When Brands Break Their Promises

Back in the mid-1970’s I was young and poor.   I had to think long and hard about buying anything – even a used clunker of a car.  So when I did, I went with a 6-year-old Corolla, a dull, boxy little get-around.   But I chose it because Toyota was the brand that promised and truly delivered “reliability.”  You could drive those hummers for two hundred of thousand miles (and a number of my friends did) just by feeding it gasoline and a little oil now and then.

So what happened that reduced the “reliability brand” to needing to recall 2.3 million vehicles because of a dangerous quality issue with sticking gas pedals?  Reports suggest that Toyota even now may not have completely identified the technical answer to that question, which is telling and damaging all by itself.   But the bottom-line answer is that the company lost its way.

At a leadership level, the company decided that “job number one” was not reliability, after all, but increasing global sales and market share.  Toyota proclaimed a few years ago that their goal was nothing less that becoming the top auto manufacturer in the world.  They broke a sacred trust by making reliability secondary to growth of market share.

Kelsey Swanekamp of Forbes reports that the recall may cost Toyota as much as $1.1 billion, but the long-term consequence of the massive recall resulting from the loss of consumer confidence may haunt the automaker for many, many years.

In writing about the Toyota debacle, automotive marketing blogger Cameron McNaughton says, “The automotive industry is guilty of thinking that its brand promises are adjustable.” But of course, no brand can shift its brand promise without serious consequences.   It reminds me of the great Groucho Marx chestnut:  “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

This same mindset sometimes invades the higher education arena, where institutions might begin to think that their brand promise can shift and change depending upon the consumer environment, or the competition, or other market forces.  For example, a number of institutions are finding that “affordability” can be a resonant sales message during these tight economic times.  Some of these institutions are making “affordability” part of their brand platform.

But by making “low cost” or “affordability” part of their brand messaging, colleges and universities come dangerously close to turning higher education into a mere commodity, where price is the primary or sole differentiator.

While short-term enrollment management issues always tempt organizations to shift emphasis, brand marketers must step up and sound an alarm about the long-term consequences of losing focus on what is most important.  Your brand promise needs to come first, always, regardless of marketplace shifts or changes in leadership, or the demands of the economic environment.

The brand promise should shape and drive everyone’s behavior, from the departmental secretares, to the classroom professors, to the President.  Every faculty and staff member is responsible for delivering the promise.  The marketing unit is merely charged with making the brand promise clear to the public and demonstrating that it has been kept through brand “proof points.”

Staying focused on what is most important is very easy to say and very difficult to do.  But it is the critical factor in building brand credibility and trust.  Ask Toyota.

Back in the mid-1970’s I was young and poor.   I had to think long and hard about buying anything – even a used clunker of a car.  So when I did, I went with a 6-year-old Corolla, a dull, boxy little get-around.   But I chose it because Toyota was the brand that promised and truly delivered “reliability.”  You could drive those hummers for two hundred of thousand miles (and a number of my friends did) just by feeding it gasoline and a little oil now and then.

So what happened that reduced the “reliability brand” to needing to recall 2.3 million vehicles because of a dangerous quality issue with sticking gas pedals?  Reports suggest that Toyota even now may not have completely identified the technical answer to that question, which is telling and damaging all by itself.   But the bottom-line answer is that the company lost its way.

At a leadership level, the company decided that “job number one” was not reliability, after all, but increasing global sales and market share.  Toyota proclaimed a few years ago that their goal was nothing less that becoming the top auto manufacturer in the world.  They broke a sacred trust by making reliability secondary to growth of market share.

Kelsey Swanekamp of Forbes reports that the recall may cost Toyota as much as $1.1 billion, but the long-term consequence of the massive recall resulting from the loss of consumer confidence may haunt the automaker for many, many years.

In writing about the Toyota debacle, automotive marketing blogger Cameron McNaughton says, “The automotive industry is guilty of thinking that its brand promises are adjustable.” But of course, no brand can shift its brand promise without serious consequences.   It reminds me of the great Groucho Marx chestnut:  “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

This same mindset sometimes invades the higher education arena, where institutions might begin to think that their brand promise can shift and change depending upon the consumer environment, or the competition, or other market forces.  For example, a number of institutions are finding that “affordability” can be a resonant sales message during these tight economic times.  Some of these institutions are making “affordability” part of their brand platform.

But by making “low cost” or “affordability” part of their brand messaging, colleges and universities come dangerously close to turning higher education into a mere commodity, where price is the primary or sole differentiator.

While short-term enrollment management issues always tempt organizations to shift emphasis, brand marketers must step up and sound an alarm about the long-term consequences of losing focus on what is most important.  Your brand promise needs to come first, always, regardless of marketplace shifts or changes in leadership, or the demands of the economic environment.

