Simplifying one of Marketing’s most complex customer journeys: Choosing a university
Recorded at Adobe Summit 2026, this episode of The CMO Show features Yasmin Spencer, Director of Marketing at Western Sydney University, unpacking the research‑led reset reshaping one of marketing’s most complex paths to purchase – choosing a uni.
After extensive domestic and international research, Yasmin and her team uncovered a clear shift in how students choose where to study. More than half of the top 15 decision drivers now centre on outcomes, specifically how likely a university is to help them land a job. The degree is no longer the product. The destination is.
But the defining insight wasn’t just about employability, it was the experience gap. Students are benchmarking universities against the best consumer brands they use every day. As Yasmin puts it, they can order from The Iconic and receive delivery in three hours, yet wait months for a university offer. From application to enrolment, the journey has become more complex than getting a home loan and that disconnect is no longer acceptable.
This episode reframes higher education as a customer experience problem, not communications one. Yasmin breaks down what it takes to meet modern expectations for speed, simplicity and service, and what real customer‑centricity looks like when it’s tied to outcomes, not activity.
You’ll hear how Western Sydney University is responding in practice, from launching ODIE, an AI‑powered Open Day concierge designed to remove real friction, to simultaneously leading a major marketing team restructure. By simplifying the operating model, rebuilding capability and focusing the team on experience, execution and impact, they’ve created the conditions to fix a journey that has historically been too complex to convert.
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This episode of The CMO Show was brought to you by host Mark Jones, producers Niall Hughes, Kirsten Bables, Syd Le, and audio engineer Ed Cheng. This is an edited excerpt of the podcast transcript.
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Mark Jones
We love to talk about being customer-centric in marketing. We love to think about our customers being the most important thing we do in marketing, but inevitably our days are full of conversations with stakeholders about technology, new projects, about the teams that we run and lots of administrative layers. What if you were able to get some clean air and a spot to really think about what ultimately matters to your customers?
What would that do to change just about everything you do in your role? Hello there. Mark Jones. Thanks for joining us. I'm the host of The CMO Show brought to you by Impact Institute in partnership with our friends at Adobe. Today, we're going to talk about university marketing. It's an interesting time to be in the tertiary sector from an organisational point of view, but in particular for marketers, understanding students is really critical.
How do you convince students, whether they're domestic or international to come to your university, but also what does it take to create a next level experience for them? Because of course, they're seeing all sorts of incredible customer experiences in their everyday life. And quite often, a university can be a lot more difficult to navigate than even getting things like a home loan. So with that in mind, I had a great chat with Yasmin Spencer, who is the director of marketing at Western Sydney University.
I had a real interesting conversation about the transformation process that she and her team have been through from a technology point of view, market technology, as well as looking at an entirely new brand campaign that the university is just about to roll out. So we get to hear a little bit about what's been going on behind the scenes. So there's a lot to understand and work with here from a marketing point of view. Let's hear what she has to say.
Yasmin, thanks for joining me.
Yasmin Spencer
Thanks for having me.
Mark Jones
Yeah, tell me about your role.
Yasmin Spencer
So I am the director of marketing at Western Sydney University. So I oversee domestic and international marketing. And I'm part of a broader portfolio under a CMO that looks at future student engagement, so high schools and things like that, international recruitment, data and analytics, and market research.
Mark Jones
So I'm going to do my best to be as objective as possible, given that I'm alumni. So good on you guys.
Yasmin Spencer
Thank you.
Mark Jones
It's great to see you here doing all this work, getting on the front edge of AI and all those sorts of things.
Yasmin Spencer
Yep.
Mark Jones
Before we go into some of the work that you're doing, tell me a little bit about coming back from maternity leave, because that was an interesting shift for you career-wise. You had a lot to do when you got back. So tell me that story.
Yasmin Spencer
I did. So I returned from maternity leave February or March last year. So my second child, I actually got this role a couple of months before I went off on maternity leave, had grand plans, had to pause them for a year and then return to them. And I came back to a really interesting dynamic within the team. We'd done some technology implementation. There was varying degrees of kind of change across the team. So it was a really interesting time. And the technology implementation, one of the things I always ask off the back of a technology implementation is, is this making your life easier or harder to my team? And I got an overwhelming response of harder.
Mark Jones
Harder. Yeah.
Yasmin Spencer
So we had to interrogate that because yeah, that's obviously not the outcome you want when you implement a piece of marketing technology.
Mark Jones
What was so hard?
