Happy Holidays from the EMG Team!

EMG hopes that everyone had a great 2008 and has the happiest of holidays.

We would like to leave you this year with some fun holiday videos of us dancing. First stop the Brand Manager’s Notebook, next stop – Dancing with the Stars.

Holiday Dancing One

Holiday Dancing Two

Holiday Dancing Three

Check back early next year for more interesting tidbits, news, and discussions for issues facing brand managers.

Have a safe and happy holiday season and happy 2009 from the EMG Team!

Betrayal on Facebook

The Age of Innocence is dead. So how long did it last, about five minutes?

Is anyone surprised at the news that private companies were using Facebook to deceptively push student prospects to for-profit websites (read article on Inside Higher Education)?

We’ve known all along that social networking is a medium perfectly designed for conning one another: Surfer beware. I mean, who believes everything they see on YouTube, or Facebook, or Myspace, or any of them?

So it was only a matter of time until someone uncovered organized deception-for-profit.  The someone was a hero named Brad Ward of Butler University who wrote about certain Facebook irregularities at the end of last week on his squaredpeg.com blog, based apparently on tips from folks at Winthrop University. As it turns out, dozens of Facebook groups devoted to the “Class of 2013″ at various colleges were created not by students interested connecting with future classmates, but by operatives of two marketing companies, College Prowler and Match U.

Will this sort betrayal affect teen confidence and prospect habits? No one is certain yet, but it doesn’t seem likely that it will have a big impact. High schoolers, after all, have grown up skeptical-obviously for good reason. Most have seen online scams and come-ons of many stripes. This simply reinforces the point. It will make them a little bit more wary, a little bit more cynical.

What can and should colleges and universities do? The first response is to ensure transparency and honesty in all of your networking activities. Elimination of social networking pages won’t help, but making sure that your presence is well-branded and open will.

Second, continue educating prospects, parents and the public about the need to be discrete and careful in online activities and to exercise good judgment in how much stock they put in online groups they don’t know well.

Third, colleges and universities have to become vigilant in social networking areas. They should look into online groups using or referencing their name and make sure they are legitimate and above board.

In today’s online world, the trust of students, prospects, and the public is no longer given freely. Now we have to earn it. And that task just became a little bit harder.

What do you think?

College Marketing Plans for 2009

Nearly two-thirds of college marketers expect their budgets to decrease in the first six months of 2009, according to a non-scientific online poll conducted on the Brand Manager’s Notebook. The several dozen poll respondents don’t constitute a representative sampling, so the results are anecdotal, but they give a pretty clear indicator of how higher ed communications shops are planning to deal with the tough economy.

While most marketers know, at least theoretically, that it’s counterproductive to cut marketing investments during a recession, a clear minority of respondents believe they will be able to hold the line on that philosophy.

The biggest impact is likely below-the-line expenditures not involving staff. A third of respondents, for example, were not expecting any changes to staffing, while 14% said they expected to increase staff size by June 2009. Even so, that leaves one in three marketing managers anticipating staff decreases over the next six months – a startling number for higher education – and almost one in five still very uncertain about staffing plans.

On the tactical side, most marketers expect to decrease their purchases of traditional platforms of print, TV, and outdoor advertising in the first half of 2009. This isn’t too surprising, since these purchases often represent large discretionary budgets that are the first to be targeted during downturns. In addition, direct mail and e-mail marketing to rented lists are both expected to be weak during the first half of 2009.

On the bright side, new media will continue to grow. As we’ve noted in this blog and at many professional conferences, online advertising is cost-efficient and increasingly effective. Poll-ers have clearly gotten this message, and plan to increase spending on website development, online display ads, paid search words, and social networking presence during the coming months.

No question, university and college marketers are struggling to get more bang for fewer bucks, and possibly people. We will be continuing to poll on budgeting issues like this in the future. Hang in there and feel free to express your frustration, exchange ideas, and help each other get through this tough economic time either on the Brand Manager’s Notebook or in EMG’s Facebook group.

