Marketing Made Easy

I am conducting a seminar next week for a dozen or so foreign university presidents.  This through the Academy for Educational Development (AED), working with USAID and a collection of U.S. host universities.

Now I’ve given plenty of CEO seminars over the years, but these presidents are from the Middle East, where there hasn’t been a strong legacy for strategic communications.  Which got me thinking about how to address the fundamentals of brand marketing.

I’ve heard (you probably have, too) the old saw that marketing boils down to two things:  a) what you want to say, and; b) who you want to say it to.  There’s a kernel of truth there, but it’s so simplistic as to be unhelpful, missing a crucial issue:  To achieve what?

So when these foreign presidents visit the U.S. to learn the secrets of American brand marketing, it will be more productive to discuss the “Three A’s:” Awareness, Attitude, Action.

I wish more U.S. college presidents understood these.  Maybe your president is one who needs a refresher.

Awareness
This is the baseline of marketing communications.  If audiences don’t know about you, they can’t/won’t engage.  Building awareness isn’t complex, just demanding.  It requires an array of tactics and platforms designed to inform audiences about who you are, what you offer.

But note that awareness implies an outcome: Not that you merely create communications devices, but that they are received and remembered by audiences.  There is critical nuance in the level of awareness, too.

What we should be aiming for is top-of-mind awareness.  That’s when audiences – on their own – think about you when higher ed topics arise or when a life trigger spurs them to choose or engage with a college or university.  Top-of-mind is elusive and requires time and investment – both of which can be minimized if you create a consistent, memorable brand identity.

Awareness is the essential foundation, but it must lead to attitude.

Attitude
Attitude sets the stage for action.  Creating a (positive) attitude means evoking an emotional response from your audiences, and that requires a clear brand personality.

While it’s easy to focus on communicating facts, figures, and competitive advantages, it is your brand personality that ultimately differentiates you from competitors.  Personality grabs attention. Personality creates impact and memorability.  Personality engenders attitude.

Creating a high-impact, memorable brand personality requires consistency in design, color palette, photography, tone, and style.  But when your audiences have a positive attitude and an emotional affinity to your organization, the sales teams – recruiters, fundraisers, outreach specialists – will be orders of magnitude more effective in “closing the deal.”

Action
This is where the rubber meets the road for marketing.  Marketing is worth nothing unless it creates action, so the performance of the marketing team must be judged on bottom-line measurements.  Increase fundraising?  By how much?  Increase enrollment?  By how many?

Making bottom-line results a responsibility of the marketing unit changes everything:  It necessitates close integration of the marketing team with the “sales teams.”  It requires fundraisers, alumni affairs, and recruiters to act collaboratively, to dissolve traditional silos.  It also requires a data-driven approach to marketing communications so that quantifiable measures drive the strategies and tactics.

If a college or university president has a good grasp of the Three A’s of Marketing, they are well on their way to understanding and supporting an effective brand marketing program.

Brand Managers Have Always Been Brand Advocates, But Now It’s Just Getting More Official

According to the consultancy Black Coffee, a Brand Advocate is a consumer who preaches the merits of a given brand when prompted. According to Dave Chaffey, a Brand Advocate is a customer who has favorable perceptions of a brand who will talk favorably about a brand to their acquaintances to help generate awareness of the brand or influence purchase intent.

Where I’m going with this is in both these instances, the advocate is not actually ‘part of the team’. In both these definitions the advocate is the customer. You could even say they’re sitting up in the stands cheering for their team. If you are an institution of higher education, they are your alumni, your community, and yes, your fans in the stands. So when I read this article from Advertising Age about ‘Why It’s Time to Do Away With the Brand Manager’ it got me thinking… Is it? Is it a silly title based on the fact we all know the consumer is the one that truly defines your brands, especially with the constantly changing online social landscape. It’s a two-way street now more than ever before. Is it time to have the title of Brand Manager go the way of the cassette tapes? While the article is a great read, I’m not necessarily convinced. The actual report suggesting this change will be released by Forrester next week.