The brand promise should shape and drive everyone’s behavior, from the departmental secretares, to the classroom professors, to the President.  Every faculty and staff member is responsible for delivering the promise.  The marketing unit is merely charged with making the brand promise clear to the public and demonstrating that it has been kept through brand “proof points.”

Staying focused on what is most important is very easy to say and very difficult to do.  But it is the critical factor in building brand credibility and trust.  Ask Toyota.

Helping the K-12s

Lately, it seems as though budget cuts, tough times, cutting programs, furloughs, and layoffs come up more often than not when reviewing higher education news over the last year or so. On occasion, a similar news story about the hardships K-12 are having comes across. After doing a specific search on K-12 you can see that it is a similar story comes more clearly.

Those in higher ed and in K-12 are starting to feel the pressure second, third, and possibly their fourth wave of state budget cuts. This blog is to offer some easy to add a little financial support to the K-12 system. After all, if the K-12 system is having financial hardships it may be harder for those schools to turnout the high-performing students that many colleges and universities seek out. A bit of circle-of-life in educational terms.

These are things anyone can do, especially if you buy food or shop on a regular basis. Disclaimer: EMG doesn’t endorse any of the stores or products listed below, I just thought it would be good to let people know there are easy options for K-12 fundraising and since a couple involve credit information and expensive electronics – use at your own risk.

• TerraCycle: TerraCycle is a company that makes new products out of used food packaging. They collect food packaging like drink pouches from CapriSun and Honest Kids, Lay’s Chip bags, Mars/Wrigley candy wrappers, Lunchable lunch kit packaging, and Sprout packaging and turn them into pencil pouches, backpacks, messenger bags, and more. How it works: create and signup brigade (a team of package collectors) on the TerraCycle website, collect the packaging, print pre-paid shipping labels and ship to TerraCycle. The cool thing is they pay for the postage. For each package/wrapper collected, they donate $0.02 to a non-profit or school of your choice. While the individual amount is small, it adds up quickly. According to its website, TerraCycle started in 2001 and has collected about $510,228.
• Box Tops for Education: a popular program seen on many popular packaged foods. Clip the box top off any of the participating product’s package and give it to a school of your choice. Each top is worth 10 cents and the box top website typically has specials for how to provide your school with bonus tops. While each individual top is small, they add up quickly. The website touts that it has given over $300 million to schools since the program’s start in 1996. The site also has tips for coordinators who want to help collect box tops at work, school, place of worship, and more. Look in your kitchen cabinets to see which packages have the box top on them.
• Campbell’s Labels for Education: the Campbell’s program claims to have given over $100 million in school equipment since it began over 36 years ago. Similar to the Box Tops clippings, you clip the UPC’s (bar code) off participating Campbell’s, Prego, Pepperidge Farm, V8, and Spaghettio products. Turn the UPC codes into any K-12 school so they can earn points toward education equipment. This website also has helpful hints for how coordinators can easily collect Campbell UPC label and bonus offers so you can earn more for your school.
• Whole Foods: Take a close look at Whole Foods paper bags. In their Bag Donation Program, if you reuse the paper bag, they will either give you $0.10 of your next bill or donate the $0.10 to a local school. According to the Whole Foods site “This program is exclusive to our stores in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Kansas and was specifically created to help our local schools! At checkout, if customers bring in their own bags, they can either take 10 cents off their bill or give 10 cents to a local school.”
• My Coke Rewards: Under each cap or on each bottle is a My Coke Rewards code. It works by buying any of the 12 participating Coke products, go to the My Coke Rewards site, enter the code and earn points. The site has all sorts of prizes and rewards to choose from, but one option is to donate your points to your school. The school must be registered in order to receive donated points and any My  Coke Rewards members can donate their points to any registered school. Schools can redeem points for school appropriate equipment and resources.
• Tyson Project A Plus: Similar to the other label programs. Clip and collect the Tyson Project A Plus, give to your school, and they will redeem the labels for $0.24 for each label.
• Community Cash for Schools: Label program where each label is worth 10 to 15 cents for retail package UPCs and 50 to 75 cents for commercial UPCs.
• SchoolPAX: Schools enroll in the program, people shop online through the SchoolPAX website or shop using the school’s code at participating stores. Schools will receive money for you shopping.
• Office Depots 5% Back to Schools Program: Buy products using the school’s program ID code at Office Depot and the school will recieve 5% of purchases made and can go toward free supplies.
• Goodsearch.com: Enter and verify your non-profit, search the web, and Good Search will donate a certain amount to your organization for each search.
• Cartridges for Kids: A recycling program that pays schools and non-profit organizations cash for cell phones, empty laser and inkjet cartridges, laptops, iPods, PDAs, video games & consoles, digital cameras, DVDs and GPS devices.
• Direct TV 4 Schools: Schools can earn $100 for every new customer and $50 for every existing DIRECTV customer who commits to one year of DIRECTV® service and mentions the school’s unique School Code.
• Target’s Take Charge of Education: Designated schools will get up to 1% of purchases made on Target REDCard that are matched to a particular school.
• Best Choice Save-A-Label: Save the labels of Best Choice products. and be sure to save the UPC portion (proof of purchase). Your school will earn $30 in cash for each bundle of 1,000 UPC’s sent in.
• Our Family Labels for Learning: Each Our Family product label is worth $0.05.
• Spartan Brand Cash for Labels: Send in bundles of 1,000 UPC labels and get $20 for each 1,000 label bundle.
• Home Team School Rewards: Labels are worth $0.30 each and can only be sent in in 100 label bundles.

