Marketing (+) Learning

A Manifesto, Meaning, & Marketing

2009-02-13T06:18:00.006-05:00

Maybe Hugh MacLeod gets mentioned a lot. Or maybe it's a single reference that's now bouncing around the echo chamber. Or maybe it's a strange bit of convergence. Whatever it is, for the last few days I've been coming across references to his Hughtrain Manifesto, so I decided to go back to it and give it another look.

My God, what a touchstone for educational marketing.

The Market for Something to Believe in is Infinite

We are here to find meaning. We are here to help other people do the same. Everything else is secondary.

We humans want to believe in our own species. And we want people, companies and products in our lives that make it easier to do so. That is human nature.

Product benefit doesn't excite us. Belief in humanity and human potential excites us.

Think less about what your product does, and think more about human potential.

What statement about humanity does your product make?

The bigger the statement, the bigger the idea, the bigger your brand will become.

It's no longer just enough for people to believe that your product does what it says on the label. They want to believe in you and what you do. And they'll go elsewhere if they don't.

It's not enough for the customer to love your product. They have to love your process as well.

People are not just getting more demanding as consumers, they are getting more demanding as spiritual entities. Branding is a spiritual exercise. These are The New Realities, this is the Spiritual Republic we now live in.

The soul cannot be outsourced. Either get with the program or hire a consultant in Extinction Management. No vision, no business. Your life from now on pivots squarely on your vision of human potential.

Think about the advantages educational institutions have in this mindset. After all, a school isn't selling laundry detergent or tennis shoes. It's selling a future and an identity. A school is already in the meaning-creation business. When your product is education, you don't have to twist yourself in knots to make a statement about humanity--your product is humanity.

So why is it that so few schools genuinely inspire belief in human potential? Because too many schools have squandered this position and have allowed their marketing to commodify them: how many times have prospective students remarked that so many of the schools look and sound the same? Maybe they're distracted and jaded. But maybe it's because educational marketing just doesn't inspire belief in our own species. A lot of it barely inspires notice of, let alone belief in, the particular school itself. Students don't pay attention because schools so often don't give them a reason to.

And there's no reason for that.

Take a look at MacLeod's evolution of capital:

1. First we had Human Capital. You There! Go to the next village and kill everybody because I'm the Chief of this village and I say so etc.

2. Then came Physical Capital. Land, property, factories etc.

3. Then came Financial Capital. Money, credit, dollars etc.

4. Then came Intellectual Capital. Our widgets are better than your widgets because our engineers are smarter than your engineers etc.

5. Then came Emotional Capital. People love our product more than they love our competitor's product etc.

Now we have:

6. Expressive Capital. Our products make it easier for the end user to find and/or express meaning, narrative, metaphor, purpose, explanation and relevance in his/her own life than our competitor's products.

What makes finding and expressing meaning and relevance easier than education?

Now is the time for meaning--not "real-world preparation," not "service"--but genuine meaning and purpose. With more and more emphasis on cost and value, those who will thrive will be those who give audiences a reason to believe. The school that can convey that reason will truly differentiate itself.

Photo credit: biscuitsmlp

How Teens are Using the Internet

2009-02-12T05:21:00.000-05:00

A report just released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows the age of Internet users is rising, with Generation X’ers leading when it comes to online banking, shopping, and researching health information, and the percentage of users from 70-75 years old showing the biggest increase (up from 26% of that age group going online in 2005 to 45% currently).

While middle-aged Gen X’ers and older users approach the Internet as a tool, younger users (teens and Gen Y’ers) see it more as a source of entertainment. Among users 12-17 years old:

78% play online games
57% watch videos online
69% send instant messages
65% use social networking sites
59% download music
55% have created a profile on a social networking site
49% read blogs
28% have created their own blog
10% visit a virtual world

Access to the full report is here.

Cross-posted on The Scoop, Stein Communications' blog.

How Color Influences Consumer Thinking

2009-02-09T06:03:00.000-05:00

Researchers from the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business have found that the color red increases both attention to detail and risk aversion. Blue, however, produces a strong sense of openness to new things and enhances creative thinking.

These variances are caused by different unconscious motivations that red and blue activate, says [researcher Juliet] Zhu, noting that colour influences cognition and behavior through learned associations.

“Thanks to stop signs, emergency vehicles and teachers’ red pens, we associate red with danger, mistakes and caution,” says Zhu, whose previous research has looked at the impact of ceiling height on consumer choices. “The avoidance motivation, or heightened state, that red activates makes us vigilant and thus helps us perform tasks where careful attention is required to produce a right or wrong answer.”

Conversely, blue encourages us to think outside the box and be creative, says Zhu, noting that the majority of participants believed incorrectly that blue would enhance their performance on all cognitive tasks.

“Through associations with the sky, the ocean and water, most people associate blue with openness, peace and tranquility,” says Zhu, who conducted the research with UBC PhD candidate Ravi Mehta. “The benign cues make people feel safe about being creative and exploratory. Not surprisingly it is people’s favourite colour.”

In a study of more than 600 people, the two researchers tracked performance over a range of tasks that included solving anagrams, designing toys, and assessing marketing. Not Exactly Rocket Science has a nice summary of one experiment in which subjects were asked to judge two versions of an ad for a digital camera, one providing specific and detailed information and the other showing generic travel images (things like maps). When the ads appeared against a red background, subjects were more receptive to the detailed version; when they appeared against a blue background, subjects were drawn to the visual, if more generic, version.

These findings also reveal another interesting implication for integrating color with messaging and packaging:

[P]eople were more receptive to a new, fictional brand of toothpaste that focused on negative messages such as “cavity prevention” when the background colour was red, whereas people were more receptive to aspirational messages such as “tooth whitening” when the background colour was rendered in blue.

The release on Science Daily is here.

Cross-posted on The Scoop, Stein Communications' blog.

The Paradox of Choice and the College Decision

2009-02-05T20:38:00.003-05:00

Carol Phillips at Millennial Marketing discusses the anxiety students feel over their college decision. It's the biggest decision they've made so far. It's also the most expensive. Citing the recent CollegeClickTV.com survey that found 56% of freshmen reported being unhappy with their college choice, she comments that "With Millennials under pressure, college marketers will have to work even harder to make the case for their schools. With freshman unhappiness running high, perhaps the place to start is by retaining the students they already have?"