Changing your Marketing Tactics in the Crazy Economy?: Take the Poll

A couple of weeks ago, Bob wrote Advertising Paradox: Old and New Media.  The post talks about the results of a MarketingSherpa poll and the change in advertising plans of 382 business marketers for the coming year due to the economic recession. So here is our take on the poll to ask all of you out there.

[This poll has been completed, and you can see the results.]

Thank you for your participation and stay tuned as we will be posting the results in the near future.

Dumpster Diving, Spell Checkers, and Outsourcing

With the economy struggling, I am reminded of Business 2.0’s “101 Dumbest Moments in Business“. Some are marketing tactics that did not do as well as originally planned.  While the use of the tactics were in cases, intentional, the outcomes were not.  Some are internal marketing tactics and some are external tactics.

So here are a few examples of past mistakes not to repeat, especially in these hard economic times.

RadioShack
RadioShack fires 400 staffers via e-mail. Affected employees receive a message that reads, “The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.”

Bank of America
After Bank of America announces plans to outsource 100 tech support jobs from the San Francisco Bay Area to India, the American workers are told that they must train their own replacements in order to receive their severance payments.

Northwest Airlines
Bankrupt Northwest Airlines begins laying off thousands of ground workers, but not before issuing some of them a handy guide, “101 Ways to Save Money.” The advice includes dumpster diving (“Don’t be shy about pulling something you like out of the trash”), making your own baby food, shredding old newspapers for use as cat litter, and taking walks in the woods as a low-cost dating alternative.

Here are a couple Web 2.0 related incidents…

McDonald’s
McDonald’s runs a promotional contest in Japan in which it gives away 10,000 Mickey D’s-branded MP3 players. The gadgets come preloaded with 10 songs – and, in some cases, a version of the QQPass family of Trojan horse viruses, which, when uploaded to a PC, seeks to capture passwords, user names, and other data and then forward them to hackers.

TextTrust
TextTrust, a company that uses a combination of software and human editors to scour the Web for spelling errors, issues a press release on the most commonly misspelled words it has found “on the 16 million we pages it has spell-checked over the past year.”

SOURCE: Business 2.0's "101 Dumbest Moments in Business"

As we all know, it is better to learn from the mistakes of others so you don’t make them yourself.  Be sure to run through the possible outcomes and possible issues that may arise from marketing tactics. None of us want to end up on this list.

A Place for Print

Major newspapers across the country sold out on November 5th as people everywhere scrambled to capture a tangible memento of the historic election of Sen. Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency. The demand was so large that many including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others couldn’t print copies fast enough resulting in a surge of papers being sold on sites like eBay and Craigslist for a significant premium.

My takeaway from this frenzy is that there is still a very important place for print in our lives.

Yes, while we like to talk about “going paperless” and report after report tells of the continuing decline of newspaper readership among all audiences, the tactile pleasures of print still have the ability to awaken our senses and stir emotion.

This on the heels of the announcement that The Christian Science Monitor will become the first nationally circulated newspaper to move to an online only format for its daily news. And two major newsweeklies – U.S. News & World Report and Newsweek – have scaled back circulation and frequency and are rumored to be exploring online only business models.

As the affect of the national credit crunch hits university marketing budgets, our first instinct might be to shift everything online. But we also know not to discount the feeling of holding a high-quality image piece in our hands. The question then, is how to effectively integrate this medium into your marketing strategy given the high costs associated with print. Below are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to print:

• U of What? Support your print materials with awareness advertising. Focus groups consistently inform us that teens do not read materials from institutions they’ve never heard of – so you’ve got to get your institution’s name on the recall list.
• Be purposeful. Who is your audience? What are you trying to achieve with the piece? While print is a very powerful medium, it should be used judicially to create an emotional connection with your audience. So before answering the call to market a new program by printing yet another brochure, really take the time to determine whether or not print is the best medium.
• Evaluate for content. Spend some quality time assessing the content of your printed materials. Chances are you’ll find that much of the information would be better housed on your website.
• Make it count. Once you’ve determined that print is the right move, ensure the greatest return on your investment by creating a visually interesting, high quality piece. Nothing will diminish the impact of a print piece quicker than poor quality photography and too much text.