I have collected Box Tops and Campbell’s Labels for Education for several years now and will be passing them over to a teacher friend fairly soon.  There are many more options out there for fundraising that are similar to the examples given above.  Anyone else know of any similar programs or like any they use for their schools?

SOCIALIZE: Rethinking the College Communications Environment

Last week my colleague Jennifer Mullen, Assistant Vice President for Marketing Communications at Old Dominion University, and I gave a presentation on Leveraging New Media at the CASE I District conference in Boston.  Great conference and great turn out in the session.

Needless to say, there’s a lot of interest still in new media, and there are a lot of directions Jennifer and I could have chosen to take in our discussion.  Unfortunately, in an hour, you can only cover so much.  We chose to focus on the changing role of central communications organizations to meet the new demands of these mediums and the expectations of audiences.  It’s a big issue.  Most central communications units in higher ed still operate in a print based, medium-driven model –- there’s a publications department, a media relations department, etc.  This model tends to work fine for the longer lead times that old style communications used to afford us.

Today’s immediate-response environment, driven by live feeds and live chat, however, requires organizations to be more nimble and responsive.  That means that you have teams assembled who can act and respond to content needs through appropriate mediums.  These are specialists in the art of the “conversation” and who know the audience with which they engage and are prepared to be part of the conversation.   Projects are developed based on objectives with the audience, rather than the mediums they are built in.

For example, the approach to recruitment might include a communications package that includes:

1. A group of three or four handpicked first year students who document their year one experiences through videos that are posted on youtube and on a special Facebook page as well as on a specially built admissions site
2. An admissions advisor that Tweets specific tips on the college admissions process along with admissions events
3. A downloadable mobile app that guides you through a campus tour and sends you alerts on admissions deadlines
4. Another app that helps you decide what majors are best to explore based on your interests
5. A print piece that catches prospects attention
6. A specialized admission site that aggregates all of these social feeds, videos, and tips and also includes key information for prospective students only.

Rather than living separately, all these operate as one cohesive communications package to the audience.  The communication that requires the longest lead time, the print piece, would have the least amount to specific informational detail, but rather serves to drive audiences to mediums with the richest amount of detail.  Additionally, information is distributed and repeated across platforms.  For example, prospects could find out about how to apply on the admission website, or on the admissions facebook page where they can also complete an application.  A great example of this kind of packaging is Coca Cola’s Expedition 206 campaign.

We included some other great ideas to spur your thinking as well.  I look forward to seeing some great wow factor in the social media space in the coming months!  Here’s the full presentation (there is an YouTube video after slide 4 that does take some time to load. If you wish to bypass the video simply click to slide 5 of the presentation below).

Marketing Budget Benchmarks

Since the economic downturn began in late 2008, marketing budgets at many institutions have been slashed.  Cuts of 25% – 30% or more in ad spending have not been unusual at colleges and universities during the past year.

Not surprising:  Marketing budgets make tempting targets for CFO’s who need to make tough calls on where and how to save money.  It’s less painful to cut back on media than to cut back on staff.  In the face of 10.2% unemployment, it’s hard to argue with that.

But here’s the surprising thing:  Budget cutbacks are almost always made blind, without anybody really knowing how much or how little the institution is investing in marketing, or where.  Important decisions would be a lot more strategic if they were driven by a little hard data – at least to the point of knowing whether it’s fat or muscle being cut.

Getting a handle on overall annual marketing expenditures is critical for lots of reasons.  It’s imperative if you want to understand whether or not you’re achieving a return-on-investment and if your strategies and tactics are as cost-effective as they could or should be.   If you don’t know how much your institution spends on marketing, it’s impossible to determine how to best allocate marketing resources.

Even so, I have yet to work with a university CEO who has any idea of how much they are spending each year on marketing.  They have no idea.

Do you?

If not, it’s time to do an assessment – on your own or through a consultant.  Overall marketing investment can be a difficult number to come by because of higher ed’s penchant for distributive marketing.  Usually, lots of departments contribute something to the marketing pot – publications, advertising, or events promotions, for example.  You should include the marketing, advertising, publications, outsourcing, and promotional investments from them all (except for department staff salaries).

