Sina Esteky, a marketing professor at the Farmer School of Business at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and his colleagues have found a placebo effect on academic coursework associated with strong brands.
Esteky's research found that course materials could be identical, but if one student is handed materials labeled from Harvard University and the other student is handed the same materials labeled from a local community college, the student who sees the Harvard name will perform better. The research, recently published in the Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, is the first to show that educational material connected with prestigious brands increases motivation and improves performance on concentration, memorization and numerical reasoning.
Esteky recently spoke with The Business Journals’ Hilary Burns about the study and the importance of branding in a competitive U.S. higher-ed landscape, to the detriment of hundreds of small colleges that lack brand recognition. The following is an edited transcript of the conversation:
Could you talk more about the study?
Over the past 10 to 15 years, there's been interest among marketing scholars to see how placebo effects occur in a marketing context. How does pricing, branding or other marketing efforts create these illusions that the same product works better when it's branded or positioned as a more expensive item? I thought, OK, so this could be very relevant in an educational setting.
We gave students identical educational material, an educational game that has been tested to improve concentration. They played the game and some of them were told that this game was developed by an Ivy League institution and others were told it was developed at a local community college. We had a baseline condition as well, so we knew how effective the game actually is without any brand being associated. We saw a drastic improvement in students’ concentration on subsequent tasks when they thought it came from an Ivy League school. This was a first step to see you can have the exact same material and just change the perceived source of that material, and you see this effect happening where it seems to be taken more seriously when they think it comes from a prestigious source.
In the second study, we focused on memorization. Again, we found that if they thought (the course materials) came from an Ivy League university, they did better. In these studies, the focus was not on the brand. In a lot of it, we didn't even mention the brand. It was just a logo on the side of the page, so very subtle. But that was enough to get students more motivated. We saw this in terms of how much time they spent learning the material. We asked them, “How motivated are you to learn this material?” We saw an increase there as well. And all of those added up to actual objective changes in how they perform on this memorization task. And then the last study, we focused on numerical reasoning and when they thought that it was associated with a strong educational brand, we saw more effort, more motivation and better performance.
Does this show how brand-obsessed our culture is?
Absolutely. These are all the undergrads, we're talking about Gen Z, so they're used to branded content. They've grown up online. It's not much of a stretch for them to go from branded consumption in their daily lives to branded consumption in their education and learning activities. We don't know how this applies to millennials or older generations. That would be one of the interesting directions for future research. There's a lot of questions that we need to answer, like how does this happen with longer formats and more involved settings? There's a lot of unknowns. But what we know is there is a placebo effect occurring in education.
What should campus leaders take away from your research?
There’s been immense investment in higher education branding over the past decade or two with the intention of talent acquisition, fundraising and other purposes. And there's really been no focus on how these efforts can actually affect student learning. (This paper) is validation of the fact that branding in higher education seems to be working in surprising ways so it's certainly worth more investigation to try to understand these long-term effects and second-order effects. It's a validation of the fact that these investments seem to be benefiting universities in more than one way.
Investments in boosting a school's brand?
A lot of that is happening through universities working on their rankings and using those to market themselves. There's a lot going on, especially in the age of Covid, where online education has become such a commodity. Branding seems to be one of those differentiating factors that can be the difference of a high versus low tuition. Not all universities have a rich history or Ivy League background so a lot of it is how a university is working on marketing itself.
What does this mean for the hundreds of small private schools and some regional publics that really don't have strong brand recognition right now?
It means that they should invest in that.
What did you take away about college pricing from this research?
It's implied that an Ivy League school is much more expensive than a community college. We're talking about branding, but actually pricing is another issue. And what our results suggest is hike up those tuition prices, because that would help the students who can afford those tuitions to get a better education and actually learn more, which is a very cruel way of thinking about this in a practical setting. But that seems to be what's happening is there's this price-quality association. If something is more expensive, people assume that it has to be better quality.
Are you working on follow up to this research?
Branding is something I am very passionate about, but my background is in design. I study how design influences consumer behavior. In an educational setting, you think the design of classrooms and how that affects student learning. Design (that allows) universities to sell themselves as modern institutions that are worth the tuition. That’s one of the related projects that I'm working on.
