Recently in Brand Strength Category

Student Recruitment: how green is the grass in your yard?

Sometimes you can't escape reading higher education RFPs for marketing services. And those RFPs provide interesting insight into the marketing challenges faced in both the public and private sectors and what people would like to do to meet them.

In the last 30 days I've read RFPs from a selective (but not Ivy League) private university and a large public university that were both planning to hire a marketing firm for assistance in meeting enrollment goals for traditional, residential students. Their problem: historically strong market areas were not producing as many students now as in the past. Their quest: where is the grass greener?

The goal: new students with more money

These schools did not want just any academically qualified students. The private university emphasized students who could afford to pay all or most of the sticker price costs. The public university wanted out-of-state students who would pay higher tuition levels.

And so with their traditional cultivation areas no longer producing the required crop, each place was about to embark on a search for greener pastures. Expand brand recognition and strength. Generate new inquiries. Enroll students from far away. Make more money.

5 Serious "Greener Grass" Problems

How many problems can we list with this "greener grass" strategy? Here are five that immediately come to mind:

• Many schools have the same idea. Will California export enough students to meet enrollment goals everywhere else, and especially in the Northeast?
• Is the budget large enough to support the imaginations at work here? More than one masterfully crafted brand campaign has floundered because the budget would not sustain the long-term effort needed to successfully cultivate brand strength in new markets.
• Is a focus on "full pay" students realistic? Whatever the proverbial "ability to pay," fewer families are willing to spend on high tuition for anything less than schools with top-tier reputations.
• Most students go less than 100 miles from home for higher education.
• Searching for greener grass might mean neglecting the home territory and leaving that open to traditional, near-by competitors.

5 steps for a "greener grass" student recruitment strategy

What elments of a "new" student recruitment enrollment strategy might work? Consider these:

• First, make sure that the yield from your primary enrollment territory is as high as possible. Strengthen what you can to increase yield without additional tuition discounting.
• Do a "pull power" analysis for your current academic majors. Calculate the percent of inquiries that apply and enroll for each major. With some exceptions (some majors are less likely to draw students from far away), programs with the highest "pull power" percents are the best bets for enrollment from new market areas.
• Make sure the high "pull power" programs have really strong website information easily available for students who visit to learn more about them.
• Starting in the high school sophomore year, conduct very focused searches for "greener grass" students around these strong majors, assuming that these are indeed the ones with open space for new students. The purpose of the search? Get students to visit the website pages for these programs. Make it easy to inquire from the academic pages. You're more likely to get students to visit your website than to become an inquiry directly from your search contact. (Keep the inquiry form simple like this one at Creighton.)
• Forget "full pay" and go for "lower than our usual tuition discount" scholarship students. Aim to improve the bottom line without creating an unrealistic financial barrier.

One absolutely essential point

Get those academic website pages in top-order for future students before you do anything else. That's likely to help right in your own backyard before you even start on your Lewis and Clark expedition for new territories.

That's all for now 

·  Join me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HighEdMarketing

· Subscribe to "Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter" at http://www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/newsletter-subscribe.html 

Higher Education Tag Lines: Does your brand really need one?

A friend forwarded to me an RFP recently posted in a CASE listserv. Among a variety of marketing communication and research items included was development of a new "marketing tagline."

The RFP nicely set out the tagline dilemma: "We have not identified a marketing tagline that both resonates with our intended audience(s) and enjoys support from campus constituents."

Mission impossible? You'll easily find more than one marketing communications firm happy to take your money and guide you on your quest.

My personal opinion is that the time, energy, and resources spent developing tag lines far exceeds the marketing rewards reaped from them. Most higher education taglines don't say anything meaningful to potential students about the schools that use them. Exceptions exist, but not many.

After scanning the RFP, I filed the email away. Reading the April 18 Education Life quarterly supplement from The New York Times brought the RFP back to life. What, I wondered, were the taglines used in the print ads from various schools?

Play This Tagline Game

And so here is an invitation to play a game in two parts: 

• Read the list below. Imagine what college or university (or even type of college or university) might fit behind the taglines. Then click on your favorites and see where you end up.
• When you arrive at each home page, do an exercise in integrated marketing: see how long it takes you to find the tag line. Hint: sometime is it quite obvious, sometimes you won't find it at all.

