Lakehead isn't the only place touting itself as a place of free thinking. A print campaign for Centennial College depicts students as scruffy individualists who evidently have no interest in behaving like adults-in-training. One execution features a young woman with multiple piercings, her tongue sticking out and her black hair hanging over her eyes, with the text: “The freak shall inherit the Earth.” Another shows someone passed out near a slice of cold pizza, with the text: “You'd sleep 'til noon too if your plans included changing the world.”
As with consumer advertising, sometimes educational marketers can stretch the boundaries of what their target audience considers good taste. This fall, Algoma University rolled out its so-called 681 km campaign, which emphasized the distance that students could put between themselves and their strict parents. (Sault Ste. Marie is approximately 681 kilometres from Toronto.) One poster featured a picture of a close-up midriff and the statement: “Put 681 km between you and ‘You're not going out in that!'” Another read: “Put 681 km between you and ‘You better be in by ten mister!'” A line at the bottom urged students: “Plan your escape at experience.algomau.ca.”
But if prospective partiers – sorry, students – were intrigued, others were not amused. Some alumni wrote to the university and local press to complain their alma mater was sullying its reputation. The Algoma Students Union held an emergency meeting to discuss the issue.
While Algoma's and Centennial's campaigns are eye-catching, they don't necessarily do much to enhance the universities' brands.
Karo's Mr. Lee believes that universities and colleges need to focus on the emotional essence of their offerings. “When businesses think of what their brand represents, they look at the real, tangible things they can represent – size of classes, dollars in the endowment, research – and it becomes a feature war, like tech companies talking about how fast their microprocessors are.”
There is one problem with that, of course: “When they market themselves that way, they're setting up for direct comparisons, and not tapping into what is important for their audience at an engaging, emotional level,” Mr. Lee says. Which is why much of the work Karo has done for Simon Fraser University appeals to prospective students in unconventional ways.
Over the past few months, SFU recruiters visited high school classrooms across B.C. and the country to try to give a sense of what it means to attend the university. In the past, the university realized prospective students had had difficulty grasping what, exactly, SFU meant when it said it offered an interdisciplinary education; the words themselves were falling flat. So, instructed by the Vancouver-based corporate entertainment and training company Rock Paper Scissors, the recruiters put aside the usual dull PowerPoint presentations that talked up class sizes and the award-winning professors, in favour of a game that had the students brainstorm to solve problems using the different disciplines taught at SFU: How, for example, would geography, computer science and dance help provide medical assistance in a remote area of the B.C. Interior? At the end, Mr. Lee said, the recruiters would tell the students: “What you've just experienced in the last five minutes is what it's like to think at SFU.”
Now, he explained, “The kids walk out of that with a feeling of the SFU brand, without being told what the brand is.”