There's an argument that suggests more marketing is the problem, not the solution. This has to do with the counterintuitive argument that more choice is a bad thing. It seems obvious to us that more choice is always better: more choice means more freedom; more freedom means more happiness. Give people more options and they'll find what they want. But Barry Schwartz argues that more choice actually undermines happiness and leaves us paralyzed. When faced with a plethora of options, people either avoid making a decision or constantly doubt the decisions they've made.

Unlimited choice, Schwartz maintains, produces a chain of negative effects.

More choice leads to less satisfaction. More options cause more second guessing because of the imagined satisfaction all those unchosen options might have provided. ("Was deciding to see Slumdog Millionaire the right choice? I don't know. It was good, but maybe The Wrestler would have been better. Man, I wish I decided to see The Wrestler.")

More choice causes escalating expectations. Whatever we choose, we'll feel worse not only because of the regret over what might have been but also because we believe that with so many options the perfect one must be out there. Good results are disappointing because they're not great results. Because our expectations are so high, we can no longer (or at least only rarely) be pleasantly surprised.

More choice shifts the burden of responsibility for our disappointment to us. It used to be that a disappointing choice was simply a fact of the way the world was. When the only available color of a Model T was black, you couldn't really regret buying a black car. Today, with so many options, there's no excuse for the disappointment you feel. If you're unhappy, it's your own fault.

Consider now the dilemma of high school students who are swamped with educational choices. Do they choose a large school or small school? Private or public? Research institution, comprehensive university, or liberal arts college? Urban, suburban, or rural? And those are just the most basic search parameters. Add to that all of the marketing material prospective students receive once they start showing up on lists of names.

While I'm somewhat skeptical of the CollegeClickTV survey, I do wonder how many of those unhappy students are feeling the effects of too much choice.

The Web? We’re Still Talking About That?

2009-02-03T20:33:00.003-05:00

Laurent Haug recalls Clay Shirky’s interview with CJR back in December where he gave a cogent response to the criticisms of the Web’s effects on culture and attention span. Haug cites one passage that didn’t jump out at me at the time but that is worth keeping in mind:

[I]t’s not just when a tool comes along that change happens. It’s really when it becomes ubiquitous and even boring. And what’s happened now is that the Web has gotten boring for a whole generation of teens and twenty-somethings. And so, because they can take it for granted, they’re using this platform to add interactivity around regular media consumption.

Haug has himself raised the issue of the boringness of the Web previously. Both are useful reminders that digital technology and interactivity are just part of the furniture for prospective students.

And since Haug sent me back to reread Shirky’s interview, I’ll share Shirky’s take on why information overload is a generational phenomenon:

[Y]ou know, you never hear twenty-year-olds talking about information overload because they understand the filters they’re given. You only hear, you know, forty- and fifty-year-olds taking about it, sixty-year-olds talking about because we grew up in the world of card catalogs and TV Guide. And now, all the filters we’re used to are broken and we’d like to blame it on the environment instead of admitting that we’re just, you know, we just don’t understand what’s going on.

…

I mean, the thing that people say about young people is just that they understand the technology so well. Well, I teach in a graduate program, I see twenty-five-year-olds all the time. They actually don’t understand the technology particularly well. I think I understand quite a lot of it quite a bit better than they do, which is the reason why I’m teaching there and they’re students. The advantage they have over me is that they don’t have to unlearn anything. They don’t have to unlearn the idea that a card catalog is a helpful thing to have. That you need a librarian to find things. That you have to figure out where you’re looking before you what you’re looking for. None of those things are true anymore. And so one of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist. And it kind of freaks us out to realize that all the things we mastered don’t really add up to much value anymore.

It’s not so much that young people are smart and old people are scared. It’s that young people don’t have to unlearn all the stuff that old people do have to unlearn if we want to understand this world. And unlearning is just about the least fun activity in the world. So, you know, it’s easy to understand why people don’t want to sign up for it. But it’s also kind of pathetic that the people going around talking about information overload don’t stop to factor in the idea that if the twenty-year-olds aren’t complaining about information overload, it probably isn’t the problem we think it is.

Cross-posted on The Scoop, the Stein Communications blog.

Communication Lessons from Information Architects

2009-02-03T07:19:00.004-05:00

I always think information architects have things to teach people in communications and marketing. Then I read something like this, and I realize that information architects have A LOT to teach people in communications and marketing. The link is to Peter Morville's list of user experience deliverables, things that information architects should consider when designing a project. Some of these are specific to the field of information architecture, but many of them are directly applicable to thinking about communicating in a systematic way.

Morville's original list describes twenty deliverables. I've omitted those dealing with things like presentations and wireframes in order to focus on the most immediately strategic elements. (The bolded and italicized text is lifted from Morville's post.)

Stories. A good story about a user's experience can help people to see the problem (or opportunity), motivate people to take action, and stick in people's memories long after we're gone.
Marketers like stories because they're compelling. It's in our nature to relate to stories, and this is especially true of audiences, such as prospective students, who want to hear from others, not from the institution. (I worry, though, that storytelling in much of recruitment marketing has devolved into thin student profiles, but these aren't stories. And they're a creative crutch.) Why not tap into lifestreaming technology--and this generations comfort with it? Not student blogs that get updated three times a semester, but real, real-time, and (and this is crucial) ongoing stories that prospects can follow.

More to Moreville's point, stories can yield strategic insights for how, when, and where to communicate. This is because stories allow the personal to break through the institutional by actualizing processes and experiences. For great analysis of this, read Why? by Charles Tilly.

Proverbs. High-concept pitches, generative analogies, and experience strategies invoke existing schemas to put the world in a wardrobe.
People rely on basic heuristics to navigate through the world; proverbs and metaphors articulate those heuristics. Building your communications around a core metaphor or overarching idea (NOT a tagline) presents an institution in a way that people can quickly assimilate. The point isn't to reduce your institution to a single attribute. Instead, a successful concept is flexible enough (and flexibility is different from generality) to allow for different applications and expressions.