I believe there is still a place for what we’ve come to know as marketing management. There’s a lot more to be responsible for than what you might find in an ‘advocate’. In the higher ed space, a central figure in your marketing department remains the optimal setup. An employee who’s looking at both the means and the end.

There’s a few other snippets in this article from the report that  got my attention, one being, “…ditching the formal annual budgeting process and upfront media-specific allocation in favor of frequently updated, on-the-fly plans that adapt quickly as conditions change and money earmarked upfront for initiatives, not specific media. In my view, some of this applies to higher education and some doesn’t. I don’t think ditching the annual budgeting process can be done. There are too many logistics that make this a bit on the impossible side for universities. However, while potentially risky in dealing with the unknown, it might be possible to consider planning for initiatives rather than specific media. I’m going to let that thought simmer for a while…

Another passage that was attention grabbing was “…marketing executives should think less about anchoring annual plans around one or two big hits and more about doing many smaller things quickly and adapting based on real-time consumer feedback and other data.” There are still good in having a fairly robust and solid marketing plan in place, but still have areas of flexibility. In today’s environment, changes can happen quickly, but at the same time, the reason for many of those changes can be pinpointed to social networking and analytics. This can result in a university or college taking quick action.

All in all in regards to the position title, we’re just talking about a technicality here. A title is a title. The duties and responsibilities of a position are obviously what really counts. You’re always going to need someone to keep a close eye and make observations and decisions on what to do in the marketing world. You’re still managing the brand and there are still shots to call… you just might have a little less control over the results.

Illinois Facing Sophie’s Choice

The decision Illinois is now facing is reminiscent of William Styron’s 1979 masterpiece about a mother’s tragic choice between two horrible options – Sophie’s Choice.  Sometimes there is no good answer.

The Illinois Monetary Award Program, or MAP, is a case in point.

MAP has been helping more than 250,000 Illinois students each year pay for college with up to $2,500 need-based grants per semester.  But MAP ran out of funding on May 15 and won’t be able to fund low-income students in the second half of the 2009-2010 year.  As things stand, students already approved for MAP grants will see them cut in half, and many thousands of eligible students won’t receive any award at all.

This at a time when demand is increasing dramatically.  Last year, average taxable income of MAP recipients was $23,558, and about 77 percent of students receiving MAP grants had a household income of less than $40,000 per year.  This year, the number of eligible recipients is up nearly 25 percent.

The cutbacks would mean that thousands of qualified low-income students would have to scramble for extra income, delay their education, or drop out altogether.

So that’s one side of the story.

The other side of the story is that state budgets – Illinois being among the worst in the country – are running rivers of red.  Governor Pat Quinn complains he inherited a “fiscal calamity” when he took over after former Gov. Rod Blagojevich was ousted in January.  “We had certain fiscal needs that we had to attend to, for example Medicaid, group health insurance for the state of Illinois, adult education,” he noted last week.

While both Democrat and Republican leaders have said that restoring MAP funding is at the top of their agenda, elected officials are stumbling and fumbling over just how that can happen and, as a result, make the powerful higher ed lobby in Illinois happy.   Political expediency has always been an engine of change, especially in Illinois.

The Governor floated the idea of a $1 per pack cigarette tax as a short-term fix (Which entitlement straw, I wonder, will be the one that breaks smokers’ backs?), while hinting at an income tax increase for the long term.  “The ultimate solution,” he says, “is that we need more revenue.”

Where have we heard that before?  California?

Most states face similar budget crunches, with looming promises of additional unfunded federal government liabilities aimed at state capitols in the near future.  We find ourselves in this dilemma for a simple, basic reason: both Washington and state governments have put more on taxpayers’ plates than any of us can afford.  We’ve over-bought and over-committed.

Yes, MAP is a worthy investment in our future. And yes, Illinois students will suffer tough consequences because of the combination of overspending, waste, and poor fiscal management.  And finally, yes, higher ed institutions throughout the state – particularly small independent schools – will take yet another hit if needy students have to drop out or stop out.