Here are 8 taglines from the Sunday supplement.

• The Edge in Knowledge
• Leading invention, innovation and entrepreneurship
• Founded in San Francisco 1929 By Artists for Artists
• Find Your Edge
• Lasallian Catholic Education Since 1853
• Earn a degree that matters
• The Character of Success
• A College of the Liberal Arts

 That's all for now 

What's the state of higher education in the United States?

"Traumatic change" might be the best two words to describe what's taking place right now and will continue to take place in the immediate future as available resources continue to shrink and schools from Yale University to San Francisco Community College adapt to meet the shrinkage.

Are people at your institution still whistling past the graveyard?  

Over the last two days I've made a quick "copy and paste" collection of news stories that illustrate the change. Had I started a week ago, this would be a much longer list. Here's the array that's come along in the sources I monitor, presented in the order received. No doubt I've missed a few.

• Resistance to "hefty" salary increases for presidents in Idaho at a time of severe budget limitations, defended on the grounds that they are necessary to get the best leaders. Public universities everywhere can expect increased scrutiny of how money is spent. Stories like this only increase the intensity of that scrutiny.

• The largest endowment decrease since World War II, coupled with increased spending from remaining endowment resources on financial aid and general operations. InsideHigherEducation offered another review of the problem, focusing on the differences between small schools that never had large endowments and wealthy institutions entangled in hedge funds.

• A voluntary retirement incentive program at the University of Illinois flagship campus to reduce faculty and administrative numbers. In Michigan, we remember these well as part of an auto industry effort to reduce high salary commitments.

• Williams College ended the "no loans in our financial aid packages" policy that many predict is the first of more to follow at similar institutions. Princeton started the "no loan" trend back in the 1990s to get better yield from middle class students not willing to go into debt for a Princeton degree, partly in the face of generous merit scholarships from second-tier institutions. Both reflected a resistance to debt levels in the face of higher tuition. How high can tuition discount rates go in the private sector to maintain enrollment levels?
 
• "Soaring salaries" at the "very top of the pay scale" at regional Washington state universities from 2007 to 2009, compared to large tution increases at the same time. Another example of increased public scrutiny of how higher education spends money. 

• A "financial state of emergency" in Nevada declared by the Board of Regents. Will academic program reductions be far behind? Reducing programs is underway now at many private and public institutions at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

• Yale University freezes salaries for president, provost, deans and other high level administrators as a symbolic step to help cover a $100 million budget gap.

• Cancelling an entire summer session program at City College of San Francisco to help balance the budget there. 

Shrinking Resources of Every Type

Almost everyone can add similar stories from their own states. Resisting the change underway is a foolish enterprise. Helping to shape the change is not. Cutting salary costs is underway. Cutting academic program costs is underway. The resources available to virtually every college and university, from Yale to the University of Illinois to City College of San Francisco will not be the same over the next 10 years as they have been for the past 20 years.

A New Brand Reality

"Brand strength" will not save individual colleges and universities from change. 

Careful adaptation to new financial realities (lower private giving, lower state appropriations, lower endowments, higher resistance to debt) will force higher education to focus on the "best of the best" at every institution. "Brand" might actually reflect real differences from one place to another as academic programs offered are reduced. That isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Social Media Marketing... the new Mass Marketing Platform?

At the AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education earlier this week, social media marketing was the hot topic at presentation after presentation. And there was strong interest in how to demonstrate "ROI" from the financial and human investment needed in this area.

ROI is a worthy topic to explore if the goal of social media marketing is to increase conversion in enrollment campaigns or to increase alumni giving rates.

But what if social media marketing isn't about immediate conversion results but general brand awareness? A story in today's Detroit Free Press positions social media as the next mass marketing vehicle. Ford Motor Company is enthusiastic about the results of a 6-month social media campaign to create pre-launch awareness of the 2010 Ford Fiesta, ready for sale next year.

