Kansas University officials have hired an outside consulting firm to analyze the university’s image across the state and develop a marketing strategy.

If successful, KU officials say, the study could lead to better recruitment and better funding for the university. But the details of what will be studied have yet to be determined.

“It’s still conceptual,” said Janet Murguia, executive vice chancellor for university relations. “It’s something new we’re talking on at KU, as far as an approach for how we talk about the university.”

The firm, Simpson Communications, is led by Christopher Simpson, who has led similar marketing efforts at the universities of Oregon and South Carolina and Indiana University.

KU officials declined to say how much Simpson was being paid because the money was coming from private funds at the KU Endowment Association. KU conducted a similar study in 1999 at a cost of $200,000.

“He’s an expert in marketing in higher education,” Murguia said. “He’s got a track record of working at different universities to do this. You want to know what works and doesn’t work in other settings. We don’t want a cookie-cutter approach, but it’s always good to know what other universities have done.”

Murguia said possibilities of information to come from the study include improvements to KU’s Web site, a unified campus letterhead, talking points on higher education funding issues and new recruitment techniques.

Simpson, whose offices are in Williamsburg, Va., said universities didn’t look at “integrated marketing plans” until the mid-1990s, when public funding of higher education began to slip across the nation.

“For an institution like KU, we don’t have the luxury any longer to simply hope what they’re doing is working,” he said. “The resources are so strained, you need to make sure we’re using every dollar as effectively as possible.”

Kansas University has hired a marketing firm to study its image. The Malott Gateway, at 15th and Iowa streets, was built as part of a landscaping plan at the university.

Each university’s marketing needs are different, he said. At Indiana, his top priority was new student recruitment. KU’s priorities probably will be to tell KU’s “success stories” better in an attempt to create a groundswell of support, which could lead to better funding.

“‘Marketing’ to some people is not a positive word for academic institutions,” Simpson said. “The bottom line is when you use an integrated marketing approach, one of the things you stress over and over and over is every dollar we spend on communication, both internally and externally, you have to make sure those expenditures are as effective as possible.”

Murguia said she expected to work with Simpson during the next eight to 10 months, and hoped the result would be a unified approach for KU administrators, faculty and staff to communicate both the university’s needs and what it has to offer.

“The university is very decentralized,” she said. “In terms of the traditional way of looking at things, that’s good. But decentralization can be an obstacle. Your message is diffused and you have a lot of different messages out there. We need to do a better job of telling our story.”