Marketing as the Con: Third in a sequence — a university's ledger, and the impunity beneath the brand

 

Marketing as the Con

Third in a sequence — a university's ledger, and the impunity beneath the brand

If the first of these essays anatomised the empty language of neoliberal management, and the second named the smooth figure who has built a career out of speaking it, this one follows the money. Because marketing is the conman's purest trade. Marketing is, by definition, the management of the gap between what a thing is and what it is said to be. In an honest institution that gap is small, and marketing is barely more than description — you say what you do, because you do it. In the con economy the gap is the whole point. The institution stops investing in the thing and starts investing in the saying of it; it pours its resources into the sign and starves the referent the sign was supposed to point at. To see how this works, and to see why it is allowed to keep working, it helps to do the one thing the con is built to prevent. It helps to open the books.

So imagine a university. Not any particular one — picture the type. It is flush with new management, a leadership team freshly installed and anxious, as freshly installed leadership teams always are, to demonstrate its own relevance and to keep its own jobs. It surveys the institution it has inherited and concludes that what this place needs — what will set it apart, what will let it conquer the market and establish itself as the go-to destination for education — is a new pitch. A new brand identity. A fresh design language, sharper messaging, a story. With the right story, management argues, the university will be all set.

The spend

So it hires a marketing consultant. One and a half million dollars, over three years, for the consultant alone. Another four and a half million is earmarked for promotion. The focus groups convene. The "stakeholder engagement" sessions begin — the workshops, the listening exercises, the carefully facilitated consultations that have the form of asking the community what it values and the function of arriving at a brand decision that was, in all but ceremony, taken before anyone was asked. From this apparatus emerges the flagship campaign. It is called Preparing students for an AI future, and it consumes, in its first three years, three point seven million dollars.

Hold that phrase up to the light: preparing students for an AI future. It is impossible to object to and impossible to verify. It commits to nothing. It could be printed, unchanged, on the prospectus of any one of five hundred universities on any continent, and that interchangeability is not a defect of the work — it is the work. A genuinely distinctive claim would describe something the institution actually, specifically does, and anything specific can be checked. Blandness is not laziness here; it is armour. The slogan is engineered to be exactly as substantial as a slogan can be while remaining beyond the reach of evidence.

The simultaneous subtraction

Now turn the page of the ledger, because the same university, in the very same period, is also subtracting. It closes three of its area-studies departments. It does so on the authority of an earlier consulting report — a previous engagement, a previous fee — that had graded the institution's departments by their "market appeal" and found these ones wanting. And it sheds, across the same three years, forty-three members of staff.

Sit with the arrangement, because it is grotesque and it is ordinary. A university spends six million dollars announcing to the world that it prepares students for an AI future, while simultaneously closing the very departments — the area studies, the disciplines of language, history, culture, region, and human difference — whose entire purpose is to teach people how to live wisely amid exactly the kind of upheaval an AI future portends. It markets understanding while defunding the faculties of understanding. It pays a stranger three point seven million to say education while removing forty-three of the people who were doing it. This is not representation. It is substitution. The sign is not pointing at the institution; the sign is replacing it, and the sign is being paid for with the institution's own dismembered body. The brand fattens precisely as the thing it brands is eaten. The marketing budget and the redundancy list are the same document read from opposite ends.

Three years on

And then the three years pass, and the only number that was ever supposed to matter arrives, and it has not moved. Enrolment is flat. The six million dollars — the consultant, the promotion, the AI-future campaign — has produced, against the single metric by which marketing claims to justify itself, nothing. Zero return. The market was to be conquered; the market did not notice.

By now the hallway whispers have started, because people are not stupid and they live inside the gap between the slogan and the institution every day. They talk, quietly at first, about how banal the whole thing is — how mundane and ordinary the new logo, how the slogans say nothing, how it is all empty rhetoric stretched thin over an absence. But whispers curdle into questions, and the questions, when they come, are precise. The staff begin to ask for numbers. They ask for an evaluation of the campaign. They ask what the six million bought. They ask for efficiency, for return on investment, for accountability.