60% Brand Awareness from Integrated Social Media Campaign

Ford gave 100 cars for 6 months to "mostly young, hip drivers" who were "savvy" with Facebook and Twitter and counted on them to ignite a fire of awareness. Read more about the program at the "Fiesta Movement" website. The results:

• 4.3 million video views on YouTube
• 540,000 photo views on Flickr
• 3 million "impressions" on Twitter

As a result of that activity, Ford has measured brand awareness by the public at 60 percent, a level that it projects would have cost more than $50 million in traditional media spending.

Impressive result. But not a car has yet been sold. If you only define ROI by sales results (or students enrolled or dollars raised), there is no direct "ROI" from a campaign like this. 

Note that Ford did one thing that is too often left out of budget-tight higher education branding campaigns: traditional market research that measures results after a campaign is over.

Creative Risk-Taking Needed

If higher education moves forward into social media as fast as ROI measurement allows, that move will not happen very quickly. We need creative risk taking, along with an understanding that measuring the exact impact of individual marketing elements on a final decision to enroll or donate (or buy a car) is not an easy thing. Some would say it is not possible.

What is clear is that we can measure the swirl of activity that does take place around a social media campaign. And we can do that better now than we could for traditional public relations and brand awareness campaigns back in ancient times. We can see and feel and hear the activity taking place. And that just might be all the ROI needed.

That's all for now.

• Join me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HighEdMarketing
• Subscribe to "Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter" at http://www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/ 

Branding: Traditional Campaigns are Dead.

"Branding is dead" is one of the subheads used by Augustine Fou in a recent ClickZ article, "A New Definition of Digital."

For traditional marketers, that's pretty scary stuff. Many still don't accept it.

For more than 15 years, colleges and universities throughout the land have been spending major dollars on efforts to establish or change brand identities. Some have had success. More have not.

Here's Fou's point:

• "Most people's first impressions of a brand are what they find in search results or what they read from other people in reviews. Hence, branding as we know it is dead." 
• And first impressions, like the "curb appeal" impact when searching for a home, are hard to change. 

Yes, Everyone has a Brand

Just about every institution, of course, has a brand identity with someone. And it isn't all that hard to learn what it is. Just tap people on the shoulder and ask them to tell you what you are. Record the answers. Smile or cringe at the results.

If you enroll traditional students and take the ACT or SAT, checking brand image is even easier. Check the quantity and quality of self-reported test scores.

Why Brand Campaigns Fail in Higher Education: Old Reasons 

Most brand campaigns over the years suffered from two problems:

• Not enough resources to run the campaign long enough.
• An impatient, unrealistic expectation that what people think of their "brand" will change significantly with a few months of concentrated advertising.

Before the advent of the digital world, presidents and trustees might at least dream that a stream of one-way messages about the wonders of their university might indeed result in more applications of higher quality, more alumni donations, and more favorable press stories.

Why Brand Campaigns Fail in Higher Education: New Reason

Today, in the digital world, the impact of one-way messages is dead.

People have too many ways to check on any organization or product that might interest them. The online world is filled with RateMyProfessors websites where people can get first-hand information about professors at a university. Yes, some professors are arrogant and selfish, concerned more with their own careers than helping students. 

Fortunately, if you pay close attention to RateMyProfessors, you'll see that good and great professors outnumber the wicked ones. But you won't find that in many admissions viewbooks or at many college websites. Bad for the brand image.

We've been in the "reality marketing" era for about 10 years. A few places in higher education were early adopters.

• One of the pioneers in student blogs, Lewis and Clark, names their blog spot "Real Life" and has never feared entries that might not be PR perfect. 
• Muhlenberg College for at least 12 years has had a web page explaining "The Real Deal on Financial Aid." If Muhlenberg wants someone special to enroll, that person gets a "preferential" finanacial aid package. Must be true. Says so on the website.

My friend Brian Niles at TargetX campaigns relentlessly for "authenticity" marketing, another way of talking about "reality marketing." How do you convey authenticity? Trust students to speak about the real experiences of attending their college or university.