Personas. Portraits and profiles of user types (and their goals and behaviors) remind us all that "you are not the user" and serve as an invaluable compass for design and development.
To whom are you speaking? This seems like an obvious question, but so often institutions aren't honest with themselves about their audience. I've worked on projects where the ostensible target was prospective students, but the administration or the faculty were clearly looking over their shoulders wondering what their peers at other institutions would think, which hamstrings any attempts at creativity that might appeal to 17 year olds. Politics aside, who is using your communications? Are you communicating to the audience you have or the audience you want? What are your audiences' goals? How do your tactics fit with your audiences' actions? Suppose a prospect clicks on your landing page after receiving a postcard. Do you know why they did it? What about the card prompted the response?

Scenarios. Positioning personas in natural contexts gets us thinking about how a system fits the lives of real people.
How well do you know how and where prospects encounter your communications? How are they interacting with them? Take publications, for example. How well do your pieces fit into audiences' own communication-processing methods? I'm thinking here of how often high school students talk about the box or the drawer where they toss recruitment material they receive. Parents tell me that oversized viewbooks don't fit into the drawer or the box, so it sits out. And we know (thanks to The Old College Try) that mothers are the primary collectors of the mail. We also know that mothers are often the ones harping on students to look at the material, or the ones looking at the material themselves. There are all sorts of influences and factors that determine whether your messages are heard or ignored. How does your communications flow account for these kinds of dynamics?

Content Inventories. Reviewing and describing documents and objects is a prerequisite to effective structure and organization. The artifact (often a spreadsheet) is a sign of due diligence.
Let's expand this one a bit to include all conditions that affect your communications. I'm continually constructing matrices to help organize my thinking about projects. They provide a synoptic view of a project's parameters and an institution's assets, but they also help me develop think through personas and define the appropriate concept.

User Surveys. Asking the same questions of many users across multiple audiences can reveal existing gaps and common needs, and show how they map to customer satisfaction.
Are you surveying the consumers of your marketing? A survey or, more preferably, focus groups with incoming first-year students and their parents about their admissions experience while it's fresh in their minds will provide a wealth of information about recruitment marketing, for example. They've just gone through the experience, and in the full flush of college, they're invested in the institution and eager to be a part of it. Now is the time to get their input. (Or you can solicit feedback even before they're enrolled.)

System Maps. A visual representation of objects and relationships within a system can aid understanding and finding for both stakeholders and users.
Develop a map of your institution's entire communications efforts to reveal gaps and overlooked communities and to ensure that communications from various areas are working in concert. This is a big undertaking but well worth the effort. (And dig down deep--get to the programmatic and departmental levels; don't stop with admissions, marketing, and development.)

Process Flows. How do users move through a system? How can we improve these flows? A symbolic depiction can enlighten desire lines and show the benefits of (less) chosen paths.
How well do you know the current state of your system? Many communication flows have evolved over time. Can you map yours? Where are the entry and exit points? Where are the stress points? Where are the leverage points? Knowing how users actually flow through the system or where they enter and leave (and enter again) is key to providing relevant and timely information.

Style Guides. A manual that defines a set of standards for identity, design, and writing can promote clarity and consistency.
Finally, consistency is key. Developing a manual that covers every aspect of your school's image and voice--from publications to podcast intros to vehicle graphics--is a huge (and politically dicey) undertaking. But with clear support from the leadership and a designated style champion, a manual will invariably improve the sophistication of an institution's marketing and communications.

How you organize these deliverables should emerge from the bottom up rather than a top-down strategy. Developing these deliverables is more than an exercise. It's the core of a thorough and intentional communication strategy.

“The Last Professor” Lingers on: More on the Fish-Donoghue article

2009-01-29T05:52:00.003-05:00

Not to belabor this issue, but James V. Schall at First Principles weighs in with a reflection on what, exactly, it means to be a professor:

The great act of being a student is first simply to listen, to listen to one who knows human and divine things, not all of them, to be sure, but enough to be himself awed by them. The “last professor” implies a world in which the young are never exposed to wonder, a world in which they never experience the fascination of what is because they once encountered an honest man who simply talked to them about what was true.

The last professor may indeed disappear from the universities. In some sense, he already has. My Students’ Guide to Liberal Learning, now that I think of it, was premised on this suspicion. Universities will go on specializing and teaching us how to find a job, how to be practical, something that is not unworthy of us. But we will have to go elsewhere to find out about what is.

Cross-posted on The Scoop, Stein Communications blog.

The Proud Heritage of Educational Marketing

2009-01-27T06:36:00.002-05:00

I've often thought of educational marketing as akin to genre painting: certain elements are required; creativity comes in how you arrange them. I had no idea, though, just how long people have been reworking those same elements:

The professor of rhetoric might also be called in to draft a university prospectus, like the circular issued in 1229 by the masters of the new University of Toulouse setting forth its superiority to Paris--theologians teaching in the pulpits and preaching at the street corners, lawyers magnifying Justinian and physicians Galen, professors of grammar and logic, and musicians with their organs [faculty who are active professionals!], lectures on the books of natural philosophy then forbidden at Paris [cutting-edge courses!], low prices [affordability!], a friendly populace [safe environment with great town-gown relations!], ... a land flowing with milk and honey, Bacchus reigning in the vineyards and Ceres in the fields under the mild climate desired by the philosophers of old [a great location with plenty to do!] ....

--Charles M. Haskins's The Rise of Universities

One-Minute Book Review: Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers, Gerald and Lindsay H. Zaltman

2009-01-26T09:30:00.002-05:00

Thesis: Deep metaphors structure how we experience the world. Harnessing these metaphors allows marketers to create more powerful campaigns and develop more resonant brands.

Key points: Most marketers and brand managers face what the Zaltman brothers call a "depth deficit," a lack of rich information about their audiences. Such a deficit causes a failure to understand audience motivations in a deep way, resulting in low-impact marketing. Studying the metaphors audiences use when talking about experiences enables marketers and brand managers to overcome this deficit.