And here is the moment the con shows its hand — because the language in which the staff are now asking their questions is not their language. It is management's. Efficiency. Return on investment. Market appeal. Accountability. This is the exact vocabulary that was used to grade the area-studies departments and find them wanting; the exact rubric by which three departments were closed and forty-three people were dispensed with. The staff are not inventing a new standard. They are simply asking that the standard be applied evenly — that the marketing spend be made to sit the very examination that the teaching was made to sit and failed. They are asking for nothing more than consistency.

The asymmetry that is the con

They will not get it, and understanding why they will not get it is understanding the whole machine. Accountability in these institutions is not a principle. It is a weapon, and weapons point in one direction. The rubric of ROI and efficiency and market appeal is forged for use downward — aimed by management at faculties, at schools, at the teaching and the research and the people who do them. It is never, under any circumstances, aimed upward, at the management's own decisions, at the consultants management hired, at the brand management bought. A Classics department that cannot demonstrate its market appeal is closed. A marketing campaign that demonstrably failed every market test there is — flat enrolment is the purest possible verdict of market indifference — is not even asked to take the test. The audit flows in one direction only, and the direction it flows is the con. The same managers who demand that a language department prove its return on investment will not, cannot, be made to account for the six million they spent proving nothing.

This is why the request for the ledger is so quietly radical, and why it is so reliably refused. The entire infrastructure of vacuous marketing — the brands, the slogans, the logos, the consultants, the rebrands, the relaunches — exists on the precondition of non-evaluation. It is structurally dependent on the absence of the very accountability it preaches. Management does not have to go back to the staff and justify the expense, and so it does not. The books are not opened to the people whose unpaid wages and vanished colleagues are written in them. Ask, and you will not be answered; you will be managed. You will become the negative one, the one raising too many questions, the one who is not on board with the journey — the recoding I described in the last essay, now performed on a whole staffroom at once.

Impunity

What sits beneath all of it, holding it up, is a single word, and the staff in the hallways have already found it. The word is impunity. No manager is going to lose their job for this failure. No one is going to be held to account for hiring the consultants, for the six million, for the flat line on the enrolment graph. A department dies for failing a market test; the person who incinerated six million dollars against that same test is promoted, or is simply gone — moved laterally, moved upward, moved on to the next institution and the next mandate, in the serial migration of the managerial class. The consequence that falls like a guillotine on the teaching faculty cannot, by the deep design of the system, fall on those who govern it.

We must be clear that impunity here is not a moral lapse of particular individuals, a few bad managers who happened to escape their just deserts. Impunity is the oxygen of the con. It is the condition without which the entire infrastructure cannot breathe. A marketing con that could be evaluated, costed, and pinned to the person who authorised it would collapse on its first failed campaign, because the failures are constant and only the non-evaluation conceals them. The culture of hired consultants and unaccountable managers does not merely tolerate impunity as an unfortunate byproduct. It runs on it. Remove the impunity — open the books, apply the rubric upward, attach the failure to a name — and the con cannot exist, the way a fire cannot exist once you take away the air.

Who pays, and the audit they are owed

So let us, finally, refuse the abstraction, because abstraction is the medium in which six million dollars can be made to disappear. Behind the banal logo and the unfalsifiable slogan is a precise human ledger. Forty-three livelihoods. Three departments, with everything each one held — the languages no longer taught, the regions no longer studied, the students who will arrive and find the courses gone, the scholarship that will not be done, the communities that will not be served by graduates who were never trained. That is what the brand was bought with. The marketing did not cost six million dollars; it cost forty-three jobs and three departments and called the receipt a campaign. The slogan and the redundancy are, as I said, the same document, and the people in the hallways are simply reading it out loud.

The questions they are asking — what did it buy, where is the evaluation, who is accountable, where is the return — are the four questions in institutional dress, the ones every essay in this sequence keeps arriving at: for whom, against whom, who pays, and who decides. The con's entire art is to make those questions unaskable, and its last line of defence is impunity — the guarantee that even when they are asked, no answer is owed and no consequence will follow. But the demand itself is the crack in the wall. To stand in the staffroom and ask that the marketing be made to face the exact test the teaching was made to face — to insist that accountability, if it is to be imposed at all, be imposed evenly, upward as well as down — is to refuse the asymmetry on which the whole con depends. Open the books. Apply the rubric to those who wield it. Make the brand sit the examination it set for the department it killed. That audit, the one they are owed and will be told they cannot have, is exactly where the impunity ends — and with it, the con.