Man with a brand new business plan

The dean of Warwick Business School talks to Caroline Haydon about his goal to raise the school's global profile

What's in a name? A lot, if you are Warwick Business School (WBS) and have to sell yourself to international students who may have heard of your rivals in London, Oxford and Cambridge, but who don't know where Warwick is, let alone how to pronounce it.

It's a problem only too familiar to the school's dean, Howard Thomas. Warwick may have a well-established reputation in the higher echelons of UK management education, but it is keen to increase its share of the brightest US students. "We know the elements we want to sell to people but to get Warwick rolling off the tips of people's tongues in the same way as Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard is a trick we're going to have to pull," he says.

Howard Thomas, a dual US-British citizen, was an academic in America for 20 years and was dean of one of the top-ranking US business schools at Illinois for 10 of them, so his appointment alone gave WBS a head start in the all-important US market. But the task of making the school better known outside European university circles depends on making Warwick's defining characteristics, which have put it in near the top of European business schools (it was in the top 10 for research in Europe, according to Financial Times rankings, eighth on the list and third in Britain), famous in a wider field.

Warming to his theme in the quiet, plush new dean's meeting room, he makes it clear he doesn't agree with a rival who says provocatively that Warwick doesn't have a brand, just that it's a pretty difficult brand to encapsulate neatly. "If there is a brand here it is a brand of innovation, excellence, cutting-edge research and relevance to the corporate body," he says.

Indeed it IS difficult to sell in sound bite terms a top-rank, very sound reputation based partly on the Warwick entrepreneurial tradition, partly on the diversity and flexibility of its courses and last but absolutely not least, on its alliance with the university.

Warwick is well known for its one-year MBA full-time course, but it delivers substantially the same curriculum via modular, evening and distance learning as well. In fact there have been several occasions where students have gained their MBA by studying in all four modes. It's big, too. Starting in 1967 with two degree programmes and 24 students, it now has 17 degrees and more than 4,000 students, plus a further 2,000 on short courses.

In Thomas's view it is essential that all those strands meet up in a business school which is part of a university. It's a two-way flow, he says, with the university also benefiting from the business school's research culture. In the latest UK government assessment of its teaching and research it achieved a 5-star rating.

Back in the Sixties, what the university sought to be, he says, was not only non-traditional, but clever at spotting opportunities, relatively unfettered compared with possibly more bureaucratic models elsewhere. It's a tradition he sees the business school as inheriting, building on top of it strong links with local industry.

He also sees it as strong on delivery of what he calls one of the defining characteristics of British, as opposed to American, business education – its heightened sense of corporate and social responsibility evidenced, among other things, in a greater concern with environmental issues.

So while we in the UK tend to do the tutor system, various cultural aspects, and more socially responsible elements better, he says US business schools have more critical mass, and specifically more faculty. "We have the largest business school faculty in the UK – over 100 – but look at top US business schools and you can see a faculty size of at least double that. And yet we have more direct involvement with the students than is the case in many American universities."

But conveying any of this to a wider audience needs clever branding. Both the university and the business school recognise this and are starting work on a new branding exercise. Thomas meanwhile is clear both about where he sees Warwick in relation to some of its obvious rivals and what he will do to achieve his stated goal – of being the leading European business school.

London Business School for now he sees as "number one, no argument. But that relies on a different business model than we do, in the sense that we are university-based and we offer a strong portfolio of programmes, unlike LBS which is purely postgraduate". Of his rivals in Oxford and Cambridge, he only observes that while they undoubtedly have a brand, they are also part, he says, of fairly hide-bound, traditional, bureaucratic universities which are slow to respond. "We have a much more flexible, entrepreneurial spirit here and we have certain characteristics they don't have". Plus, as Thomas likes to point out, brands can be lost as well as gained, as one or two rather spectacular falls from grace in the business world have demonstrated recently.

The key to Warwick's success lies, Thomas believes, in two things. One, its buildings. The school is currently in the middle of major expansion in its green field, spacious site – phase three of which he is itching to begin as soon as he can raise the money, and which will somewhat symbolically link the business school via a bridge to university teaching facilities. "Buildings are tremendously important in creating an impression, an entente cordiale and a spirit within a school," he says.

Second, he will improve budgets, which he says are already satisfactorily devolved from the university, by building up the number of endowed chairs. "At Illinois we had 20 endowed chairs and when I left we had 50. I want to get between 10 and 20 endowed chairs here – now we have one." That will up the school's budget and status, and help further down-the-line fundraising.

It's a long-term plan. And if he can find in the shorter term an adequate sound bite size, successful brand idea for it all, he would be a happy man indeed.