Yasmin Spencer
And after kind of a review of its implementation, we realised we could have done it much better. So then we did do it much better. And we brought on an additional digital partner and they really helped us kind of connect data into the system, configure the system with our use cases in mind. I think my observation was with the original implementation, the whole use case layer wasn't applied to it. So we kind of had this highly configured product that really wasn't working for us in the most basic ways. So that's the kind of approach we took to optimise it.
Mark Jones
So the bigger picture view here is that for the marketing team, understanding the student journey, I presume from recognising they might want to undertake some tertiary study through to completing some form of study-
Yasmin Spencer
That's right.
Mark Jones
Right? You've got that holistic view.
Yasmin Spencer
Yeah.
Mark Jones
I imagine really getting your head around that from a strategic point of view is critical.
Yasmin Spencer
Absolutely.
Mark Jones
So what's the lesson that you would bring to that from a marketer who isn't in education, but is thinking a lot about customer journeys?
Yasmin Spencer
Yeah. I think one of the biggest things ... and I should add another complexity that we have, I think a lot of people assume that higher education, our target market are 18 year olds are HSE students, 50% of our cohort are non-current school leaders, so they are returning to study, they're studying for the first time in an advanced stage. So that's a really interesting dynamic. They tend to have much longer decision-making journeys. So from a lead nurture perspective, it's not, they're doing the HSE in October, we've got to make sure that they're applying to Western preferencing us and then they start the next year. It's much longer winded, and I think that's fundamentally what we need marketing technology to underpin.
Mark Jones
Yes.
Yasmin Spencer
And I think one of the key learnings around that is really to understand where the technology and in fact personalization is going to add value into that journey. And we've done really ... I think the idea of personalization has really shifted from putting your first name and your student number into an offer to what can we value add and information you might need to start your journey at university or to interrogate your journey in a university.
And I think when we took a step back, that was the biggest learning is actually finding those use cases for personalization where there's meaningful gain behind it rather than just tokenistic personalization. I think that's one of the biggest learnings.
Mark Jones
Because if we connect that to the stress that your team was feeling, it's quite obvious that they're trying to get stuff done within that context. So where do you find that it often breaks for marketers or in your own experience, what are the segments of the journey that are most difficult if there are?
Yasmin Spencer
I think one of the key things that I've certainly observed where implementation of marketing technology might break is really when you've got digital teams kind of working in isolation from the marketing team or the content team or the comms team. And so, one of the things that we really intentionally did when I came back from maternity leave was got the team that were using the technology, the comms and the content teams, or in fact, realising the value of the technology rather than just using the technology to kind of dissect whether it was working and whether it did what they needed it to do.
Mark Jones
Yes.
Yasmin Spencer
Often technical teams in all of their brilliance are like, yes, this is a technically perfect implementation, but then when you look at use cases, that's where it falls over, as I said.
Mark Jones
Yes.
Yasmin Spencer
So I think that is a kind of key thing that I always do is involve the entire team. I've got a really great leadership team. I'm incredibly lucky, but whenever we kind of look at these new opportunities, whether it's marketing technology, whether it's content, whether it's personalization, AI, automation, it's kind of considering it across the whole team and understanding where the value to be gained from is. I don't have a large team, especially compared to some other organisations and universities within the same sector as us.
Mark Jones
And just for some quick context, number of students, staff and marketers at Western Sydney?
Yasmin Spencer
Yeah. So we have 50,000 students. We've got about 3,000 staff and I have 37 people in the marketing team. So the remits that I oversee, so we've got the website and user experience team. I have an events team and we look at everything from orientation right through to graduation. So it's kind of full scope student experience, marketing strategy and we've got a business partner function that partners with our faculties.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Yasmin Spencer
I think that's a really unique model from a university perspective is we don't have a decentralised marketing team. We have a centralised marketing team with a strategic business partner function, which is really interesting and working really well for us. Then we've got personalization and automation, which is a new team that I've just put in and we're recruiting for those roles at the moment actually. And that is really to have greater clarity and strategy in the use of personalization and automation.
It's something that the team has picked up really organically, but there just hasn't been a great focus on that. So that's going to really ramp up our ability to generate personalization strategies, but also find those opportunities for automation across the small but Maori team.
Mark Jones
Yes.
Yasmin Spencer
And then, I've got comms and content team. So we've put in a new head of content role there and she'll oversee everything from creative services, paid media, comms, content. And so that's kind of the full remit of the team and we cover international and domestic student recruitment, so a huge amount.
Mark Jones
Before we talk about your campaigns in a second, I want to just quickly understand the change management because transformations are always tricky.
Yasmin Spencer
Yes.
Mark Jones
What have you learned from a sharing practise point of view, the best things to do and the best things not to do?