Metaphorical thinking is an innate human characteristic, and after conducting 12,000-plus in-depth interviews, the Zaltmans have identified seven fundamental metaphors:

• Balance
• Transformation
• Journey
• Container
• Connection
• Resource
• Control

These metaphors reflect universal unconscious thought patterns people rely on to interpret experiences. They're lenses through which we view our world. Grasping which of these seven audiences use to represent your brand to themselves yields genuine insight to your positioning and marketing strategies.

Assessment: The authors define these metaphors so broadly that almost any experience would fit into any one of them. To complicate matters more, the authors admit that most experiences do in fact involve multiple metaphors, and the primary metaphor will vary depending on the context. More rigorous definitions and guidelines for applying the metaphors would provide better guidance for applying the book's ideas.

However, overall, the book is worthwhile addition to any marketer's conceptual toolbox. Working with these metaphors would provide a great springboard for big-picture thinking or an analytical framework for qualitative research.

A New Economy, Same Old Higher Ed Marketing

2009-01-20T22:25:00.008-05:00

In "A User's Guide to 21st Century Economics," Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab, poses some deeply interesting questions about what organizations must do to survive the "tectonic shift" in how people consume and save. Most of these questions are directly applicable to how colleges and universities market themselves. I've merely added interpolations to help focus my own thinking:

What is the role of [higher ed] marketing in a world where consumption must slow?

For so long, marketing has been about differentiation--finding the marginal differences between identical products or creating needless differences. The most egregious case of this I can think of is an ad Miller Brewing ran proclaiming their bottles were steam cleaned (and therefore, I guess, more sanitary). Of course, they weren't doing anything different from what every other brewery was doing; they were just the first to tout it. Thus they owned that point. This isn't a real difference, nor is it real value. It's marketing masquerading as value.

Higher ed marketing relies on the same differentiation approach. Some schools are clearly different; those are easy to market. Others, and it's the majority, require a lot more digging. (I once had a college president flat out tell me, "I've been here for ten years, and I can't tell you what distinguishes us from 500 other schools. I've tried to figure it out. We're small. We're liberal arts. We do a very good job teaching students. You tell me what's unique in that.") In many cases, the quest for differentiation leads to perceived value--a clever tagline or graphic style that positions the school a little differently, a marketing strategy that hypes a superficial difference.

We use differentiation because it works. But it works provided we have more and more prospects vying for limited spots. Now, the constant stream of news stories about the impacts of rising tuition, falling stock markets, and a stagnating economy are telling us that students are weighing their educational options more carefully. Prospects aren't going to settle for perceived value any longer.

Haque argues that successful companies in the new economic environment will use marketing to create real value. He points to the example of Nike's integration of the iPod. Here's an instance where marketing (incorporating popular technology into a pair of shoes) is at the same time a genuine innovation because Nike+ is of real value to its users.

Successful marketing of colleges and universities will have to move away from differentiation through perceived value to differentiation through real value. So, how do we use marketing to create real value for prospects? How can marketing serve innovation and innovation marketing?

What is the role of [higher ed marketing] distribution in a world where consumption, savings, and investment will accelerate in volatility?

In the 20th century, advantage was attained by seizing or building distribution channels. At the Lab, we've found that value chains built on inert channels are significantly less profitable than value chains built on circuits - two-way channels, where context flows in one direction, and goods in the other.

"Value chains built on inert channels." That sounds about right for much of higher ed marketing.

We rely on fixed streams of communication to flood prospects with information, but the prospects remain primarily passive recipients. Sure, we might set up a social network that allows prospects to talk to each other and to the school, but it's still fundamentally a "you ask, we tell" model. A first step is getting beyond the admission funnel mindset. We already know that such a model is breaking down: sniffers, lurkers, stealth applicants, whatever you want to call them, are becoming the norm; peer-to-peer recommendations through sites like Zinch and Unigo are also undermining the viability of the traditional communication flow.

Haque advocates two-way distribution channels, which shift the direction of information. Here, the exemplar of such a model is Threadless, the T-shirt company that crowdsources the decisions for what designs get produced. Individuals submit designs, the audience votes, and the company produces the shirt. This isn't just a conversation; it's a group effort.

Of course, we're not selling a commodity, so audience participation has limited utility. But Haque's larger point still holds: How do we rethink the distribution channels of higher ed marketing?

What is the role of [higher ed marketing] strategy in a world where the game is no longer about winning more consumption than rivals?

Competition in the 20th century was about winning a zero-sum game: the winner was the organization that could claim the greatest market share. "Strategy" in that environment was often a euphemism for "short-term self-interest." What must we do to grab a bigger piece of the market--right now? But that made sense as a long-term strategy only when the market was growing. The epitome of this way of thinking was the dot-com boom.

Educational institutions are themselves locked in a zero-sum game: the students who enroll in your school are lost to your competitors. Marketing strategies have always about taking a greater and greater share of the market (whatever the specific target market might be--more students, better students, more males, more diversity). That was (and still is) the definition of success. But very often, pursuing a strategy for attracting prospects entailed pouring lots of money into short-sighted programs or facilities (such as climbing walls and resort-style accommodations), or lowering standards, or beefing up money-losing athletic programs. Sure, it attracts students, but how long will it take for those investments to pay for themselves (if they ever do)? How much real value will they create?

Haque doesn't offer an alternative to strategy, but I would suggest it's purpose. Purpose supplants strategy. If strategy "destroys tomorrow for today," as Haque claims, purpose "uses today to start building tomorrow." Establishing a clear purpose lessens the need for rounding up bodies and scrambling for market share since having a clear purpose attracts interested and like-minded people to you. A clear and compelling purpose also creates greater possibilities for two-way channels of communication: if prospects are engaged by your purpose, they'll have recommendations and suggestions, which opens all sorts of possibilities for broadening their engagement.

A few comments about purpose: (1) Purpose and strategy are not mutually exclusive. Purpose can (and should) employ strategy to further its goals, but a strategy that uses a purpose risks appearing inauthentic and like a marketing ploy. (2) Purpose, of course, must go beyond a mission statement. Mission statements are inward looking; purposes aim outward. No one is going to rally around a mission statement.

