‘You're not just learning it, you're living it!’ Constructing the ‘good life’ in Australian university online promotional videos

Abstract

Online promotional videos on Australian university websites are a form of institutional branding and marketing that construct university experience in a variety of ways. In this paper, we consider how these multimedia texts represent student lifestyles, identities and aspirations in terms of the 'good life'. We consider how the 'promise of happiness' is deployed as an appeal to perceived consumer desires within the local student market, as well as within the highly competitive global knowledge economy. These texts position university students as youthful, attractive, active and fun, and depict student life as being about leisure and pleasure. Such representations promote cultural and social entitlement to the 'good life' as if synonymous with choice, participation and success in higher education. Learning and scholarship are depicted as secondary activities. We also contend that claims to cosmopolitanism and consumerism are framed by racialised entitlements through which an appeal to Whiteness as both commodity and context is maintained.

The social anatomy of ‘collusion’

“…For example, some of the guidelines reviewed seem to provoke an attitude of suspicion towards the intentions of one's peer community. Guidelines that urge independence of study need to reconcile this message with the promotional rhetoric of university life, which stresses the classroom as community (Gottschall & Saltmarsh, ).…”

The academic precariat post-COVID-19

“…In late-capitalism, university qualifications are aggressively repositioned towards market objectives, from political rhetoric through to university advertising campaigns (Brett 2021;Connell 2013;Gottschall and Saltmarsh 2017). Including an obsessive and accelerating focus on the use of emergent technologies including virtual reality, blockchain and big data, made to fit with teaching and learning in undergraduate, science, technology, engineering, math, humanities, arts, social sciences, education, law, government, medicine and nursing qualifications -regardless of authentic benefit or even relevance (for example : Eijnatten, Pieters, and Verheul 2013;Kaplan 2015;Kitchin 2014;Rooksby and Dimitrov 2019;Skiba 2017).…”

“…There is a deep need to identify students' views on areas for innovation, improvement and change. In this vein, universities have, distressingly, progressed towards increasingly consumer-focused market research tactics in a marketing and market research head spin (Batabyal 2006;Gottschall and Saltmarsh 2017). In order to meaningfully direct higher education for the future the students must be included in meaningful ways in the strategic decision-making of the university.…”

Desti̇nasyon Tanitim Fi̇lmleri̇ Ne Anlatir?

“…Tanıtım filmleri ile ilgili yürütülen çalışmalara bakıldığında filmlerin kurumsal marka ve pazarlama süreçleri açısından etkilerini inceleyen çalışmalardan (Gottschall ve Saltmarsh, 2017), tanıtım filmlerini kültürel olarak inceleyen çalışmalara (Zaidman ve Holmes, 2009), ürün tanıtım filmlerini ikna ve satış odaklı inceleyen çalışmalardan (Flavian, Gurrea ve Orus, 2017), tanıtım filmlerinin üretim süreçlerine kadar (Choi, Lim ve Jeong, 2016;Choi, Lim ve Kim, 2016;Fukushima, 2002) pek çok farklı araştırma alanı çerçevesinde kurum ve ürün için yürütülen çalışmalara rastlanmaktadır. Bu çalışmaların önemli bir kısmında tanıtım filmleri araştırma sürecinde incelemeye tabi tutulan materyaller olarak kendine yer bulmaktadır.…”