Personalization is the branding choice of the day. In a world of nearly endless choices, brands want to make consumers feel like their product is uniquely for them, and universities are no exception to this marketing ploy. The rise of individualization and a saturated marketplace have led to the “personalized generic” brand, where you are both “one of a kind” and “a kind of one.” For example, many universities in the UK began using the term “MyUniversity” as part of their educational platform, which doubles as a branding tool. The rise of this branding technique is partly due to increasingly consumer-specific data tracking and collection systems coupled with the wise-use of linguistic shifter language, such as “my.”  As the market continues to be inundated with more of the same, the competition to distinguish one from the rest of the pack will be crucial to universities. Their branding model focused on personalization may be what it takes to prevail.

The brands of universities are best understood not as trademarks, but as geographical indications. The conventional American theory of trademarks has always been an ill fit for the merchandising uses that universities enforce their brands to protect, because those uses are grounded in anti-misappropriation impulses that traditional American trademark law has always looked on with ambivalence. But the use of a signifier to channel material support from consumers to a productive community (such as a university), out of support for the community itself rather than out of market demand for the community’s outputs, is perfectly consistent with the justifications typically offered for protection of geographical indications. While understanding university brands as geographical indications provides analytical clarity, it also reveals such brands have a potential dark side: they may give the community’s most generous and idiosyncratic benefactors an outsize role in deciding disputes over the community’s priorities and values.

Faced with budgetary pressures, American universities have embraced propaganda within their athletics programs in order to maintain lucrative partnerships with global corporations. These university administrators become, in effect, educators-as-corporate-propagandists. This chapter examines the controversial relationship between Nike and the University of Oregon. Nike has constructed the University’s brand identity, taken control over its communications and public relations, and spread its habits and impulses to every facet of University operations. But private interests do not always overlap with public or educational ones – even to the point of violating state and federal law. The partnership between Nike and the University of Oregon casts two very different shadows over the question of usefulness of propaganda in a democratic society. On the one hand, its efficacy is unquestionable, especially in the realms of politics, business, activism, and education. On the other hand, propaganda’s utility for democracy is questionable, and in the realm of public education is often incompatible with democratic ends. America’s financially struggling public universities may need to reimagine their use of propaganda. Their success or failure may depend, ironically, on the effects of propaganda elsewhere in society: What use is a university, after all, in a society which has no use for truth?

The 2019 college admissions bribery scandal revealed uncomfortable truths about elite higher education and its conspicuous consumption. In this chapter, I explore the legal implications of treating higher education as a luxury good reflecting wealth and status. Like luxury goods companies, elite universities are regarded as owners of luxury brands. Just as companies such as Louis Vuitton, Ferrari, and Hermès own brands that enjoy a high level of exclusivity and serve conspicuous consumption, so too do elite universities. In the minds of many, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale are analogous to Louis Vuitton, Ferrari, and Hermès. This “luxurification” of higher education, however, perpetuates class division and violates the right to education.

Online education both does and does not radically transform higher education and higher education brands. On the one hand, providing courses online potentially allows universities to reach a worldwide audience, helps them globalize their brand, changes the cost structure for both students and institutions, and could reshape the competitive branding landscape among universities. On the other hand, university brands are surprisingly regional, low student–faculty ratios are still necessary for truly high-quality education, and the online competitive landscape might ultimately simply replicate reputational hierarchies forged over decades in the world of on-campus education. Thus, although the idea that online learning will completely “disrupt” the higher education model and existing university branding hierarchies is almost certainly overstated, online education will inevitably become more and more integral to universities, and over time the distinction between on-campus and online education is likely to become increasingly blurred. As a result, online education brings both promise and peril for universities as they manage their brands while increasingly adopting online education modalities. This chapter first provides an overview of the online education landscape in higher education. Then, it outlines some of the core issues that universities must address as they consider and implement online education strategies while managing their brand.

It is hard to reconcile the research university’s supposed reason for being – the reasoned pursuit of knowledge – with its methods for building brand awareness and equity. Just like pitches for other luxury goods, the selling of higher education depends on irrational appeals devoid of information and marketing missives meant to hug the line between legally protected puffery and outright fraud. Although universities have always borrowed from the selling strategies of the commercial sphere, in recent years, there has been a sea change in the prevalence and degree of less-than-truthful content in higher educational self-promotion. How do university constituents – administrators, professors, students – interpret this gap between their institutions’ traditionally understood role and the logic of today’s academic branding strategies? The chapter chronicles the main rationalizations these actors deploy to reduce the tension between academic mission and academic marketing. By telling themselves that their school’s advertising efforts can be quarantined from the university’s larger purpose or actually provide tangible and truthful information to outside audiences or are a necessary evil, university constituents reduce their internal dissonance but fail to confront the realities of academic branding.

Higher education misunderstands branding. Fears that embracing branding leads to commodification show the problem. When higher education institutions strive to meet ranking systems’ metrics, they take the path to commodification and cede power to outsiders. Branding, however, does not force such an outcome. Instead, applying the logic of branding to the realities of higher education today opens a way, especially for public institutions and systems, to define their purpose. This change can free schools from traps set by following systems that quantify education in the hope that it can be analyzed in economic terms. This chapter explains problems with ranking systems and examines California’s approach to higher education as a template for a broader understanding of education.