Name change meant to get MU recognized
Published Aug. 28, 2007
MU administrators said they hope changing the name of the university will enhance its marketability and ability to be recognized, but an MU marketing professor said the name change might not have an immediate effect.
While administrators at MU said they hope that a potential name change will result in an increase in name recognition for the university, they can look at a number of other schools across the state to see the results that can come from a collegiate name change.
The change is seen as a way to solidify the school's position as the flagship campus in the state.
MU marketing professor Ratti Ratneshwar said the effectiveness of a name change would depend on how MU communicates the change to the public.
"If the name change is introduced properly or if the company has the right type of advertising, or in some cases the communication efforts, people understand that the new name is still the old," Ratneshwar said.
Ratneshwar said that if MU were to drop Columbia from its name, the transition would not be drastic enough to harm the school's image, but only build upon it.
"In general, the thinking is that gradual transitions in name changes are much better than discontinuous changes," Ratneshwar said.
If MU does move forward with its plan to change its name, it will be following in the footsteps of UM-Rolla, who will change its name to Missouri University of Science and Technology in January, and Missouri State University, which changed its name from Southwest Missouri State University in 2005.
According to Paul Kincaid, MSU Assistant to the President for University Relations, MSU's name change was the result of the university trying to inform out of state students what the school had to offer.
"Any time you got out of the state, the further away, the worse it got, because people had a connotation of what the institution was based on because of the name," Kincaid said. "People thought the enrollment would be four, five or six thousand instead of 20,000, and they thought the range of programs would be much more limited than it actually was."
To establish their new name across their campus, MSU spent about $100,000 on things such as signage and letterhead, according to Kincaid. He said that overall, the school's new name now effectively exemplifies what the school has developed into.
"The time the university's name was changed to Missouri State University, the (old name) just did not describe what the university had become," Kincaid said.
Ratneshwar said when it comes to marketing itself, MU's name will not matter as much as the quality of education it offers.
"A lot of that [reputation] is driven by the quality of the academic programs and the research that goes on at MU, the next thing you need to do is just get word out about it," Ratneshwar said.
Ratneshwar also said numerous schools that have kept their location in their names and are nationally recognized because of their educational quality.
"I think what has happened is a lot of public universities, including some public universities which have some higher reputation on the university level, seem to be doing fine with their location attached to their name," he said.
Ratneshwar said examples include the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Texas at Austin and University of California-Los Angeles.
"It is UCLA," Ratneshwar said. "It has always been known as UCLA, and it's obviously known as one of the country's top universities."