Yet increasing the public tax burden to continue funding an incredible array of entitlements is no solution at all.  Especially when, as Governor Quinn has already identified, tax revenues are down and state liabilities for Medicare and a host of other needs are increasing at a terrific rate.  Again, examine the plight of California.

Increasing taxes drives away business, costs jobs, and will ultimately hurt the higher education sector as well as the economy in general.  It is a well-established recipe for disaster.

Brand managers everywhere are well advised to take an active role in guiding their institutions in cutting costs while maintaining quality, increasing efficiency, and developing sustainable non-government revenue streams.

Sophie’s Choice, indeed.

Measure Brand Equity and Satisfaction

Serious brand managers know that successful branding hinges not just on how well and broadly you communicate your brand, but on whether or not your organization actually lives up to what you’re promising.

So wouldn’t it be great to have a low-cost survey that gives you hard data how well your organization is actually delivering on your brand platform? And at the same time quantifies how resonant and motivational your brand messaging is among your most important constituents?

That kind of sophisticated quantitative data is now possible at a cost low enough that any organization, regardless of size, can conduct the survey as often as needed. For the first time, brand managers can quantify progress in brand understanding and internalization and can even compile longitudinal data on the growth in internal brand equity!

An online survey methodology developed by EMG quantifies the depth of understanding and the strength of your brand among current students as well as faculty, staff, and alumni. It’s a powerful tool for marketers to measure both resonance and impact of brand messaging and delivery.

The quantitative research process identifies the strengths and weaknesses of brand commitment among various internal constituencies in order to plan effective internal communications strategies and tactics.

It quantifies how strongly each audience is internalizing the brand platform, how resonant the platform is among each group, and where and how the brand helps shape organizational behavior:

• Is the brand promise/platform being communicated to students and prospects?
• Is it resonant and motivational for them both?
• Do internal constituencies believe the brand promise is real or just a slogan?
• Does it shape/improve student life and the academic experience?
• Do faculty and staff know, understand, support the brand platform?
• Are they using it to shape the student experience and improve quality?
• Are brand messages getting through to alumni?
• What impact are they having?
• Do alumni reinforce these messaging points?

Important questions. Questions that used to cost thousands of dollars and many months of work to answer. But this new online survey process makes it easy and fast to obtain this kind of quantifiable data, and for less than $2,000.

It’s as simple as customizing the survey instrument to reflect your unique environment and brand platform, inviting stakeholders to participate online, and placing the survey link on your website. That’s it. The rest of the survey process – including data analysis – is done for you. The survey report includes cross-tabulations by segment to understand how each constituency perceives the brand and how well they are internalizing and supporting it through their own actions and behaviors.

Sign up for our October Brand Bounce newsletter if you’d like to get more information about this incredibly powerful – and cost effective – survey tool.

Hey, That’s My Tagline!

Several of our clients within the past year have been surprised to learn that the strategic taglines and campaign themes we created for them were compelling and popular enough that competitors began using them, too!

So now what? While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, stealing your thunder is going a little too far. But there are lessons to be learned here.

The first institution in question had protected their tagline by registering it as a trademark of the university. About a year later they learned that another institution had started using the same tagline as a campaign headline. Since the phrase had been trademarked, the university attorney was equipped to send a cease-and-desist letter to the offending institution. The competitor demurred. Case closed.

Truth is, you can’t legally stop others from using your marketing idea. Headlines and taglines can’t be copyrighted, and a trademark protects only the execution of the tagline as it’s associated with your name, not the words or the idea themselves.

However, trademark establishes ownership. It plants a flag in the ground, and stamps a date on it. Most offending institutions, when alerted to a prior claim like this, wisely choose to drop their use without further ado.

Now consider a second case. This client launched their campaign using a consistent high-impact branding theme – they didn’t trademark it as a declared tagline, but simply used it is as a prominent recurring headline and guiding theme.

They learned a year later that a direct competitor had started using the same headline in their ad campaign. Which college owned the idea? From a marketing perspective, the key is “ownership” in the public perception.

One choice, for example, would have been to simply abandon the campaign theme to the competitor and create an alternative. Yet we advised the opposite.

