Adding an E to an MBA: what an ‘executive’ rebrand costs in real terms

Every evolutionary change made to a degree course comes at a cost: does your target audience know the difference between your degree and one with the same name offered next door? 

Our MBA enrolment had grown 500 per cent since a 2020 overhaul added an academic and industry leader to every class, and provided a personal leadership coach for each learner. We had also watched competitors in the region shift their MBAs online. Our own data told us that it was, in fact, in-person engagement doing the heavy lifting for leadership development, so we stayed hybrid and held the line on active participation for anyone joining remotely.

The degree cohort itself had changed shape, too. Average student age had crept up, from late 20s to 30s and early 40s, with about 11 years of leadership experience apiece. These were people already running teams, schools, NGOs and communities. They were executives. The degree hadn’t kept up.

• Sea of sameness: why universities have trouble with branding
• What on-the-job training looks like in the classroom for MBA students
• Tips for teaching MBA students

So, the real question wasn’t whether to rebrand from MBA to EMBA; it was whether we could add “executive” to the title without losing the very people the old name had attracted.

The stakeholder split nobody plans for

Before touching a single campaign asset, we sat down with students, alumni, faculty and our external advisory board. The results should worry anyone assuming a rebrand is a comms exercise: about 10 per cent of learners said “executive” didn’t sit right with them; it wasn’t how they saw themselves, and some were leading community organisations or schools rather than corporates. About 60 per cent were ambivalent. Only 30 per cent were actively enthusiastic, some of whom started calling themselves EMBA students on LinkedIn before we made anything official.

The 10 per cent with reservations matter more than the number suggests. Losing those learners wouldn’t just cost enrolments, it would narrow exactly the diversity of leadership experience that made the programme distinctive in the first place. If your rebrand strategy doesn’t account for the people who feel alienated by the new label, you’re optimising for the loudest 30 per cent and quietly bleeding the rest.

The fix here isn’t clever copywriting; it’s semantic reframing before launch. Working with an outside agency, we built the campaign around the idea that the E doesn’t only stand for “executive”. It’s also “empowered”, “energised”, “equitable” or “engaged”. In other words, executive was one reading among several. That gave the ambivalent 60 per cent something to opt into and the resistant 10 per cent room to stay without feeling rebranded out of their own identity.

Sequence your campaign, don’t front-load conversion

Another mistake is worth naming: don’t treat a rebrand launch like a recruitment campaign. We used the AIDA model (attention, interest, desire, action), but stopped short of the full funnel. Billboards on commuter routes, advertorials in the national airline’s inflight magazine and PR in the business pages were all aimed purely at attention and interest. Desire and action were left for later, once the market had absorbed that the name had changed and why.

Trying to convert on day one of a rebrand conflates two jobs: announcing an identity shift and selling a product. Do both at once and you’ll undercook the first while looking desperate on the second. Give the market time to notice before you ask it to act.

What I’d tell anyone about to rename a higher education programme

A rebrand lives or dies on three questions, answered in this order. 

• Why are you doing it? In our case, the market had already started treating our graduates as executives; we were just behind on the paperwork. 
• What do your stakeholders think (before you touch a public campaign)? 
• Can your message hold multiple meanings so nobody feels written out of the new name?

Skip the stakeholder audit and you’ll find out about your resistant 10 per cent after launch, when it’s a lot more expensive to fix. Skip the sequencing and your campaign will chase conversion it hasn’t earned yet. And skip the reframing, and you’ve just told a third of your community they’re not who the new name is for.

None of this is unique to an MBA rebrand. Any higher education programme changing its name, its target audience or its positioning is doing three things at once: shifting an external market signal, renegotiating an internal identity, and asking a community that already trusts you to trust you through a change. Treat it as only the first of those and you’ll get a tidy campaign that quietly alienates the people who made the programme worth rebranding in the first place.

Get all three right and, as we found working in kotahitanga (collaboration) across faculty, students and industry partners, a single letter can signal a genuine shift in what your programme is, without costing you the people who built it. We’re still watching whether desire and action follow the attention and interest we bought ourselves, but the right people are still in the room, and that was the part we couldn’t afford to get wrong.

Ekant Veer is professor of marketing and MBA director, and Teresa van Dugteren is marketing partner, both at the University of Canterbury Business School, New Zealand.

If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus newsletter.