Here are national investment benchmarks, gleaned through years of assessing all sorts of campuses:  Most colleges and universities invest between 1.0% and 3.5% of the overall institutional operating budget for marketing and communications activities (including salaries for the central mar-comm staff but excluding departmental staff salaries and admissions salaries and operating budgets).

The benchmarks are strongly dependent on the size and scope of your institution, its brand architecture, marketing objectives, geographic reach, audience demographics, and overall approach.  In most cases, small independent colleges invest at the high end of the spectrum (2.5% – 3.5%) and large research universities are at the low end of the range (1.0% – 2.5%).

To place the benchmarks in perspective, Dr. Philip Kotler, the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern – one of the most widely recognized experts in integrated marketing – has suggested that colleges and universities (and other non-profits) can and should invest up to 4.0% of operating budget to achieve impact and return on investment.  While it’s rare to find institutions investing that much, marketing investment levels have been inching higher and higher over the past 10 years (disregarding the economic downturn), up from a range of 0.75%-2.5% in 2000.

One thing is certain, though:  if you’re overall investment is 1.0% or less, you probably don’t have the resources you need to be effective; and if you’re spending more than 3.5%, you’re comparatively profligate.

By contrast, private for-profit institutions invest at much higher levels: Costs of 10% to 20% (or more) of total operating budget are common in the corporate sector.  For example, in 2008, the University of Phoenix (Apollo Group) invested about $416 million in advertising and promotional costs (not including recruiter salaries/bonuses) or about 13% of expenditures.  And Phoenix still showed a profit of $476 million.  It is important to remember that your institution competes with the University of Phoenix in the consumer marketplace.

Take some time to understand how much your institution invests in marketing – it will be well worth the effort!

Spreading Your Brand, One Tweet at a Time

After several years of social networking hype, many companies are still attempting new ways to spread their brand to the social networking masses. I recently came across a Mashable post about a small and growing ice cream chain called Tasti D-Lite making one such attempt. I have never been to this place and never heard of it until I read the post and thought the idea was worth passing along.

Tasti D-Lite recently announced that if you connect your Twitter and/or Foursquare account to the your TastiCard, a loyalty rewards card, you get points toward a free treat. According to the Tasti D-Lite website,

Just register your TreatCard online and opt-in to enable your account to send tweets on your behalf or automatically check you in on Foursquare. You earn a point everytime you make a purchase for each social network connection you setup. The secure API’s provided by Twitter and Foursquare allow the myTasti.com application to post messages on your behalf without storing your account password.

Once the TreatCard and your Twitter/Foursquare accounts are connected and a purchase is made, a message will be sent on your account “I just earned 5 TastiRewards points at Tasti D-Lite Columbus Circle, NYC! http://myTasti.com.” The Tasti D-Lite site also says that this generic message is just the beginning and will be working with its fan base to develop new creative messages.

For a growing chain of ice cream stores, this seems like a great way to spread the word to the world and to create a new fan base of followers. But could this work for higher education? Off the top of my head and thinking out loud, I would say… possibly. A few thoughts come to mind also. For example,  once a similar connection, as mentioned above, is made between a student account and their social networking site, then messages could be sent when students pass certain milestones. Students could be given points for setting up their social network connection and for passing the milestones. Points could go to rewards like free tickets to athletic events or campus bookstore items.

While this seems like a novel idea, a couple devils-advocate thoughts come to mind,

• Spam: while Twitter has been recently fixing the issue regarding spam tweets, a tweet mentioning points and a company website may resemble a spam tweet to some. This could potentially result in some tweeps being kicked off Twitter for spam tweeting.
• Annoying: many social network users get annoyed when they get repetitive messages from friends that take up their social network home page.  This could make users block, hide, or unfriend those that allow these types of messages on their account.
• Trivializing: This is the reason I said this could idea could possibly work for higher ed. It could possibly trivialize the higher ed experience and make the college seem over aggressive in marketing. The milestones that students would have to pass and the rewards they receive would have to be chosen fairly carefully so the school wouldn’t be equated with an ice cream retail store.

This is just one of many new ideas for how social networking could be used as a marketing tool.  I am interested in knowing if anyone has heard of other companies orany colleges using social media to market their organization like the example mentioned above.

How University Vice President of Communications And Marketing Strategy Leadership Roles Are Likely To Change

The following is a guest blog post by David Dalka. He was scheduled to speak at the 2009 Educational Marketing Group (EMG) Brand Manager Summit, but that speech will have to wait until the conference is rescheduled. David is presently a web analytics and online marketing strategy management consultant available to create effective content strategies and yearly marketing budget planning and restructuring.

