ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence · Swami, ContraMinds Labs

Why Universities Need To Be Marketable Brands - Burzeen Bhathena, Marketing Director, NMIMS (#017)

·1 hr 12 min·5 clips

Burzeen says some corporates claim up to 85% of engineering graduates are not employable.

The discussion starts from a simple point: a university has to be marketable if it wants attention in a crowded field. That idea is framed through admissions rather than slogans. The university says it used AI-assisted personal interviews for its MBA program. The process was not a thin automation layer. The candidate's SOP and CV were uploaded before the interview. The AI then shaped its questions from those documents. That meant the conversation could move beyond generic prompts. It also reduced the mismatch that can happen when an interviewer comes from a very different academic background. The goal was to test knowledge depth, not candidate ignorance. More than 14,000 people took the AI-based interviews on the Mumbai campus. The response from students was strong. From there, the discussion moves into what happens after a student joins the campus. Marketing cannot stop once the consumer is inside. Students are treated as ongoing audiences and, in time, as brand ambassadors. The institution keeps in touch through emailers and WhatsApp messages. It also invites students to events and keeps them updated on what the university is doing. When the conversation turns to admissions campaigns, parents and students need different narratives. Parent targeting is difficult because interest signals are not always clean. So the campaigns are separated rather than flattened into one message. The final stretch asks how a university would spend a hundred rupees across media. That question pulls the talk toward practical allocation and marketing judgment. The episode keeps returning to the same idea: higher education now runs with the discipline of a serious brand, not just an academic brochure.

As heard by us

A plainspoken look at how universities handle admissions, retention, and ongoing communication.

The conversation treats university admissions as part marketing, part sorting process, and that framing gives it shape. It follows the AI-assisted MBA interviews closely enough to show how the method works: the SOP and CV go in first, then the panel asks questions built around…

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Why you'd press play

You want a look at how a university uses AI-assisted MBA interviews and keeps marketing after students enroll.

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