing. As the cost of living, and study, rises, choosing a university for abstract altruism will be a harder sell.
According to the NSW Universities Admission Centre’s 2024 survey of Y12s, “this pragmatic group of students are most concerned with traditional dinner table issues like supporting their family (42 per cent), affordable housing (33 per cent) and job security (29 per cent). Just 20 per cent rated two staples of change the world campaigns, “climate action” and “reducing inequality.”
And so the next big thing in recruitment campaigns will likely be advertising focused on what is in for students. UTS is on to this, with advertising showing what specific students get out of study there. “What can UTS be for you?” is the take-away.
Good question.