Yasmin Spencer
Yeah. Last year was a really, really tricky year. So we underwent a change across the university. And in fact, a lot of universities in the sector underwent some significant changes last year just because of the volatility of the sector at the time and a decrease in kind of international students. And so, there was an opportunity, I suppose, to redesign the entire team, find the silver lining to a kind of a mandated process if you like.
Mark Jones
Yes.
Yasmin Spencer
And so, I just established 40% of the team to rebuild up a more future-proof version of a marketing team. And that's where I was able to put in functionality like personalization and automation, paid media, all of those kinds of things. And I think one thing I learned through that process, probably the most difficult two months of my entire career, having to kind of facilitate those conversations and processes, but really having that kind of human centred and empathetic lens to the whole process, I think lent itself really well to the outcomes.
We were incredibly lucky because even the staff that were impacted were able to find roles across the organisation and perhaps we're able to be trained up and upskilled to kind of occupy different roles. So that was a really good outcome. I think last year the team, we're in a world of pain and this year we've come back to this energised, revitalised team who are completely seeing the model at play and how it can be leveraged. I went with a couple of really key guiding principles like a flatter and more autonomous structure.
So we removed some of the bottlenecks, we removed some of the more junior layers so that we could really focus on automation and seniority and autonomy in a lot of the kind of roles around comms and things like that. And yeah, for all intents and purposes, it's worked really well for us. And this year, we've got the team full again. We've been able to recruit. We're on the other side of it and we're reaping the benefits across the board in terms of what we've been able to do.
Mark Jones
That sounds great. Now, to the campaign, Western Sydney Uni has had for something like 15 years, the unlimited campaign, which has done extraordinarily well.
Yasmin Spencer
Yes.
Mark Jones
And it's been now replaced or in the process of being replaced by....
Yasmin Spencer
New brand platform.
Mark Jones
So tell me what's going on.
Yasmin Spencer
Yeah. So we're on the precipice of this being finalised, but we've done probably a six-month programme of works to build a new brand platform for the university, which is incredibly exciting and I feel really privileged to be able to participate in the process.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Yasmin Spencer
So we are launching a new platform, it's centred in being student centric, it's centred in being bold.
Mark Jones
Yes.
Yasmin Spencer
We did a whole body of research at the end of last year. So we worked with a research partner and we did an international and domestic research to understand the sector as a whole. And it's been really fascinating how much that's shifted. I wasn't around for unlimited. It was about 10 years ago, but we've got all the research there that kind of underpin that work and how much, even just decision drivers across the sector has shifted.
So of the top 15 decision drivers across the sector, probably seven or eight are centred in career outcomes. And it's this really interesting new proposition, I think for higher education where you're really selling the destination or you're selling the journey to a destination now, more than just a degree itself. Students want to know if they're going to get a job off the back of a degree, and that's come through loud and clear in the research and we're kind of responding to that.
But the other really interesting insight to emerge from it has been the kind of whole sector has these really lofty promises around what higher education can kind of do for individuals and students just aren't feeling like that's their real life when they get to a university, which is really interesting. We've done a lot of work as an organisation to kind of look at student experience and customer experience and almost introducing that as a notion into the university.
My favourite anecdote is to kind of compare the consumer grade experiences students are having with some of the experience that they have in university. They can log onto The Iconic and get something delivered in three hours, but can apply to university and have to wait months and months for an offer. And so, we've really been dissecting that and looking at how can we respond to these experiences that students are now benchmarking us against. And we're very much kind of focused on that as an institution and our brand platform will be focused on that as well.
Mark Jones
One of the things that I know Marcus are really interested in when it comes to understanding your sector, you mentioned that some of the challenges that are well known around declining international enrolments, but there's also an AI narrative which says you don't need that anymore. You don't actually need a university degree. That's an entirely different landscape for telling stories as marketers.
Yasmin Spencer
Yeah.
Mark Jones
So I'm interested to know to what extent that thinking is coming to your campaign.
Yasmin Spencer
Yeah, absolutely it is. And we are incredibly lucky to have a chancellor and a vice chancellor that are of the view of we need to embrace AI. I think we're noticing this dichotomy in the sector now where some universities are trying to ban it and other universities like us are trying to lean into it and how can we actually empower our students to leverage AI in the way that they live, in the way that they study, in the way that they will eventually work.
I don't think there's a marketer in my team that wouldn't not open up ChatGPT every day. And so, we really want to condition our students to be equipped to embrace AI and to use it and to kind of leverage its capability and the value in AI. We absolutely aren't going to turn away from it as an institution and that's absolutely going to be part of our brand platform, is to be embracing the future, to be embracing the change that's front and centre.