Online Education on the Fast Track – Is Your Brand In the Game?

Unless you’ve been dozing or vacationing on another planet, you know that online programs have been the superstars of higher education for at least five years. Growth of online programs last year (before the recession/depression) blazed forward at 12.9%, eclipsing the annual growth of 1.2% for higher education overall.

And although there’s no data yet, it looks like the recession is giving an added boost to online programs, as students flock to college instead of work, with a high percentage of them opting for online.

Yet according to Sloan-C, 33% of institutions account for 75% of online enrollment, so most colleges and universities have great opportunity in this exploding marketplace.

Are you doing all you can to advance your brand’s online product line? Perhaps you should be. Brand managers are uniquely positioned to bridge campus political chasms by bringing together all the players at one table. This central strategic role should include demonstrating – through a solid business plan – how all units will benefit from online revenue streams.

For institutions that already have a strong online operation, savvy marketers are growing enrollment and market share through aggressive marketing and ongoing market research.

Good research makes all the difference. What are the characteristics of your online audiences? In what products will growth occur? What programs need to increase capacity? What are motivational attributes for online audiences? Are students satisfied with academic and support quality? A constant data funnel helps fine-tune programs, messaging, and tactics.

On the marketing front, we’ve found search word and social network advertising to be exceptionally effective. Stands to reason: those interested in online courses look for their options online. We combine Web advertising with lots of social networking activity, including blogging, to increase market share.

One final thought: Brand managers need to take care that increased exposure for online programs does not have unintended fallout on bricks-and-mortar programs. It is often the case that the advantages of online education conflict with those of the “core brand.” Low cost and convenience are examples – great motivators for online students, but in most cases you don’t want them associated with traditional campus programs.

For most of our clients, therefore, it makes sense to position online education as a “well differentiated sub-brand,” to safeguard the integrity of what the institution stands for. This is easily achieved and very effective, but too often brand architecture is not a part of the institutional mindset. Yet as many, many universities have learned to their dismay, lack of differentiation for online programs can lead to significant image problems in the future.

Keep Your Enemies Close and Your Vendors Closer

Tough times call for tough measures, the saying goes.

So, what can we do that doesn’t cost a bunch and saves us a lot. That’s been a common question among many of the colleges I work with lately.

Seems to me, one frequently overlooked opportunity is better managing your vendors. Time and time again, when I examine the internal workings of a university I find that each college, department, or unit has their own favorite outsourced designer, web developer, writer, photographer, or what have you.

There’s never any coordination and it’s clear that everyone is paying a different amount. In fact, recently I came across an institution where a frequently used outsourced photographer was giving different rights deals to different parts of the university. Some colleges had rights to use the photos however they wanted and others had specific-use clauses. He was charging each of them different fees and retaining the rights to some shots.

Aside from the confusion this causes, it also drives up the overall cost of imagery over time. And, it craftily makes it more difficult for these different units to come together around one expression.

Solving this takes time, focus, and political savvy – but it doesn’t take much money. The key is to get senior support for building a stable of managed vendors/ freelancers who:

• are bound by commonly negotiated rates
• agree to commonly negotiated rights arrangements
• are trained in your brand.

Then, depending on how tight money is compared to how strongly your organization likes its traditional decentralization, it’s time to begin negotiating and influencing.

I think the last point in the list is the most critical and where you’ll achieve the greatest savings. When you’ve got hundreds of individually prepared print pieces, webpages, and whatever, the developers of them must be educated in expressing your brand. Without this you’re wasting a ton of opportunity to build equity.