Since this institution had a significant investment in the brand – months of intense research, consensus building, and a strategic rollout, a strong identity was already built around the branding concept. They owned the idea among internal stakeholders. We recommended that they quickly build robust opportunities for external audiences to see their decisive “ownership” of the phrase. Put it prominently on the Web, use it for SEO keywords and adwords, create banners, give it to faculty and recruiters as a primary talking point, use it as branded event theme, and in advertising. Connect themselves to it.

If a campaign theme is important to expressing your brand, it’s a matter of who best “walks the talk”? And when an institution establishes this level of ownership, competitors who use the same theme end up pretty much advertising for you. In short, while the idea may not be legally protected, “ownership” of the tagline and the essence behind it can carry the day.

But the real moral of the story is this: If a branding concept, tagline, or campaign theme is important in defining and supporting your brand promise and you would like to use it for several years or more, protect it through trademark as a strategic tagline. Internal legal counsel can do this for you.

It’s easy to check for prior trademark protection to see if any higher education institutions or large corporations have already laid claim to your phrase or idea. Just go to United States Patent and Trademark Office website or the Canadian Intellectual Property Office website and search for the phrase in question. If it’s not being used, pounce on it!

Health Care for Sick Brands

Now that “branding” has become entrenched as a buzzword with colleges, universities, and non-profits, a lot of the consultations we’re asked to perform focus on diagnosing what ails a brand, and prescribing corrective action. It’s really brand remediation, a sort of health care for brands – the BRAND ER.

Common Ailments
Hundred of illnesses can beset brand marketers. Here are a few of the most common ailments we get asked about:

• Obsessive-Creative Disorder – Creating brand new campaigns every year!
• Budganemia – No resources to do what you have to do?
• Old Brandage – Tired, outdated designs, photo style, palette?
• Psychosis of the Giver – Campaign doesn’t work for donors or influencers?
• Brandnesia – No one can remember what it is you stand for?
• Multiple Personalities – Umpteen entities, each with their own logo?
• Brandkenstein’s Disease – Umpteen entities, all living in one body – “It’s alive!”
• Brandiswine Flu – Pandemic messages that infect everyone and differentiate no one!
• Research Effective Disorder - Little, aged, or no research to point the strategic direction?

We’re obviously having a little fun with these names, but the symptoms are no joke. These are serious and complex brand challenges. And when you face them for real in the field, identifying what’s really going on – and what to do about it – can get pretty tricky, pretty fast.

The Treatment
Take Obsessive-Creative Disorder (feeling the need for new campaign creative every year or two), for example. Many colleges flit from one creative campaign to another – a costly idea. Consider: A corporation investing, say, $80 million in advertising each year might be able to get away with it, but a college investing only $1 million or less is throwing away hard-earned equity by changing too often.

While departmental clients often harp on the theme that “We need a new campaign,” no institutions I know can build reach and frequency at high enough levels to enable them to change campaigns annually. Again and again, data proves that most institutions begin to get good campaign traction after two or three years. So if you’re changing the look and feel of the creative every year or so, you’ll be starting over from scratch in building brand recognition. That’s enough to make any brand manager feel under the weather.

The best treatment for this condition is a program of brand evolution rather than creative do-overs. It is a way to strategically manage creative updates using new imagery, revamped formats, fresh headlines, and incremental design tweaks so that the campaign continues to feel fresh and new, yet builds on what has gone before. It’s a simple idea, sure, but it compounds the impact of your campaign many times over to help you better achieve the holy grail of marketing: Return on Investment!

We’ll be conducting more brand diagnoses in the August 27 Online KnowledgeBuilder – “The Brand ER, Triage For Ailing Brands.” If your brand isn’t as healthy as you’d like, think about joining. We’ll ask participants to describe the symptoms their brands are exhibiting, and then talk over the possible treatments. Should be lots of fun as well as informative.

Stay healthy!

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Nebraska Launches Distance Ed Winner

Last week the University of Nebraska (NU) announced an aggressive plan to re-engineer its distance ed programming and greatly expand online courses to capture a larger share of the growing national and international online market and to better serve in-state students.

