We saw last time that academic marketing tends to poorly understand its true audience. This time, we'll discuss how academic marketing fails to understand motivation to action. Motivation to action is at the heart of all marketing. Marketing is only the process of communicating clearly to an audience to get them to take some action. Academic marketing fails to understand what it wants its audience to do or to motivate them to do it. Donor relations, especially with alumni, is the exception. There, clear calls to action abound and are even too insistent. Outside this area, academic often don't seem to understand what they want their audience to do. Consider a department newsletter. Often an academic department sends a perhaps yearly communication. It's apparently designed to keep everyone informed about the department. But, no one asks "Why?". To communicate effectively, there needs to be some reason; there needs to be something that will be different in the world because of the newsletter. Information might certainly be good to have, but we need to understand what will be done with the information. What need will it fill? This is obviously closely related to an understanding of the audience. Audience construction starts with the department's interests in identifying people affected by its interest. Audience analysis is understanding those persons to make sure that the communication relates to their real needs and desires. When motivation to action is not well understood, communication tends to be useless. Next time, we will talk about the need for directness.