What is the role of [higher ed marketing] innovation in a world where greater investment will flow to reinventing moribund industries?

Compare Apple to the record labels. The labels relied on a model centered around products, viz. songs. For them, innovation meant developing new products--new things--to deliver those songs; but this was innovation of a low order. It revolved around the products themselves: albums, eight-tracks, cassettes, CD's. Apple, Haque tells us, developed the iPod, which was certainly innovative, but it was a low-order innovation (since mp3 players already existed). The higher-order innovations, the truly disruptive development, was iTunes and Apple's figuring out how to monetize music downloads, which in turn sold more iPods.

Higher ed marketing continues to think about innovation in terms of processes and services. The Web site now delivers the information that viewbooks once did. E-mails can replace postcards. But how do we reinvent the model of marketing an institution? What would constitute genuine, disruptive innovation? I don't have an answer to these questions, and finding one is going to require challenging our underlying assumptions and dominant ideas about educational marketing. But much like Apple, the schools that do come up with answers will be the institutions who not only survive this economy but who rewrite the rules of educational marketing and are positioned to be leaders for decades to come.

Recession as Opportunity: What's to Be Done?

2009-01-19T09:44:00.002-05:00

How do you deal with a recession? Do you hunker down and ride it out? Or do you look for opportunities?

Think long term.
Right now, most institutions are focused only on getting through this recession. When faced with a crisis, institutions, like individuals, get tunnel vision and devote their energy to figuring out how to minimize their losses. But now, while everyone else is fixated on the near-term, is the time for long-term thinking.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter reminds us that successful CEO's use periods of crisis as opportunities for new initiatives. These don't necessarily require substantial investments. Rather, the point is to reach out while the competition is looking inward, to build relationships and create partnerships now that will pay off for your institution and your marketing down the road.

Think big.
Even more beneficial is to develop and own a big idea--not a marketing concept or a brand, but an idea that will define your institution's brand. It might seem counterintuitive, but a recession is the perfect time for this. Ideas, after all, are cheap to develop. Kanter points to IBM's unveiling of "Smart Planet," a new concept focusing on intelligent infrastructure, back in November, which was right in the middle of terrible economic news. As companies and municipalities scramble for financing, infrastructure isn't high on their lists of priorities. But Kanter thinks that's fine with IBM; they're happy just to wait things out: "With a modest communications effort, IBM can put the 'smart planet' idea on public policy agendas and 'own' an idea ripe for action whenever recovery occurs."

Now is the time for colleges and universities to develop their own big ideas, even if the development is only internal. With that foundation in place, an institution will be positioned to thrive once the economic climate begins to thaw.

This, of course, goes well beyond the realm of marketing. Discovering and establishing a big idea will have to come from the highest levels of an institution's leadership and will require input from the whole community. But proactive and innovative marketers have a clear role to play in reading the competitive landscape and helping to shape the big ideas that every institution will need to define itself in the markets to come.

Is the Liberal Arts Model Sustainable?

2009-01-19T06:41:00.003-05:00

In yesterday’s New York Times, Stanley Fish reviews The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the University by Frank Donoghue. According to Donoghue, the time of the traditional, liberal arts institution is over.

Donoghue begins by challenging the oft-repeated declaration that liberal arts education in general and the humanities in particular face a crisis, a word that suggests an interruption of a normal state of affairs and the possibility of restoring the natural order of things.

“Such a vision of restored stability,” says Donoghue, “is a delusion” because the conditions to which many seek a return – healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have largely vanished. Except in a few private wealthy universities (functioning almost as museums), the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past. In “ two or three generations,” Donoghue predicts, “humanists . . . will become an insignificant percentage of the country’s university instructional workforce.”

The “ethic of productivity” has overtaken the ethic of contemplation. We already see this in the operations of liberal arts institutions: “in the very colleges and universities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, the material conditions of the workplace are configured by the business model that scorns it.” These schools market themselves as bastions of thoughtful examination, but internal discussions are about customer service, maximizing efficiencies, and minimizing costs.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the for-profit university, which explicitly rejects talk about the life of the mind, is gaining influence and redefining the liberal arts model as a luxury. (Just look at Kaplan’s new ad.) Learning should be a means to an end, and teaching about imparting instrumental knowledge, not inspiring appreciation. Consequently, according to Donoghue, “ ‘all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.’ And as a corollary ‘professors will come to be seen by everyone (not just those outside the academy) as unaffordable anomalies.’ ”

The current recession, assuming it’s as long and as deep as some economists predict, will exacerbate these tensions and accelerate these trends. Students–adult learners and traditional undergraduates–will demand more concrete, practical, and immediate payoffs for their investment. (And, as we’ve seen with Kaplan and the University of Phoenix recently, those corporations recognize that their moment has come.) This means traditional liberal arts institutions will face even harder choices in the future, and passivity today will only further weaken their perceptions in the market. For institutions that talk about the virtues of self-examination, now is the time to put those reflective abilities into practice.

Cross-posted on The Scoop, Stein Communication's blog.

Three Criteria for Marketing to Millennials

2009-01-15T20:52:00.003-05:00

Mark Greenfield linked to a ReadWriteWeb post from May, "Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web". I want to pull three points from the article that I think bear applying to higher ed marketing.

Point 1: If recommendations trump ads, the old advertising models need to change.

Because they are immersed in media, both online and off, Gen Y'ers are marketed to left and right. But when it comes to making decisions, Gen Y tends to rely on their network of friends and their recommendations, not traditional ads. "Ads that push a slogan, an image, and a feeling, the younger consumer is not going to go for,'' says James R. Palczynski, retail analyst for Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. Instead, they respond to "humor, irony, and the unvarnished truth."

If this is true--and there's truckloads of research to support it--why do schools place so much weight on taglines and images of signature buildings and great stories of students doing incredible things? Is it just the status quo? Your prospects know your viewbook is an advertisement and they treat it as such. When they flip through them at all, they're not oohing and ahhing over that gorgeous shot of the library. They're trying to figure out how photoshopped it is.

Humor and irony could do wonders for a school's image, and Lord knows there are plenty of cliches and tropes in higher ed marketing to exploit. I know, I know--there's institutional dignity to consider; there are donors; there are peer institutions. But and humor and dignity are not mutually exclusive.

