Statmats Integrated Marketing Conference: Building Brand

Building a Brand for Colleges and Universities in the 21st Century
Why it still matters

Fritz McDonald
Stamats

Prospects are tuning us out -

• Information overload - Average consumer is exposed to nearly 3,000 commercial messages a day
• People are leaving traditional media - newspapers are dying, loss of messaging with TIVO, iPods, pop-up blockers, etc.
• The web is becoming traditional media
  

Marketing efforts seem more and more futile

• Target audiences more fractionalized - parents, adults, grad students, etc
• Spending more, getting less
• Technology is the future - but how do we leverage it?

... And there are problems

• Prospects are going to the competition
• Enrollment declining; applicant pool shrinking
• Competition for best adult students is fierce
• Alumin involvement/giving is flat - young alumini harder to reach
• Graduation, retention and satisfaction rates fallin
• Not attracting best employee candidates
• Negative word of mouth is leaking out
  

A strong brand can break through these challenges

• Strong brands bring people together - create contagious passion
• A strong brand can last forever - has enduring impact on everything we do

A brand is -

• Intangible—not just a look, letterhead, or logo
• Action—a promise that an organization makes to its most important external and internal audiences
• Signifier—tells the world who you are and what you stand for
• Expectation—delivers a feeling through experience

Brand = position = your name

• Goal of all branding - own a word in your marketplace. What is DU's word? Careers
• Preparing students for careers is our most valued position
• When someone thinks careers, DU's name should be first in their minds
• The essence of brand marketing and positioning is in the power of your name

Higher education brands

• Usually involve clarifying/strengthening, rather than creating a brand
• The most effective brands are built from your institution's core values

Challenges

• Successful brand marketing is more than anything a function of institutional will
• Must focus outward toward customer rather than inward

Build a brand

• Make a brand promise that matters
• Communicate the promise (internal communication, training! DU's employee orientation is an excellent start; internal communication is strong and needs to get stronger)
• Live the promise
  
• Strengthen the promise
  

Your brand promise must be

• Understandable
  
• Important
• Believeable
• Distinctive
  

Your messages must be

• Relevant (understandable, important, believable, distinctive)
• Repeated
• Remembered
• Noticed!!!
  

Brands tell stories

• Distinctly
• Emotionally
• Creatively
• Convincingly
• Consistently
  

Advertising isn't enough - you must be memorable

• Stand-out creative is a MUST
• Creative must arise from your strategy
  
• Creative must operate on multiple levels of integration - think everywhere, everything
• Creative must work through traditional and non-traditional touchpoints - those we haven't thought of before
• Work from digital out - not the other way around
• Creative must deliver an experience
  
The experience delivered through the creative must match the experience delivered on campus (Don't try to show that you're something you're not)

Launch internally

• Make it a show - to build support with internal audiences, help them own it, too
  
• Present brand portfolio, including the rationale and creative
• Provide guidelines on how to communicate the brand, how to live the brand
  

Launch externally

• Launch it - don't just leak it.
• Do the easy-obvious things first, celebrate early successes
• Communicate success - especially those that impact bottom line directly
  
• Show outcomes - not just the output
• Stay in it for the long haul - tweak where you need to, keep it going; don't quit or change course

10 brand domains - places your brand needs to be seen, heard, advanced and lived

• Mission and Vision (Your brand begins here)
• Finance and budget
• Academic affairs
• Student recruiting and financial aid
• Student development/retention
• Advancement and alumni relations
• Facilities planning
• IT
• Marketing
• HR

In other words, the brand is not just Marketing's domain, so ...

• Help people understand their role through communication, training and development
• The entire university experience must deliver on our brand promise
• Enlist others across the university in brand stewardship
• Review regularly to maintain, freshen, strengthen the brand

Building and maintaining your brand is the same type of long-term commitment that we make to building academic quality or our campus master plan.

Our goal is to build brand equity among internal stakeholders and external audiences.

Over time, a successful brand strategy will become
the central organizing purpose for the institution
and will be indistinguishable from a successful
strategic plan.