Over the past decade the traditional role of VP of Communications and Marketing Strategy has remained relatively unchanged while the world of content and media has changed dramatically, including:

User Generated Content – Organizations and individuals can now create content online with written content in blogs (like this one), videos on sites like Youtube, photo sharing sites like Flickr and social networking sites like Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter.

Search Engines Have Changed Content Distribution – Opportunities for high rankings in organic listings in search engines like Google have created opportunities to transform regional universities into internationally known brands. To achieve this, VP of Communications leaders must possess both search engine optimization, content strategy and technology and data strategy skills and have a clear understanding of the significant transformational elements that these changes can enable.

Ever Increasing Content Volume is Lowering the Relevance of Legacy Channels – Television and radio are competing with the explosion in content on the web and mobile phones. As such, they are becoming less effective advertising mediums over time. Owning your own search engine optimized content on your .edu domain can now compete directly with these legacy media organizations.

Journalists Quantity and Quality at Major News Outlets is Shrinking Rapidly – The implications of this are starting to become clear — most existing news outlets are understaffed and unable to digest traditional press pitches. Many journalists are simply unable to read most of their email due to the volume of irrelevant messages. As layoffs mount, decades of relationships with media relations professionals are adversely impacted. The relevancy of traditional media is rapidly dwindling and getting placement in that media is becoming harder due to the shortage of dedicated journalists. On June 7th, 2009, Jeff Jarvis of the blog Buzzmachine put together a thoughtful piece that I think is important to understand about how most news starts in the blogosphere and then migrates to the mainstream media.

Newspapers Are Slowly Fading In Both Importance and Quantity – According to some estimates, up to 25% of the nations newspapers may go out of business in the next few years. This will crimp what has historically been a primary advertising medium for universities. Demographic shifts indicate that the younger generation does not read magazines and newspapers the way their parents did so this shift is healthy in the long run.

Press Releases Are Directly For The Target Reader As Well As Journalists – Well written press releases now rank in search engines and Internet news aggregators as well as mainstream media content. Acquaintance David Meerman Scott pointed out the following primary themes in his recent book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, he states the following clearly starting on page 25:

* Marketing is more than just advertising.
* PR is for more than just a mainstream media audience.
* You are what you publish.
* People want authenticity, not spin.
* People want participation, not propaganda.
* Instead of causing one-way interruption, marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it.
* Marketers must shift their thinking from mainstream marketing to the masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of underserved audiences via the web.
* PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. It’s about your buyers seeing your company on the Web.
* Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. It’s about your organization winning business.
* The Internet has made public relation public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media.
* Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great online content
* Blogs, podcasts, e-books, news releases, and other forms of online content let organizations communicate directly with buyers in a form they appreciate.
* On the web, the lines between marketing and PR have blurred.

Recent economic trends also play a role in the potential for disruption of the competitive landscape:

• Iconic Universities Endowments Have Shrunk Dramatically – Universities like Harvard depend on their endowments for up to 40% of their budget traditionally, many of these types of schools will be in a retrenchment mode rather than aggressively changing media mix to content strategy. Sources have told me that the University of Chicago get 14% of its budget from endowments. Upstart universities that get almost none of its budget from endowments will be able to be more aggressive in this environment.
• Family Budgets Are Stretched Thin, This Change Might Be Permanent – An ING Direct Study released in June of 2009 which indicates that families are stretched thin, with one in every five families now dipping into savings that were intended to pay college tuition. This ultimately will increase financial aid demand or reduce demand for college education overall which will put a priority on being the top notch experience and generating student leads at a lower cost than competitors while at the same time raising the profile of the institution.

“It’s clear that parents are struggling with their expenses during these difficult times, but tapping money put aside for their kids will only exacerbate a family’s problems when it comes time to pay for college,” said Arkadi Kuhlmann, President of ING DIRECT USA, the nation’s largest direct bank.

• Changes In Content Distribution Are Enabling Online Universities Success – For profit universities like Strayer and University of Phoenix are demonstrating net income around 20% of revenues. The University of Phoenix can afford luxuries such as financing a 20+ city book tour for Keith Ferrazzi’s new book which debuted at #1 on the New York Times best sellers list that will bring the school massive attention and web currency in the form of discussion and links. MIT is posting lectures and basic class materials on the web as well which may prove to be disruptive. Traditional universities will eventually have to reduce fixed costs to remain competitive.
• Poor 2009 Student Job Placement Reports May Affect Future Enrollment – I discussed in a post several years ago my disappointment with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business for not having the level of career services and alumni network it advertises in its student acquisition brochures. In a transparent world, potential students will likely be more savvy by conducting their own research about overall alumni success than the previous superstar or two that traditionally were profiled will be ignored. Communication of alumni success stories via transparent content strategies will eventually become the most important form of university advertising. Strategic management reorganization of those content strategies will likely replace traditional media spending over the coming years.