What does that mean? Well, it has at least three components

1. Your vendors have received your institution’s Brand Toolkittm. BTW, a Toolkit is not a Graphic Standards Manual; it’s oh so much more.
2. They have received training on your brand personality, platform, and visual identity.
3. They have committed to share in the management of your brand expression by operating within the brand’s parameters.

It’s easy to go too far controlling your vendors. After all, you need them to keep the brand creatively fresh while at the same time you’ve got to prevent them from going off-brand. But, judging from my experience, most universities are enormously far from doing too much.

Thinking about this post, I kind of liked what I found here:

• 50 Tips for Locating and Working With Freelance Writers
• The Art of Business: Care and Feeding of Freelancers

No Internet, No Money, No Problem

Small businesses have been around for a long time, many of them before the Internet. Many of them also survived with little to no marketing budget. So how did they survive without the Internet and a tiny marketing budget?

Before we go any further, I don’t disagree that technology is a great inexpensive marketing tool, but with the economy on everyone’s mind, here are a few inexpensive examples taken from the small business world to help support Internet tactics that may be able to help (according to AOL Small Business article Cheap Marketing Tactics and Forbes.com article Marketing Tactics Worth The Money):

“Get good ‘marketing mileage.’ Elevate your efforts so they include many opportunities for attention.

Partner up. By partnering with other businesses in your marketing efforts, you can expand your circle of influence and slash your budget.

Find diamonds in your own backyard. Every time you reach out to customers, you have an opportunity to reinforce your marketing message. By using vehicles you already have, you can increase your outreach and get more business from existing customers.

Track results and reinvest appropriately. Put tracking mechanisms in place to ensure your efforts are paying off.

Survey The Landscape. Too few entrepreneurs bother to define the market–and its willingness to pay–for their product.”

 SOURCES: http://smallbusiness.aol.com/start/home/article/_a/cheap-marketing-tactics/20051213182609990020, http://www.forbes.com/2007/05/16/google-yahoo-zoomerang-ent-sales-cx_mc_0517marketing_slide_2.html

While small businesses are a far cry from the large hulks that are colleges and universities, they often have a lot less money to market with and they often have to come up with inexpensive tactics on a regular basis and have to do it before there was the Internet. Entrepreneurs and small businesses may be a good resource to pull marketing ideas from during the tough times.

Advertising Paradox: Old and New Media

There’s been some hand wringing over advertising allocations, judging from the interest in last week’s blog – Arguments for Advertising – and a recent poll-of-the-week from MarketingSherpa, which reported on the advertising plans of 382 business marketers for the coming year:

The platforms that advertisers plan to increase most during the downturn? No surprises: social network marketing, email prospect lists, and paid search word buys. The “big three” speak to audiences on contemporary electronic turf, they’re highly targeted with little waste, and they give you great control over timing, reach, and budget.

And the areas marketers plan to trim 2009 are no big news, either: radio/TV (a net 77% say they’ll reduce it), print advertising (-54%), event marketing (- 49%), emailing to purchased lists (-37%), and direct mail (-40%).

But here’s the paradox: The Web loves brands, yet it’s tough to build one online.

Think about it. When your school’s name pops up in a Google search, why do they click your button instead of the other guy’s? When schools are mentioned online, which ones do people remember? Online or off, the game is the same. Awareness. Attitude. Equity.

So is it penny wise and pound foolish to eliminate the very platforms that build awareness and attitude and drive people to your website? TV is still the most cost-effective way to generate reach and frequency to support an online presence. We continue to get great results by coordinating TV and out-of-home with Web marketing (paid search and social networks). When the targets are diffuse and scattered across a region or the country, we substitute in-theatre, out-of-home, direct mail, branded events, and/or targeted print to support the brand and drive audiences online.

No question, Web advertising is huge and growing. We counsel all our clients to be incrementally shifting dollars online each year. But don’t dismiss the traditional tactics. TV, out-of-home, and the others make easy targets in a tough economy, but it’s just not smart to dismantle a strategic multi-platform campaign to save a few bucks in the short run.