Worth Doing? Yes Possible? Maybe

Good article in University Business this month with an outstanding quote that pretty much sums up the difficulty with integrated marketing on a college campus by Don Shutlz of Northwestern University, "You can never integrate higher education marketing because no one on any campus ever wants to be integrated into anything."

So far, in my own process I have developed the key messages and we are kicking around taglines. The good news is that we are on time and the value of the process reveals itself with each step. The bad news is that most of the taglines are in my head, and that seems to be the thing that feels like it is getting most of the kicking.

I have to admit that several days in the past two weeks I have wanted to give up. I feel like I'm five miles into a marathon and I see that the finish line is being moved and so it just seems easier to die where I am at rather than keep running. Overly dramatic - sure, but I think if we are honest with ourselves we live in some fear of the moment that a President, board member, or other looks at months of work and says - "Let's just do this instead." Or the dreaded in my mind, "I don't like it." I don't dread "I don't like it," because my self worth is in the work, I dread it because if we are going to just argue about opinions then there are no winners.

Research is continuing to become more and more valuable, and harder to take the time for and come by.

Our Communication

Over the past several weeks I have been getting together with key groups on campus and brainstorming, "What are our key messages?", "Why do people come here?", "What do we want to accomplish in their lives?". It has been a lot of fun, and as I have been out on this tour I'm hit by the power of a marketing leader getting out and firing others up about marketing. In the past, I have probably ebbed and flowed in terms of getting out and keeping the marketing fire burning, but this exercise has shown me that when you talk about it, people can get excited.

One of the great things about having a blog is that you can shamelessly promote friends and relatives, and an article from an athletic training journal written by my brother seemed to hit a lot of great points along these lines. The article refers to another book, but one of the communicaiton assumptions that it states well is that we assume the person we are talking to, "cares about the request and will act accordingly to fulfill the request."

So many things in marketing rely on other people that I hope I don't ever make the mistake of assuming those things. As a communicator it is more than my job to communicate "stuff", I have to package it in such a way that it inspires people to get involved and do their best work.

My deadline for delivering my initial research and ideas is two weeks away, and I'm more excited about this job and this field than I have been in a long time because I can see the vision.

The funny visionary quote of the week comes from Steven Wright who says, "I'm a peripheral visionary. I can see into the future, just way off to the side."

I hope that you are excited about what you're doing today, because it could be life changing for a student sitting somewhere asking the eternal question, "What do I want to do with my life."

Web posts of interest

Our new web content editor has gotten the first draft of the marketing and media relations website up and running. It is at http://www.crown.edu/4615.0.html. The site still needs significant work, but since the new content editor started we have made pretty good strides in making sure that the news and events are updated weekly. I know - kid stuff - but there are no small steps up the marketing mountain.

Sub-brands

"I'm a special case." That seems to be the common theme when you begin to talk about a brand. It seems so hard to develop a brand that is rigid enough to be meaningful, yet elastic enough to allow individual expression and departmental differences.

Most of the time I like the give the analogy of Coke and Diet Coke. No one really wants to be Diet Coke, but they tend to understand that the brand looks different but the same. Another place this analogy seems to fall down is the question of what if someone doesn't like the Coke brand in the first place. Worse yet, what if someone just doesn't like Coke.

It seems like on a college campus this is primary to confronting the marketing conundrum. Professors, staff and others want to change the institution in some cases by changing the brand. Of equal problem are brands that don't really reflect the campus.

The most interesting story I have recently of this is that an admissions counselor got up at a college fair and stated that we were the only "Christian" college in our state with a certain program. This caused quiet a flap with two schools sitting on the stage who feel that they fit the definition of Christian, though they don't fit the admissions counselors. We can talk about Christian or any other word, but the truth is that as marketers we have made some words meaningless. I would say excellence in academics falls into that category. Just what does that mean?

Thoughts? I'd appreciate even a brief comment or two, I'm not sure that I'm not just typing to myself.