The proper leadership individual to be the VP of Communications, Public Relations and Marketing Strategy will certainly have all of the following attributes:

• Individual Will Have World Class Search Engine Optimization and Web Content Strategy Skills
• Person Will Understand How to Create Unified Content Strategy
• Individual Should Be Passionate About Enabling Student and Alumni Personal Branding
• Person Will Be A Well Connected Networker With A Strong Online Presence
• Individual Has Been Previously Quoted And Is Comfortable With Both Old and New Media
• Person Should Be Focused on Individual and Group Stakeholder Success
• Individual Understands The Impending Impacts of Marketing Change Management
• Person Should Likely Be A Marketing Leadership Business Speaker
• Individual Must Be Comfortable Delegating, Training and Transferring Skills
• Person Has To Be Naturally Curious About How Complex Ecosystems Work
• Individual Must “Get The Job Done Today”, Yet Be Visionary About Future Skills of the Gen X CMO
• Person Should Be a Leader by Example And Have a Bottom Up Management Style
• Individual Has Experience Driving Change in Data Models, Technology and Process Standardization
• Person Should Be Able To Execute Well At The 3 Foot Level and 30,000 Foot Level
• Individual Must Be A Team Player As Well As Able To Execute Individually
• Must Have a Passion for Enabling Entrepreneurship And Positive Community Impact
• Individual Has Vision On How Different Divisions Of The School Can Enable Each Others Success
• Person Should Have Passion For Effective Spending and Budget Reform
• Individual Should Desire to Make Education More Accessible To All
• Person Should Embrace New Technologies Like Mobile and Digital Signage

This was a guest blog post by David Dalka who is presently a web analytics and online marketing strategy management consultant available to create effective content strategies and yearly marketing budget planning reallocations. (This post was originally guest content in June of 2009 on another website which has since ceased operations. Please redirect any links to this URL.)

CASE VI

What an awesome time Ineke and I had at the CASE VI Conference this year. I won’t lie, I wish I could have spent the entire weekend, all of Monday, and all of Tuesday attending sessions, conversing, and exploring downtown St. Louis, but there is work to be done on the home front! Ineke and I believe our presentation 5 Steps to Turning Facebook (and Other Social Networks) into Amazing Marketing Tools (see the embedded slideshare below) was well received (the session evaluation will tell the tale!). We also had some enlightening conversations with folks both related and unrelated to our presentation. So for those individuals who made the choice to sit in on our presentation or spend time talking with us at some point during the conference, we extend a special thank you your way. As I tweeted shortly after our presentation, we hope you walked away from our session feeling there’s plenty of opportunity for higher ed to be exceptional when it comes to social media! Note: after slide 6, there is a video that was in the presentation, it does take a couple minutes to load fully (to bypass the video, simply continue to slide 7).



Some Excellent Presentations
I sat in on two presentations while there. The first was Social Media 101 by Keith Politte of the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute. He did a great job showing some very relevant (and funny) video examples. He showed an excerpt from Clay Shirky’s semi-legendary TED talk on Institutions vs. Collaboration, and entered the charitable, yet crazy world of Ben Stiller and the STILLERSTRONG campaign. I had never seen this one before: awesome. He touched on an interesting idea of making the information the target rather than the audience. In the digital world, it kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? People will help you get the word out if your content is good and you do the best that you can to make it interesting. I can’t recall the exact building that was under construction on campus, but Keith gave a great example of finding some excellent photography (with elaborate descriptions even) on Flickr that the University had nothing to do with. Someone was documenting and explaining the transformation of this building, so of course the University would take advantage of this . This is just another example of why it’s important to keep tabs on what’s being said about your institution online, both good and bad. If Keith’s presentation is online, please let me know and I’ll link to it here.

The other presentation I was able to attend was by Andrew Careaga called Tweets, Tubes & Feeds: Hitting the Moving Target of Social Media. We started off with a little digital quotient quiz and it turns out nobody in the room was a Wikipedia editor, so we had a tie. Also turns out that Courtney Tompkins from Des Moines University is still rockin’ a MySpace page so she ended up winning the tiebreaker (hope she doesn’t mind me saying this!). His presentation encompassed subjects such as digital natives versus immigrants, the differences between creators, critics, collectors, and joiners, a 4-step approach to planning, and many specific examples you can view at the tail end of his presentation. There was a nice energy to the crowd in his session as well.

Location, Location, Location
One final bit of news I want to mention that had me incredibly excited on Tuesday afternoon  because Ineke and I had earlier touched on it during our presentation (I kind of wish the news had come out before our presentation). It was the news of the partnership between Harvard and Foursquare. It’s becoming quite clear that location will be huge from here on out and it’s great to see institution’s getting in on it. In this regard there’s such an opportunity for creativity! (it gets me excited…) But overall, it’s one of the many ways to take advantage of the new tech and social opportunities for higher ed that are sitting there, available for the taking. It’s time to Pownce! (R.I.P.)