Mark Jones
Yeah. And as I think about it, there's a notion that unis are AI free zones, which is why people think, "Well, what would I do there? I'll just go and use AI and get on with my career." So how important has it been for you and the team to really interrogate those narratives? Because I can see, particularly in the years to come, this concept of narrative intelligence really being key to marketing strategy, right? How well do we understand the narratives and how have we baked them into our campaigns? How have we baked them into our automation, the assumptions that carry right through all of the work that we're doing?
Yasmin Spencer
Yep. And how are our audiences using AI? I've been to multiple sessions over the last couple of days around how you need to be discoverable from a search perspective when our audiences are now using AI. I had a conversation yesterday and someone was genuinely mind boggled that students would jump onto ChatGPT and say, "What university should I go to?" But they absolutely are doing that.
Mark Jones
Of course they are.
Yasmin Spencer
So I think it's our responsibility to kind of understand that and respond to that. It's incredibly difficult in such a large organisation to kind of be driving that agenda and to get people thinking about how we are a content factory as a university. As you can imagine, our researchers are constantly producing content, our academics are constantly producing content, our students are constantly producing content. And so to add that AI lens and brand discoverability, which I've heard mentioned a whole bunch of times over the last 24, 48 hours.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Yasmin Spencer
That's absolutely front and centre around ... We're lucky we've got the Adobe stack and we're kind of primed to be able to respond to it technically, but I think strategically and philosophically, we still probably need to do some more thinking around how we actually embrace some of the new ways that students are starting to look at brands. Even being discoverable on social media is a kind of a new thing, right? I know I use TikTok. I've used TikTok to discover every place I want to eat in Las Vegas.
But students are literally doing it from a university perspective and we've got this kind of trend of micro influencers, starting to talk about universities and that potentially being the first piece of content a prospective student is served up about a university is a really interesting concept for us to kick around.
Mark Jones
So I'm presuming you can't tell me all about the whole campaign, but I know that the vice chancellor has really been driving and you sort of mentioned that. So what are the ways that you're going to be bold without big budget TVs? Is there a bit of a creative hook that you can share with us or even the technical side?
Yasmin Spencer
Yeah, I think it's really interesting. We've dissected the unlimited launch over the last couple of days.
Mark Jones
Okay.
Yasmin Spencer
And it was kind of ... or the last couple of months, I should say. It was 10 or 11 years ago and it was purely centred in TVC film. There was three incredible ads that were generated as part of that campaign.
Mark Jones
Yes.
Yasmin Spencer
That's just not how you launch a brand in 2026. So we are very much thinking about what the social strategy is, how we can still create the hype that those three incredible TVCs did create 10 years ago, but in really new and innovative ways, we're looking at ... We're actually going to run a workshop with our students in the coming weeks to hear from them and literally ask them like, "How do you want to see us rock up with this new brand platform?" And no doubt that it would be incredibly insightful.
We're looking at how we leverage our campus network. We are incredibly lucky to have 11 or 12 campuses across Greater Western Sydney. So an out of home ad is very expensive and it stays there for a week, but the campuses, they're permanent. So we've got all of this really great traction and opportunity to kind of leverage our campus network.
Mark Jones
You've got your own out of home. Your own assets.
Yasmin Spencer
Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm really pushing our office of estate and commercial to help me with that because yeah, we've got all of these assets across the board. We've got buildings now in the centre of areas like Bankstown in Sydney and Liverpool that have these amazing fronts of build ... at the front of the building, which is in itself is an advertising opportunity. So we're very much looking at all of that stuff.
We're also looking at how we can utilise all of our frontline staff. We're very much ... One of the biggest, I think, things we're doing differently with this brand platform is we're creating a modus operandi for the organisation. We're not creating a creative execution. And so we have dissected that, we've taken the executive team through that, we've taken our board of trustees through that. And there's been an incredible response to really thinking about how this brand platform could change the way that we operate as a business. And that's, again, a marketer's dream.
Mark Jones
It's so tough doing this interview before you've done the campaign.
Yasmin Spencer
I know. I know.
Mark Jones
Maybe I have to come back and we'll talk about it afterwards.
Yasmin Spencer
Yeah.
Mark Jones
But I presume you're going to be using the students as influencers.
Yasmin Spencer
Absolutely. Both on campus, on social, on the phone, our student services at our call centre is staffed by current students. And so, we very much want them talking about us in a different way when they're the ones that make the call and you've got an offer from Western Sydney University. So yeah, we're absolutely going to be using our students. Hence why it's so important to hear from them, right?
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Yasmin Spencer
We had them, they've been considered through all of our research, but we're going to have a face-to-face workshop and start to really plot out how we can bring this to life in a consumer-facing campaign.