Point 2: They need reasons, not rhetoric.

Sometimes dubbed "Generation Why?" they need to "buy in" as to why something is being done.

This generation is pragmatic. I don't want to rely on my own experience with students, but what I've seen with regard to attitudes toward college corroborates this claim. They view college as a necessary step toward success in the working world, but they don't buy the need for general ed classes or a required set of electives outside their major. So, despite their vaunted can-do spirit, they need a clear rationale for why they must do something--like choose your school. What's in it for them? What is it going to do for them? Where's the payoff? And the answer to this needs to be concrete. If you're going to answer that with some "discover your passion" language, see the above paragraph.

Point 3: Social networks? You're in their world now.

Gen Y thinks a truly "private" life is a crock. ... They're happy to continue over-sharing with friends, but also learning how to protect their updates and set their profiles to private. They're also wary of old folks, like their boss, trying to "friend" them in their social space, especially if they're tragically un-hip wannabes.

The issue that schools tend to forget when it comes to Facebook and MySpace is that for students these sites are about them, not the school. The underlying logic at work is (1) persona creation through (2) positioning. If a student joins your FB group, it's because the group imparts some social capital that reinforces his or her identity. A school has to bring that social capital to the table. Starting a group won't do it.

In the light of CollegeProwler's manipulation of Facebook groups (sorry, but I can't bring myself to call it "Facebookgate"), some schools are pushing for bringing prospects' social networking under the aegis of the school itself. That circumvents the positioning issue since it limits the peer group to a self-selecting population. But what happens to the social capital? Where's the benefit? Is it in the flexibility it affords in terms of persona creation?

It will be interesting to see how this shift in control impacts student involvement. Will the "creepy treehouse" effect kick in? (Here's another question: Is it paternalistic to even take administration of these groups in house?)

Questions, Questions

2009-01-14T15:02:00.006-05:00

A while back, I wrote a brief review of Mind Your X's and Y's, a great book (with a bad title) that examines ten cravings of Generation X and the Millennials. While going through an old file, I stumbled across a list of questions that I'd pulled together for my own clients based on that list of cravings.

Here's what I came up with (and I've consolidated some of the cravings and omitted others):

Personalization

If you were to rank your prospects into tiers, what would be your criteria?
What (besides scholarships) could you offer the top 10%?
How can you put members of this group in touch with each other?
What would you do for them if you had unlimited resources and their undivided attention?

Filtering Mechanisms

Who is your most powerful underground community?
What are your prospects' passions?
How do we filter information and prospects in terms of the practical and passionate?

Emotional Pulls

What emotions do you want to evoke? What should people feel when they experience or encounter your school?
What stories do you have that reflect these emotions?
If prospects had an all-access, what could they experience?
Where are the stale categories in your recruitment process and admissions funnel? (Perhaps one stale category is the very notion of "admissions funnel.") How do we make these categories more visual, more engaging, more exclusive?

Engagement

What outdated or ineffective communities, if any, do you have?
How can we create an architecture of participation?
Are there interactions between prospects or between prospects and current students? How are they connecting with each other?
How do active prospects participate? What motivates them? How do we expand those offerings?
How do we take active prospects deeper into the campus experience?
How do we give prospects a more hands-on experience?

Dealing with Boundaries, part 1

2009-01-13T15:32:00.011-05:00

Seth Godin posted a blog entry last week on boundaries where he mused that a person's or organization's reactions to boundaries (or, perhaps more accurately, obstacles) reveals aspects of their personality.

He presents two possible conditions: rigid boundaries (unavoidable barriers, issues, constraints) and no boundaries (limitless opportunities, uncharted territories).

Each present their own problems for people and organizations:

When faced with rigid boundaries, some ignore them, others rage. A few quit. Most acquiesce, and a handful figure out how to make those boundaries work for them.
With no boundaries, some wait for the conditions to change, most just do what's been done before. Others might freeze up entirely, and a few are off and running.

What are the rigid boundaries in higher education marketing? Here's the start of a list:

Economic & budgetary issues institutions and prospects face
The competing demands for prospects' attention
Expectations of institutional respectability (certain approaches are just not acceptable)
Legal and institutional guidelines
Institutional bureaucracy

Where are there no boundaries? Another stab at a list:

Technological innovation. How many schools are using texting to communicate with prospects? How many are using wikis on the Web sites to let their own students represent the institution? How many admission offices have even caught on to the benefits of IM?
Creativity. Most schools want marketing that is safely creative: different at the margins, but not too different (because, you know, you don't want to stand out too much). Meanwhile, everything about this generation of prospects tells us that they expect creative creativity, not tried-and-true creativity.
Market channels. Why are so many marketing efforts limited to print and web, some stabs at social media, and maybe some radio--when everyone knows those channels are crammed full? The ironic thing here is that so often I work with schools that have languishing ready-made feeder relationships with churches, specific segments of secondary faculty, and community organizations offering direct person-to-person contact.
Utilization of faculty. Set aside the boundaries of institutional politics and general faculty willingness for a moment. I'm not talking about rounding up some faculty to be part of an open house. I'm talking about the fact that a college is a concentration of experts, experts who are (hopefully) doing interesting things. How do you tap that expertise and those networks?

What other "no boundaries" are there?

Low-Hanging Fruit

2009-01-13T06:58:00.008-05:00

A recent article in the Chronicle's blog highlights a missed opportunity in college recruiting.

The piece focuses on a study by a Stanford economist who found that high-achieving, low-income high school students are less likely to apply to selective colleges, despite having the qualifications to be accepted. These students do attend college, but usually at institutions that are below their abilities.

Ms. [Caroline M.] Hoxby and Christopher N. Avery, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, obtained a huge cache of data from the College Board, which allowed them to analyze the entire population of students who took the SAT in five recent years. The data included test scores, high-school grades, and the names of the colleges where the students asked the College Board to send their scores (which is a close proxy for where the students actually applied).