The Higher Ed Brand Spokesperson

First, Happy New Year, hope everyone had a great holiday, and welcome back.

Now on to the blog, after the holidays and in time for everyone’s New Year’s weight loss resolutions, Taco Bell released a new campaign tactic – The Drive-Thru Diet (click here). This new campaign features Christine, Taco Bell’s version of Subway’s Jared. According to Christine’s story on the link above:

For me, I didn’t want to cut out my fast food so I started choosing Fresco items from the Drive-Thru Diet® menu and making other sensible choices. I reduced my daily calorie and fat intake by 500 calories to 1250 calories a day, and, after two years, I ended up losing 54 pounds!

We are all familiar with several types of brand spokespeople: from the average joe (like Jared and Christine) to the cartoons (like Captain Crunch and Tony the Tiger) to athletic figures (like Michael Jordan and Peyton Manning) to famous people (like William Shatner, Bill Cosby, and Jessica Simpson) and everything in between and more.

This got me thinking, could it be possible to have a college/university brand spokesperson and who could it be? So here are of few of my thoughts on the subject.

• A college or university is so large, diverse, and, in some cases, geographically spread out  that it would be hard to pick one person that could represent an entire school.
• The people who are most often in the lime light for a period of time at a school are often the athletic teams (or an individual from a team) or someone involved in a scandal.
• Political types would be hammered for favoring one particular institution.
• Celebrities may offer the wrong perception of the institution (especially if it was the wrong person). Also, celebrities have often provided soundbites or testimonials or brief plugs about their alma mater, but have rarely done a full-out spokesperson gig. Also, they would also come with at a cost that many higher ed marketing budgets couldn’t support.
• Athletic spokespeople like Michael Jordan could give the sense that the college was too sports oriented and not academic based.
• Cartoon spokespeople could be too childish.

The thoughts above kind of bring me around to some of the fundamentals of branding – consensus and tie-in. In essence, in a place as big as a university, everyone from the faculty, staff, students, alumni, administrators, and community leaders could be considered a brand spokesperson for your university. If everyone mentioned above could easily point out and discuss a couple of the key pieces of information (brand platform, positioning statement, and a couple key messages) about your university, then it would be easier for that consensus driven message to travel out to the masses. In contrast and for example, if the faculty think your institution is academically challenging and the staff think it is a beautiful campus, and the students think it is second-choice school then it will be hard for a potential student on the receiving end of these messages to grasp the true brand of your university.

But in terms of marketing and advertising, EMG has used a group of students, faculty, staff, administrators, and alumni at some clients to act as brand ambassadors in TV commercials, photography, and other marketing materials.  As is everything within a brand, the people who represent your brand should be carefully and respectfully screened. Here are some questions to consider when screening for brand ambassadors (unless specifically mentioned, the questions are for relevant for all campus stakeholders).

• Do the students carry a high enough GPA?
• Are they involved on/off campus?
• Are they considered high achieving?
• Do they have any blemishes in their records that could potentially embarrass the university?
• Are they representative of the campus population body?
• How much longer will they be at your university?
• Are they recognizable on/off campus?
• Are they well-spoken and can they articulate the brand if asked about your university?

A quick example of this used in the corporate world is the new Special K Challenge advertising that also started around the beginning of the new year. They use neither celebrities nor models to represent the real people who buy their products – they use real people they found while they were doing their consumer research. As mentioned in a New York Times article from last week (click here):

“In the past, we had cast women more in terms of their success at the end, but the object of these spots is just to get women to declare their vision,” said Mylene Pollock, a senior vice president and creative director at Leo Burnett who worked on the campaign.

Six spots feature women whom the company encountered while conducting consumer research describing fitness goals. In one spot, a woman wants to stop “using my arms to hide my stomach”; another wants to “hear those four little words: Have you lost weight?”; another wants to show her young daughter “that mommy feels confident.” A voiceover at the end of the spots concludes, “Be victorious — take the Special K Challenge.”

So you may not have a single person or cartoon as your university spokesperson, but you could have a representative group of people used as stand-outs and representatives of the brand in your marketing materials. Has anyone else used this tactic in higher ed or know of other examples?

10 Blog Posts a Leapin’ in 2009

Thank you to all our readers and followers for a wonderful 2009. We truly enjoyed writing these useful tidbits on branding, marketing, web design, social media, higher education and more.

For the last blog post of the year, I will recap the 10  most popular blogs our readers enjoyed in 2009 (in countdown order, click on the bold blog title to go read the full blog).

First here are two blogs that were posted in the last week that could be on next year’s list – 5 Higher Ed Social Media Movements to Watch in 2010 and Passiongraphics: The New Measure in Marketing.