It’s a program to watch, already getting some attention, and probably the best-engineered “re-launch” of distance education to occur on the national scene in a long, long time.  It’s the result of a 2-year study, system-wide strategic positioning efforts, and a comprehensive series of recommendations by EMG, done in close collaboration with NU System staff.

The effort calls for nothing less than a re-engineering NU’s distance education approach:

1. Strategically positioning distance education as an “Integrated Academic Enterprise” employing the same professors who teach on the campuses
2. Marketing distance ed programs at all campuses under a single brand
3. Leveraging campus support services such as financial aid, call centers help desks
4. Strategic expansion of online programs based on emerging market needs
5. Increased brand marketing initiatives to carefully targeted audience segments
6. Creating a unified website as the entry point for all NU System online courses
7. Restructuring the financial model to spur new program development
8. Increasing tuition in order to provide/support exceptional academic quality

“We offer students what they want,” says NU President J.B. Milliken: “the same professors who teach on campus, exceptional student services, current and relevant curricula and a sense of community. Whether students are in the classroom or online, they are part of the NU community.”

By marketing all distance education programs under a single brand, Milliken says, potential students will be better served and operating costs will be reduced.

NU already offers more than 1,200 courses and more than 70 online degree and certificate programs, ranging from bachelor’s degrees to PhDs.   Aggressive new program expansion will be guided by market needs.  For example, one of the first programs out of the chute will be a bachelor’s degree completion program in business – the first time an NU business degree will be available completely online.

A new brand identity, logo, and the distance ed website, now under development, will debut this fall.   Arnold Bateman, director of NU’s distance education efforts, also plans a more aggressive regional, national and international marketing strategy in support of the effort.

All of this requires investment, and NU has wisely determined to increase and codify tuition so that NU courses are competitively priced, yet still leverage the prestige of the AAU-member NU name for students who want premier quality.

News accounts have reported recent missteps in distance ed initiatives by a few big state universities.  These costly and embarrassing snafus resulted from miscalculations of marketplace needs and lack of understanding of the marketplace itself.  Unlike these efforts, NU’s initiative has been carefully and strategically planned, and aims to put NU into a league with the big boys of distance education – University of Maryland, Penn State, UMass, and for-profits such as the University of Phoenix.

With the strong foundation they’ve begun, we’re betting they’ll succeed handily.

Un-sites and Other Lessons from the Frontiers of Marketing

If there’s one thing that has defined marketing for almost the last 100 years and perhaps even more so today, it’s the constant drive to find new ways, new words, new mediums to spark consumers’ imaginations. For daring groundbreakers, that implies huge risks, huge failures, and huge rewards. For everyone else, it means new ideas, new inspiration, and new opportunities.

A few years ago, Advertising Age published its list of the top advertising campaigns of the century. The publication had three criteria for judging a campaign:

• If it was a watershed, discernibly changing the culture of advertising or the popular culture as a whole.
• If it itself was credited with creating a category, or if by its efforts a brand became entrenched in its category as No. 1.
• If it was simply unforgettable.

At the top of the list was Doyle Dane Bernbach’s 1959 “Think Small” Campaign for Volkswagen.

Ad Age wrote this about it:

“First of all, our thanks to Kurt Kroner, the man behind the defining example of the greatest advertising campaign of the century. He wasn’t the copywriter. That was Julian Koenig. Nor was he the art director. That was Helmut Krone. Nor was he elsewhere employed by Doyle Dane Bernbach, the agency that stormed the confining Bastille of advertising orthodoxy to ignite the “creative revolution.”

Actually, our hero wasn’t in advertising at all. Kurt Kroner was the one, among 3,389 Wolfsburg, Germany, assembly plant workers, to flag a blemished chrome strip on the glove compartment of a 1961 Volkswagen Beetle and reject the vehicle for delivery. Yes, if we are to believe Koenig’s copy, Herr Kroner gave us the famously failed and fabulously forlorn. . . “Lemon.”