Mark Jones
Yeah, very good. Let's switch tracks. The open day AI chat book called ODI is a really interesting story and you thought about how to create these digital experiences for people investigating uni. So from a journey perspective, these are people that are at an open day, they've at least decided to turn up physically. Tell me about how that works.
Yasmin Spencer
Yeah. So open day from a marketing perspective, certainly for us, is the single most effective marketing tool we have. So from a campaign perspective, it generates the most leads, it's the most cost-effective. We also know when students come to our events, they're much stickier and they go on to convert at much higher rates. So Open Day can look really anecdotal from a glance, but it is so incredibly important from a marketing perspective.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Yasmin Spencer
And so, one of the things we did last year, obviously my remit is really broad. I've got digital marketing, but then I've also got physical events and all of that kind of stuff. And one thing that I didn't want to do was kind of anecdotally add an AI chatbot into the event experience, which didn't really add to the physical event experience. So we were really adamant in the scope of that, that it needed to be a value add, not a detractor or another weird thing that you had to download on your phone that you never really had to engage with.
Mark Jones
Yes.
Yasmin Spencer
And so we built OD, which was open day information expert.
Mark Jones
Nice.
Yasmin Spencer
Yep. And what we wanted it to do was answer those administrative questions that it could source data for really easily. We wanted to be able to up weight and upscale the physical experiences students are having with our academics so that they could have really deep and meaningful conversations around what they want to study and why and why they should choose Western. But we didn't want them to have to ask seven people how to find a building or what time a session was on. And so, we built OD really to focus on that to be a complimentary event concierge.
And we partnered with the digital agency to do that. We had a very refined scope because it was a pilot, and so we kept it to administrative kind of information, but this year we have grand plans to kind of really bolster that out to be a much broader tool. We've brought that in house and the team have built that in house, which is an incredible feat. We did that because we wanted it to be scalable. We want to be able to use it at orientation and potentially graduations and all the other events that we did.
But as I said, we were really adamant and the scope will still remain to be a complimentary digital experience to the physical event experience because the value is in the physical experience. As I said, we're a student-centred university and we didn't want to start taking things digitally just because we could or we should.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Yasmin Spencer
We very much kind of planted that as that complimentary digital experience. We had 16,000 questions asked of it. We got loads of really great feedback. We had anecdotal feedback from academics saying that they felt like the conversation they had were really meaningful because we could connect students with an academic much easier. So it was a real value add.
Mark Jones
So what's next?
Yasmin Spencer
So our focus is obviously the new brand platform, and the second-biggest strategic focus for the team is to create a frictionless digital experience. So as I said, we've done a lot of work to start to benchmark those consumer grade experiences that we know our students are having. So often people, we hear both directly and inadvertently, it's probably more complex to apply and enrol at a university than it is to get a home loan at the moment.
And I think that's probably true across the sector. And we want to break that mould. We want to do things differently. We want to make it as frictionless and simple and easy and automated as it possibly can be. So that's going to be a huge focus for the marketing team, but also the whole institution. I think marketers are often the biggest advocates for customer experience or in our case student experience. And that's certainly the case with the digital project that we're going to kick off.
And it's really about how can we take the application experience, the enrolment experience, everything in between right from first touchpoint through to enrolment and make that as frictionless and quick and simple as possible. So that's the other really big priority that we're focusing on.
Mark Jones
Yeah. So it sounds like that student experience, the customer experience is kind of the catch cry for the whole team, yeah?
Yasmin Spencer
Yep.
Mark Jones
Yeah, great. Well, what a fantastic conversation. Thank you for sharing your story.
Yasmin Spencer
Thank you.
Mark Jones
And all the best for the campaign. Let us know how it goes.
Yasmin Spencer
Thank you. We'll make sure we touch base afterwards. I'm looking forward to your thoughts.
Mark Jones
One of the things I really liked about Jasmine's comment around the student-centric approach they're taking to not just marketing, but the whole university is how critical it is at a time of change for the whole sector. We all know that in the AI world, many people are asking, not just the students, but parents as well. They're asking, "Do I even need to go to university? What's the point of it if I can just learn everything from AI?"
The narrative is that the universities are not thinking about AI, but in fact, the opposite is true. And when you start to think about AI as an enabler, as well as an insight into the mindset of students, starts to change your entire approach to marketing in this sector, not just the chatbots that they use that open days, but across your entire technology stack.
So some really great ideas here around how you can fully embrace AI in all parts of your organisation. So that's it for this episode of the CMO Show. Thanks for joining me. My name's Mark Jones. See you next time.