The two scholars used a variety of methods, including block-level census data, to estimate each student’s household income. In their paper they define a family as “low income” if its income is below the 30th percentile, which is around $28,000. They define a student as high-achieving if the student had combined SAT scores above 1200, a high-school grade point average of B-plus or better, and at least one Advanced Placement score of 4 or 5 (or an equivalently high score on an SAT subject-area test).

In one typical recent year, Ms. Hoxby said, there were roughly 21,000 high-achieving students from low-income families. But more than 60 percent of those students did not make any “ambitious applications,” the study found.

Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Avery regarded an application as ambitious if the college’s median combined SAT score was no more than five percentiles below the student’s own score. “Notice that that’s a very broad definition,” Ms. Hoxby said. “I’m not saying that you’re applying to a school where you would be below the median."

But even under that generous definition, Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Avery found that a large majority of those students did not make any ambitious applications. Instead, they typically applied to nonselective (or only slightly selective) public institutions close to their homes.

One of the crucial factors the study found was geography: low-income students from rural areas are less likely to apply to ambitious schools. Students in these areas lack guidance from teachers, counselors, and parents in determining what schools to consider.

This isn't an audience that's plugged in to traditional college marketing--they require a targeted and sustained communication effort that educates them (and their families) about financial aid and about the possibilities that are out there. But it's a sizable group of smart, highly motivated, hard working students who just need someone to help them recognize their options.

This post also appears on Stein Communication's The Scoop.

Busy-ness, Boredom, Balance

2009-01-12T09:00:00.002-05:00

Carol Phillips at Millenial Marketing observes that

“Gen Y says their biggest challenge is ‘busy-ness’, the sheer volume of things they want and need to do. There simply isn’t enough time to do it all. As a result, they see their lives as ‘hectic’, ‘exciting’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘fun’. However, busy-ness also is the main barrier to achieving things that are really important to them, like staying in touch with old friends, making new friends and finding time to lead a ‘balanced’ life.”

When marketing universities and colleges to high school students, there’s a tendency to hype up the high-energy, never-stand-still aspects of life on campus. (At least, I know I’m guilty of it.) Think of how many “24/7″or timeline-themed viewbook concepts you’ve seen. The point, of course, is to convey a sense of how and to what degree prospects will be engaged once they’re on campus. “Come to our school! Bored is the only thing that’s hard to be!”

It’s all meant to appeal to an audience that expects continual activity. But it’s very easy to forget that this busy-ness is also a stressor. And it’s taking a toll: anecdotal evidence and hard data indicate that the use of on-campus mental health and counseling services is climbing; we’re also seeing the growing practice of a gap year as students declare that they just need a break.

As Phillips reminds us, what students crave and what’s in short supply is balance. Emphasizing the ways your students step off the busy-ness treadmill, how they find balance between competing demands, also has its appeal.

This post also appears on Stein Communication's The Scoop.

A Brand That’s Hard to Like May Be More Likeable

2009-01-07T09:24:00.000-05:00

A study appearing in the Journal of Marketing Research in April examines how a sense of effort impacts the way consumers respond to brands. The study shows that consumers who were forced to work a little bit when confronted by a brand viewed the brand more positively.

The researchers’ findings show, first, that brand opinions are not static or fixed.

“The message is that people don’t just form brand opinions and stick with them,” said [Sharon] Shavitt, a professor of business administration. “Instead, they’re constantly monitoring their sense of understanding. They may in fact be swinging between doubt and closure more often than we think.”

Second, by requiring effort, consumers have to actively manage their understanding of the brand, rather than simply processing it along normal (and, presumably, unconscious) lines.

“A sense of difficulty threatens consumers’ metacognitive comfort zone and can lead them to doubt their understanding of an established brand,” Shavitt said. “Consumers expect a strong sense of understanding for those brands, and when that’s threatened it can lead them to be more open to reevaluating a brand.”

Shavitt goes on to claim that distracting situations may in fact be beneficial for brands—provided that the conditions induce doubt about previous understandings of the brand. In other words, not all distractions are helpful.

Marketers also can plant a sense of struggle, [Shavitt] said, such as contests or online surveys with new information that runs counter to a brand’s traditional image. McDonald’s, one of the brands included in the study, could instill doubt by asking consumers how many salad varieties are on menus or the sodium content of its burgers and fries, she said.

On one level, the results aren’t surprising. Marketers have known for a long time that the best marketing will challenge audiences’ presuppositions. People crave a sense of discovery, especially when it relates to something they’re already familiar with.

On another level, though, if the findings are accurate, brand awareness is much more malleable and dynamic than commonly believed.

One complaint: The Science Daily article reporting the study makes no distinction between forms of effort: it lumps physical distractions (such as blurry print) and cognitive dissonance together. My sense is that forcing audiences to reconcile dissonant ideas about a brand has far more beneficial effects than taxing the attention of the already distracted consumer.

Here’s the Science Daily article.

This post also appears on The Scoop, Stein Communication's blog.

Image Maintenance 101

2009-01-06T21:33:00.000-05:00

I once worked with a boarding school, and while doing a quick YouTube search, I found two rather embarrassing student-produced videos. After I showed these to the horrified administration, their response was, "How do we get this off?"

Obviously, the answer was one they didn't want to hear: "You can't. They're out there."

Now, these videos didn't contain anything obscene (other than language) or criminal. They were just clips of teens being..., well, stupid, but they certainly didn't make the best presentation of the student body. What made their existence especially problematic was that they were the only videos of the school online. Any prospective parent or student googling the school would immediately discover them among the results.

The administration's second response was to put the fear of God into the students about posting any kind of content online. But this wouldn't address the prominence of the offending videos. In fact, choking off potentially positive content would only exacerbate the googling problem. Our advice, which they soon came around to, was to encourage students to post videos and photos. Get as much out there as possible.

Now, a recent article in the Washington Post shows how the Obama administration is using that easiest approach to image control: get your image out there early and often.

It may sound counterintuitive, but the best way for Barack Obama to keep any of his life private in this era of cell phone-snaps, Facebook goofs and long-lensed paparazzi is to do exactly this: reliably and regularly release pictures of newsworthy intimate family moments in a manner that he can control.

That's because online, the only way to control your own image is to drown outsiders' takes in media stream of your own creation ... .