God bless him, because in so doing he also gave advertising permission to surprise, to defy and to engage the consumer without bludgeoning him about the face and body. Kroner offered up a lemon with approximately the same result of Eve offering the apple. Not only did everything change, but suddenly things were a lot more interesting.”

Suddenly Things are a Lot More Interesting
In following the developing trends in marketing today, it strikes me that we’re at a moment in time, like 1959, when things are about to get a lot more interesting. And that’s exciting.

The explosion of digital mediums. The interactivity of those mediums (touch screens; voice activated commands; hands-free, full-body video control). The cross pollination of technology (using your cell phone to connect to your online presence; your TV to get additional information on material you’re watching in a broadcast…). The social networking rage. The expectation of user engagement. All of these are forming a perfect storm of possibility. Most in the marketing business are still struggling to understand how to use these mediums effectively. What I see most often are still campaigns designed from a very last-century world view – they talk at the consumer rather than with the consumer. There are a few, however, that are paving new ground, and perhaps one will become that groundbreaking campaign that will change everything. Like a great multi-stage bike racer – say Lance Armstrong – (a little plug for my favorite sporting event, the Tour de France as it is the month of July), a savvy brand manager will stay at the front of the marketing peleton (cycling term for big bunch of riders) watching carefully those marketers who break away from the pack, and jumping on the wheel of those mavericks of the race who show the most ability to help you achieve your goal. Or, better yet, know when to leap out in front yourself.

3 New Trends to Stay on Top of

1. Let Others Do the Talking About You

A new genre of websites, or rather, un-sites as blogger David Griner calls them in his blog “Web 3.0 is About Taming the Deluge of Data” are tapping into social network and Web content streams to promote their brands.

The upside: it’s fresh, updated frequently, honest, and less of a workload for you.

The downside: it’s unpredictable, uncontrollable…and honest. If you’re willing to risk the downsides, the upsides could reap rewards. How much, hard to tell yet.

Some examples of these types of sites:

• Skittles, which uses people’s references to its brand on their Twitter feeds; comments on their facebook page; and flickr and YouTube posts as the company’s website.

• The ad agency Modernista! which literally uses the Web as its website. When you type Modernista! into Google or you type in modernista.com you get a Google search page and several small red bars along the top of the page. One is the site navigation (you can drag and place it anywhere on the page you like) and the other is a notice that says the following:

“Do not be alarmed. You are viewing Modernista! through the eyes of the Web.

The menu on the left is our homepage. The blog is ours. Everything else is beyond our control.”

2. Brand Minimalism

Another type of un-site is the kind that takes the brand to where Web users hang out rather than making them come to it. For example, the agency BooneOakley’s site exists only on YouTube.

When you go to BooneOakley.com, it directs you to the company’s YouTube page where you can watch this video

The upside: it’s unexpected, invites user engagement, has a built in feedback mechanism, uses a video interface, is concise, should be simple.

The downside: it’s concise, perhaps too simple, feedback is open for all to see.

3. The Challenge

Probably nothing gets people more intrigued than if you challenge them to figure something out. In a perfect marriage of product, medium, and message, Samsung’s latest campaign for its new phones with high definition cameras is a poster child for how to do this right. The campaign, created by the Viral Factory in London, challenges viewers to figure out how the phone appears and disappears in the ad when the entire spot was shot in real time, on the camera phone, with no editing. The genius here is the chatter that it created simply by people trying to guess the trick. Samsung then came back and posted a “How we did it” piece, which had people coming back to their site/product to see the reveal.

The upside: it’s intriguing, highly engaging, it fits the medium beautifully, is a great example of something that feels self-made but was professionally crafted, promotes chatter, brings people back for more, gets multiple views as people are trying to figure out how the trick is done, and the metrics are easy to track. Not only are the views tracked by YouTube (over a million so far), but marketers were able to track how many times individual visitors viewed the piece, how long they watched it for, and whether they spent time replaying pieces of it.

The downside: hard to see a downside to this one, other that some of the random lude comments some people made. In general, I’d say this is an idea to jump on when you can.