10. The Athletic Image:  A case study on a questionable sponsorship and their TV commercials at the University of New Mexico. Not only was it a heated topic on the UNM campus, it was fairly intense conversation in the blog comments as well.

9. Hey, That’s My Tagline!: Some tips on when to trademark your tagline and what to do when another college or university uses one that is similar.

8. Brand Architecture: A discussion on possible issues academia faces when it comes to brand architecture and some tips to creating core brands, sub brands, and independent brands.

7. Top Secrets to Turn Social Networks Into Amazing Marketing Tools: Useful hints on how to do a social networking map or audit of your university’s social media sites.

6. What Students Are Telling You About Your Website Design: A recap of a recent focus group study of a client that revealed pertinent information students would like to see on college websites.

5. Making Facebook a Real Marketing Tool: A recap of one of our KnowledgeBuilders on the use of Facebook in higher education marketing. This post points out great Facebook examples (at the time of blog post) and 5 secrets to making Facebook a useful marketing tool.

4. Recognize Me?: How recognizable is your university logo? This blog points out a list of things to think about that may help college and university logos stand out. Also a couple games that ask you to name the company and university/college by the logo given.

3. 10 for 10: Looking Ahead to Next Year’s Web Design Trends: Just posted about a month ago, this post quickly jumped toward the top of the list with 10 web design trends that may be popular in the year 2010. This post provides some great corporate web examples for higher education web designers to glean design tips.

2. Of Taglines and Brands: A discussion on the difference and the connections between higher education taglines and their brands. This post provides some examples of academia’s most creative taglines.

1. The Silhouette Seen Around the World: Following a post on the discussion of higher education brand evolution, this post focused on a case study of a corporate brand evolution that went horribly wrong – Dora the Explorer grows up with some quick and severe growing pains. Posted  at the beginning of the summer, this blog quickly went to the top of the list of most read blogs and has been read at least once a day since it was posted. At the time of writing this, the silhouette post was read more than 1,550 times.

There you have it, 2009 on the Brand Manager’s Notebook in a nutshell. We will continue posting great new posts next year in the first full week of 2010.

From Bob, Ineke, Steve, myself and the rest of the EMG Team, we wish everyone the happiest of holidays, Happy New Years and Merry Marketing!

Passiongraphics: The New Measure in Marketing

I was reading Jon Lasner’s blog 8 Steps to Social Network Power in The Orange County Register the other day and came across the term passiongraphics.  It instantly struck a chord.  In marketing, we’ve known for quite a while that profitablility is higher when you get and keep happy, loyal customers. Loyal customers come back and it costs much less to get their attention — than when you hinge your entire business plan on only seeking new customers.  Those corporations – those brands – that are strongest and have the most brand equity, have enormous customer loyalty.  Those that have weaker brand positions, often have customer-service issues at their root and therefore weak customer loyalty.  This is no more true for corporations than it is for institutions of higher education.

In fact, in our experience, many institutions of higher education struggle on this front.  This is pretty evident when you look at U.S. News & World Report College Rankings.  The magazine uses alumni giving as one of its measures of institutional strength; in a sense, it is a measure of brand equity/loyalty.  In a time when higher education is looking for other sources or support, financially and otherwise, the numbers show that this is a marketing area of huge opportunity.  To illustrate, looking just at nationally-ranked universities:

The top 50 ranked institutions average an alumni giving rate of roughly 28%.  The next 50 a rate of 18%.   That’s already a 10% drop.  The last 60 ranked institutions in the magazine’s nationally ranked university list average an alumni giving rate of only 7%.

Passion is at the heart of brand loyalty
How can these numbers improve?  A huge asset can be the understanding of what makes our most loyal alumni (and current students) so passionate.  Most alumni operations tend to measure their alumni in terms of demographics and impersonal statistics – who, where, how many mailable addresses, how many times has someone sent a check and for how much, etc.  These measures don’t provide much of an insight into the passions of alumni.  But it is those passions, rather than all the letters, newsletters, and magazines, that make them write that check, attend an event, talk about their alma mater to others, and motivates them to participate on your social networking sites.

So understanding and tapping into what your alumni (and current students audiences) are passionate about in their lives and in your brand can take you a long way to increasing that alumni participation number and move the invaluable alumni asset along a giving funnel.

Keys to building passion among your audiences
How do you do this? The great news is that new media is a great way to gauge who is passionate about your brand and a way for you to assess, and deliver content to engage and draw these audiences deeper and draw in new audience.

The keys are these:

1. Don’t think about social network content (or your magazines and newsletters for that matter ) in terms of what you want to tell alumni. Think about content in terms of what kinds of information and experiences alumni crave and how those tie into your brand.
2. Categorize your alumni by their passions rather than their age or class year.
3. Create social media avenues that speak specific types of content/information.  In the end, you should have multiple social networks built about audience interests, rather than a single portal.