James – thanks for commenting, great to have your point of view (and cheers for your kind comments about my presentation :-)).

I’m absolutely with you – as I hope was clear from my post – about the value of companies such as Precedent. I’m unconvinced, though, that most large institutions see, or are wholesale bought into this value. The interfaces that you have with these institutions could well be with those people that have, but I’m really not sure they are representative of the wider community.

I’m only too aware (having done it for seven long years..) that actually the issue is not “just” about brand awareness but about lack of strategy; it’s about organic rather than managed growth. Having a holistic view of “what the website is for” from an institution perspective is probably the biggest challenge that these institutions face. Working with museums, it was hard enough: how do you build a strategy with no money, few resources and no idea where the “value” is held? In HEI’s it is even harder: I don’t know of a HE website manager who could give me a one sentence elevator pitch about what their website does, where it is going or who it is for. These are still – often – wild, unmanaged landscapes that attempt to cater to everybody from student to academic to postdoc to funding body. They usually fail. This is through the fault of history rather than anyone in particular, but I think the current “trust landscape” means that it is more important now than ever before to focus on these strategies.

Under the hood, I still don’t think many web teams see the value of brand. I know most techies don’t. I fully understand (and sorry, it was unfair of me not to mention it!) that you were having to pull together an ad-hoc presentation at the last minute – but overall, I think it would have worked better if the conversation had started with the question “why brand is important” rather than anything more complex.