By producing your own content--your own videos, your own Flickr streams, your own blog posts--you certainly won't pre-empt embarrassing or negative media exposure generated by others (or your students). But when that negative content exists amidst a sea of authentic self-generated content, you'll make it harder to find and you'll blunt whatever impact it might have.

Canada: Our Friendly Competitor to the North

2009-01-06T14:40:00.000-05:00

This appeared in the Boston Globe on Christmas Day, so in case you missed it: Facing rising tuition here at home and more purchasing power in Canada, greater numbers of New England students are heading north of the border for college.

Colleges in eastern Canada report mounting interest this fall among high school seniors from the Northeast, with a recently stronger US dollar making already low tuition costs even more of a bargain for Americans.

Although applications for next academic year are not due for at least a month, schools from Toronto to Halifax say many students in the Boston area and throughout the region are drawn by the allure of an international college experience relatively close to home.

…

The number of Americans studying abroad has more than doubled in the past decade, and high school counselors say the influx to Canada reflects a broader trend of students attending foreign universities full time.

Since 2001, the number of American attending college in Canada has risen by 50 percent to about 9,000, according to Canadian Embassy in Washington.

Now, 9,000 students isn’t a huge number, and the recruiting efforts appear to be confined to New England, but it’s a trend worth watching. US schools appear to be behind the 8-ball on this one: Canadian colleges are heavily subsidized, making them less expensive than private schools in the US and in some cases comparable to public institutions. Add to that a simplified admissions process, schools with outstanding reputations, and (at least in the case of Toronto) fabulous urban experiences. Oh, and while they don’t qualify for financial aid, US students can receive loans from the federal government (that is, our federal government) to study in Canada.

I’m curious, though: Does anyone know the number of Canadian students studying in the US?

The full story is here.

This post also appears on The Scoop, Stein Communication's blog.

Do Your Brand Values Translate into Real Experience?

2008-12-29T14:44:00.000-05:00

Fifty-nine percent of Americans believe they can judge a company’s values by its online presence. That’s according to a new study by MS&L and reported in Brandweek. So, first, what’s your online presence (and we’re talking about more than just your Web site) say about your school’s values?

The study, which polled 6,000 consumers worldwide, also found that consumers are increasingly driven to identify leading companies as those that are “innovative, financially secure, ethical and possess the biggest market share.” This means traditional notions of competitive advantage are shifting, and that means how you communicate your values must shift as well:

The findings underscore the need for marketers to shift their business focus from being “driven by a coherent set of core values” to one that emphasizes how those “values [can] be communicated effectively at every touch point or companies risk undermining both their relationships with their customers and their long-term success,” said Mark Hass, CEO of MS&L Worldwide, a brand communications and consultancy network headquartered in New York.

Schools too often take their values as a given. After all, information about those Spring Break service trips are posted in the news archive and that page with the mission statement has been on the Web site for years. But the fact is, the values that an institution projects are generally (to extend Donald Rumsfeld’s epistemological categories) “unknown knowns.” That is, they’re things we don’t know we know because we’re too close to them. When we spend the bulk of our time talking to people who are equally invested in and knowledgeable of the institution’s values, we take it for granted that those values are apparent to everyone. However, what you say your brand values are and the values you project can be radically different. (And, at any rate, as this study indicates, consumers aren’t interested in what you say your values are; they’re inferring your values based on what they see or experience.) Take the example of the campus tour: How many schools tout their individualized approach to education–to large groups of prospective students and their families? Think prospects who are looking at everything with a critical eye–and who are hyper-aware of propaganda–don’t spot the disconnect?

Other findings:

72% of U.S. respondents believe that companies can have values just like the public does.

75% of Americans said companies have both a “higher purpose” and want to be financially successful, with honesty being a core component of that success.

56% of Americans said it is crucial for them to know about the values of the companies they do business with, while 33% said this was somewhat important.

Respondents polled in the survey also rated a company’s competition in the marketplace (87%) to be as important as environmental responsibility (82%).

While price and quality may be the primary purchase influencers in tough times, in the long run, it’s values that matter the most. 77% of consumers in the U.S. said they either strongly agree or somewhat agreed with that statement.

This post also appears on The Scoop, Stein Communication's blog.

Welcome to Ninth Grade. Here’s Your AP Class.

2008-12-22T12:23:00.000-05:00

While colleges and universities bemoan the admissions frenzy, high schools keep upping the ante.

This post also appears on The Scoop, Stein Communication's blog.

Phony Facebook Groups

2008-12-19T11:51:00.000-05:00

Brad Ward at Squared Peg has discovered what appears to be an effort by College Prowler to co-opt Facebook groups for stealth marketing campaigns. This is all still sketchy, but the evidence is pointing to interns for College Prowler joining Class of XXXX Facebook groups and gaining admin rights.

What the implications of this are isn’t clear, but if you have an unauthorized Class of XXXX group on Facebook (and, of course, you do), it’s worth checking out Ward’s list of suspicious names and paying attention to this.

UPDATE: The president of College Prowler has taken responsibility (this comment was posted to Squared Peg):

Yes, College Prowler has been directly or indirectly involved with the creation of multiple Class of 2013 groups. The original purpose was to use these groups as a way to inform students that they can access a free guide about their new college on our site. No employee or anyone else associated with College Prowler has used these groups to send out messages or wall posts.

Until about an hour ago, I was unaware that College Prowler was working with another company that may have been using fake aliases to create to these groups. The groups that College Prowler was responsible for creating were set up with real accounts. Here are the names that are associated with College Prowler, and they will all be removed immediately from the Class of 2013 groups(all other names are not controlled by College Prowler):
• Mark Tressler
• Ron Tressler
• Brenna Young
• Lisa Young
• Lauren Plavchek
• Jessica Lash

From a big picture perspective, having a marketing strategy using social networking sites (like Facebook) is something that is necessary to be effective in our business. We do pride ourselves on being forward thinking and aggressive. In this instance, in its current form, we have crossed the line and to reiterate, we will be removing our administrator privileges from all of these 2013 groups immediately.

This post also appears on The Scoop, Stein Communication's blog.