Last winter, in a classroom of King's University College, it was the students who schooled the instructors.
The college, which is affiliated with the University of Western Ontario, had recently asked one of its professors to do some marketing work for the upcoming recruitment season, and the students were more than eager to act as an ad hoc focus group.
“They would roll their eyes and shake their heads,” recalls the college's registrar, Marilyn Mason. “They'd just look at something and say, ‘You're kidding, right? That's so '90s.'” The college's website felt institutional, they said; their tagline was wrong; and why wasn't King's trying to reach prospective students where they lived, on their cellphones?
So this fall, when King's rolled out its recruitment campaign, many of the students' recommendations were incorporated into the mix. The tagline, “You Belong at King's,” was gone, its warmth and friendliness dumped in favour of the more directly businesslike, “Get Connected, Make a Difference.” The recruiting website was redesigned, and a new campaign, titled “Bling Your Crib,” encouraged prospective students to enter a contest via text message.
“My colleagues said, ‘It's kind of risky to have your students run your campaign.' But who better?” said Ms. Mason this week. Still, she says, “It's sometimes humbling to have a group of people point out things you should have realized. We're all learning here.”
The students didn't exactly run the campaign. Their ideas – and other themes found while conducting focus groups in local high schools – were handed over to their professor, Kim Medynsky, who had retained the college as a client. “The King's brand is really about being forward thinking and creating a community of idealists,” Ms. Medynsky said. “Doing things differently, creating change, making change, is really what they're about.”
People like Ms. Medynsky, who help institutions of higher learning isolate their essence, are gaining prominence. Certainly, colleges and universities can depend on a steady stream of applicants from year to year. But there's a fierce fight for market share – and the collateral benefits that come from alumni seeing the marketing for their alma mater – which will be won by institutions that recognize they have a lot more in common with for-profit businesses than they had previously thought.
“Some people wish the ivory tower was taller and the walls were thicker,” notes Anson Lee, the Vancouver-based director of customer experience strategy at the communication and branding design firm Karo. “But with the scene we have in B.C., with colleges becoming universities, and students feeling they can go anywhere, it's no longer automatic that you'll go to the university your parents went to.”
Which is why more universities than ever are focusing on refining their brand identity. In the fall of 2006, Lakehead University attracted attention around the world with a campaign which, its tongue simultaneously stuck in its cheek and stuck out at George W. Bush, declared: “Yale Schmale!” This year, though, it is using its limited ad dollars to focus on the sort of experience it offers students, with a campaign that features three distinguished alumni – Michael Rapino, the CEO of Live Nation; the singer-songwriter Shy-Anne Hovorka; and the Governor General's Award-winning illustrator Duncan Weller – with the tagline, “I think for myself.”
“We realized our students are individualists. They come here because they do not conform to the norm,” said the university's director of communications, Eleanor Abaya.