Initial Spot

Camera Trick Revealed

For All You Strategists Out There: Communicating Strategy to a Designer

When I first began working at EMG in 2004, I will admit that I didn’t completely understand how solid strategy and creative design worked together. I had no idea how important that idea really was in the whole scheme of a successful brand. Why would you need a “separate brain” to think about strategy? Doesn’t that just come naturally along with the design? Well, no, not really.

To me, a successful strategy means conducting some really deep-thinking sessions. It’s ultimately about knowing who you are. Some designers are also great strategists and some strategists are fantastic designers. As someone who’s more into the strategy piece than the creative (though I try to enter the creative world from time to time), please allow me sum up what I’ve learned in a little over four years’ time: you have to let designers do there thing, but with some strategy laced into it.

That may or may not strike a cord with the strategists when it comes to explaining a certain strategy you’d like to see brought out in a design. Whether it’s a certain way of cropping images, or the making sure that certain design elements are used in ways that can translate to multiple mediums, it’s important.

For those who are big time strategists who are typically thinking hard and long about strategy, it is best to often repeat “I am not the designer!” There’s certainly a grey line between a lot of aspects and that’s when working together becomes so important.

Avoiding stepping on each others feet can be challenging and it’s advantageous to have a long-standing, working relationship with designers. When you’ve worked with each other before and can almost read what the other is thinking, it makes this process much easier, and most times fun.

But, as is in most cases…, what if you don’t have this close strategy-designer relationship? Well, for one, just have patience. Secondly, you’ve got to be a good listener. Really understanding where they’re coming from goes a long way. It can help immensely to be sure you’re familiar with a lot of their previous work. Lastly, stay optimistic! It’s a lot easier to see each other’s points of view when you’re expecting a positive outcome. These tips will definitely help the strategists out there work closely with the designers out there.

So do any strategists or designers out there have any stories, good or bad, about the challenges and/or rewards of working together?

Breaking Your Brand Family’s Back

The intense cost of supporting multiple sub-brands and independent brands came up during last week’s Online KnowledgeBuilder on brand architecture. I thought it was worth a little more discussion.

Our KnowledgeBuilder discussion reinforced that, in most cases, little thought is given to marketing costs when the heads of various units – deans, chairs, directors, vice presidents, etc. – get a wild hair that they want their own brand identity. For some obscure reason, unit directors are convinced that having their own logo and creative identity will somehow make their units more successful. Maybe it’s ego, too.

But rare is the unit director who gives serious consideration to what it will take to actually support their sub-brand or independent identity.

It’s more than just the cost of creative development, although that can be significant on its own. It also involves printing costs; signage; costs for website, microsite, and social networking presence and maintenance; ongoing PR and internal communications; events marketing; and an adequate advertising budget. How about staffing for developing the materials, writing a separate marketing plan, and implementing integrated tactics?

We’ve estimated that each sub-brand you create will cost your institution at a minimum, an additional 65% to 85% of the core marketing budget in order to adequately support it. For example, if you’re investing $1 million annually (including salaries, operating expense, PR, marketing, advertising, and promotions) on the core brand, then each sub-branded unit should be budgeting between $650,000 and $850,000 in annual marketing and communications investment.

Each independent brand will cost your institution even more – between 75% and 100% as much as the core brand marketing budget. (It’s never a good idea to have a sub-brand invest more in marketing than the core brand over an extended period of time, since the risk is that the sub-brand will eventually gain greater equity than the core brand – a calamity.)

For institutions devoted to the public good, and particularly in this difficult economy, such additional marketing requirements can appear extravagant to the point of wasteful.

Regardless, the projected costs for marketing support of sub-brands and independent brands needs to be at the forefront of any discussions about creating unit-based identities. It should be one of the basic criteria for whether or not to create such an identity, and it’s one of the big reasons that we caution brand managers that senior leadership must assume authority and responsibility for approving the institution’s brand architecture.

I invite your further thoughts on this issue, and thanks to all the participants in last week’s KnowledgeBuilder on brand architecture