SESAME - July 2000
VC’s Column
The OU Brand
I find it intriguing how certain previously little-used words suddenly become fashionable in one English-speaking country and then spread to the others. An example is robust. I hardly ever used or heard the word when I lived in Canada but soon after I moved to the UK it sprang into common usage here. For example, ‘we must send a robust response to that letter’. Today I find that robust has become common in North America too.
Another word whose frequency of use has increased dramatically in recent years is brand. This used to be a term for marketing specialists. Today it is everywhere and I am often enjoined to worry about the OU brand. Already slightly sceptical of this obsession with brand, I became much more so after reading Naomi Klein’s powerful new book, No Logo- Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.
She shows how brands were simply a way of reassuring consumers about the quality of products until their use changed steadily in the 1990s. First, some companies started to give more attention to their brand than to their product. Making what the firm actually sold was outsourced to sweatshops in the export processing zones of the third world. By eliminating the expense of producing goods in the west such companies were able to invest huge sums in advertising their brand.
The second step was progressively to divorce the brand from any notion of product quality and to try and endow it with a life of its own in a soft focus world of lifestyle, values and culture. To create the appropriate fantasy it was necessary for a brand to be displayed increasingly prominently so as to fill more and more public space. Where sponsorship of a public event was the advertising vehicle it meant trying to make the event subservient to the sponsoring brand rather than the other way around.
The trouble with all this, of course, is that a brand which is built on puff and whimsy can deflate very fast if someone pricks the balloon - as university students, to their credit, frequently do. Student action has been particularly important in preventing brands from bullying universities. Universities are vital public spaces, literally and metaphorically, which should resist commercial take-over. They are enterprises of collective responsibility which must avoid proprietary control. They stand for open debate against the corporate gagging mechanisms of libel actions and copyright lawsuits. And all universities – not just the Open University – should stand for transparent dealing.
This is the background against which I worry about all the hyping of university ‘brands’ in the current discussion about the e-university. We must not allow the e-university to become a Trojan horse for the corporate invasion of academic space. Equally universities would be wise to ensure that, as they join the game and promote their own brands, they do not allow their ‘brand’ to become divorced from the ‘product’ that underpins it, namely a quality experience for the student.