Brand in the Digital Era

Let's get back to Fou:

• "Start with a true understanding of consumer habits and expectations -- digital -- and you will quickly find yourself cutting or placing a lower priority on marketing tactics that are one-way, or shout messages at consumers disrespectfully, or hit a ton of people many times (reach and frequency).
• "Instead, you will gravitate toward techniques that cultivate genuine and open dialogue with customers, where brands humbly listen and learn, and then respond with new features and innovations continuously to better match the needs of the customer."

In the digital era, your brand depends on your abililty to "match the needs of the customer" and "continuously" change. As Brian says, doing that requires a "revolution" in higher education. It will be interesting to see how quickly that revolution moves along.

That's all for now.

• Join me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HighEdMarketing
• Subscribe to "Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter" at http://www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/ 

National Merit Scholars: What do the numbers say about brand strength?

National Merit Scholars enrolled each fall are for many colleges and universities an important indicator of their brand strength among high achieving academic super-stars. These students end up enrolled at relatively few schools. Many of the schools are happy each year if they enroll just two or three Scholars. National Merit Scholars pay no tuition while in college.

In 2008, 8,486 National Merit Scholars enrolled at 219 private and 149 public institutions.

Is the number of National Merit Scholars enrolled a serious indicator of brand strength in higher education? Simply looking at the number enrolled doesn't tell us much that we don't already know: Harvard College, for instance, was at the top in 2008 with 285, followed closely by University of Texas-Austin with 281. A host of schools (173) enrolled 5 or less.

But there's another way to look at what National Merit enrollment tells us about brand strength, particularly among especially prestigious academic names: how many National Merit scholars had their tuition paid by external donors and how many were paid by the host school itself. Harvard contribued none of its own money to enroll those 288 freshmen, while UT-Austin provided the funds to sponor 213 of its 281 scholars. In other words, if schools were ranked by the number of National Merit scholars they had to pay for themselves, rankings would look much different.

The Top 20 National Merit Schools: Who Pays for Tuition?

Consider the 20 schools that enrolled at least 100 National Merit Scholars in 2008.

Only 5 of the 20 did not sponsor any scholars themselves:

• Harvard College, 285 scholars
• Yale University, 213 scholars
• Princeton University, 175 scholars
• Stanford University, 147 scholars
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 114 scholars.

Based on this measure of brand strength, these are the superstars in the quest for National Merit students.

The other 15 reach 100+ status by sponsoring most of their scholars themselves:

• Arizona State University, 143 of 169
• Georgia Institute of Technology, 70 of 105
• New York University, 100 of 127
• Northwestern University, 191 of 239
• Ohio State University - Columbus, 98 of 120
• Rice University, 104 of 169
• Texas A&M - College Station, 119 of 161
• University of Chicago, 148 of 222
• University of Florida, 134 of 166
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 106 of 142
• University of Oklahoma, 147 of 178
• University of Southern California, 216 of 254
• University of Texas - Austin, 213 of 281
• Vanderbilt University, 107 of 147
• Washington University in St. Louis, 161 of 228

Opting Out of the National Merit Academic Arms Race

It is also obvious from scanning the list that some schools with high academic prestige elect not to increase the National Merit Scholar numbers by adding their own resources. Perhaps they believe their brand reputation is strong enough to not need the boost of additional National Merit winners. Consider this sample:

• Brown University, 88 scholars
• Carnegie Mellon University, 27 scholars
• Columbia University, 74 scholars
• Cornell University, 66 scholars
• Dartmouth College, 78 scholars
• Duke University, 99 scholars
• Georgetown University, 46 scholars
• UC-Berkeley, 85 scholars
• University of Michigan 57 scholars
• University of Pennsylvania, 98 scholars

Most of these 10 schools (and many others) would enroll more National Merit scholars if they added their own funds to the available scholarship pool in the same proportion as 15 of the top 20 listed. If National Merit Scholars enrolled is a measure of brand strength, it makes sense to subtract the "institution-sponsored" students from the total when comparing schools on this list. 

For more details on the entire group of 368 schools, visit the National Merit Corporation's Annual Report.

That's all for now.

• Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HighEdMarketing
• Subscribe to "Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter" at http://www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/