Those who really know me, know I love Tiger Woods and what he does for the sport — and what he does for all things branding. Twenty years ago marketers couldn’t have dreamed up a better representative.
A long, long, long time ago there was a project called the “Book of the World” that sought to collect all the knowledge about everything and put it into one nice and neat collection. It was, more or less, the precursor to the modern day encyclopedia. The problem, however, was that there was just too much information to include and everyone eventually resigned to having an incomplete, impossible project. Then came the Internet. The ability to collect and manipulate vast quantities of data spawned a resurgence in the idea that we can collect all the knowledge in the world – hence Wikipedia.
There’s a striking similarity between how something like Wikipedia is set up and how normal college admissions sites are organized. The former supposes to be a complete list of facts about everything, give or take a couple entries. The latter is carefully organized to contain all the information that a prospective student would ever need to know about applying to your institution. Now, of course, collecting all the information you’d ever need on a site is impossible; the best you can get is pretty close. But, more important, it would be pretty boring if you knew everything about everything. Once you read all the information, you’d be set. Wikipedia can get away with this since it’s impossible to read all the content, but what about an admissions website? Sure, there are a lot of pages, but it’s pretty easy to comb through most admissions sites in an hour or so. The question here is: how does that affect prospective student engagement with your institution?
If prospective students have all the info they need about the feel of your institution from the website – or even think they have all the info they need – then they’re probably not going to reach out and contact your admissions office, they’re just going to send an application. Normally, this is seen as a good thing. That would mean that the branding succeeded, that the experience of the institution carried over through the design and copy on the website so that it connected with the student enough to send in an application. But, this also means that the “success” of a website is based on how completely it can stand in place of your institution – in other words, the more “successful” and complete your website, the less the prospective student actually interacts with the real, physical, living institution. A better approach would be to create strategic holes in the information provided online that would encourage prospects to either visit the campus for themselves or, better yet, contact admissions offices and counselors directly.
Now, this doesn’t mean that admissions websites should start taking the application off of their websites or taking out every third word in the marketing copy. It means that they should admit that certain aspects that are important to their brand cannot be transferred electronically and one of the most important of those is a human articulation of the institution.
You want to give enough information on your admissions site so that prospective students are intrigued and want to ask more. This action gets a dialogue going and creates a mental investment in your institution on the part of the prospective student that gives your brand life. Place contact information around the site as often as possible and encourage visitors to ask more about particular aspects of your school. Give as many different ways to get in touch with counselors and admissions officers as possible: IM, email, phone numbers. Even better, point out the holes in the information on your site and suggest questions for students to ask. The key to all of this, as Toby Keeping mentions, is to actually get back to the prospects with relevant, personalized information in a timely manner so as to actually build a rapport. This rapport is the key not just to getting more applications, but make sure that you’re at the top of the list when it comes time to decide on which school to enroll in.
It’s hard to deny that we get a lot of our information about a lot of different topics through searches and as a result, we end up tailoring our sites to perform well in searches. But too often, optimizing sites for search engines comes at the cost of actually developing an online presence.
For a lot of websites, a high search engine ranking is important. These sites, however, are mostly fact-based sites that don’t necessarily rely on creating an actual presence for their success. Wikipedia, for example, shows up first or near the top in a lot of searches, but that’s because they have the best (or at least most referenced) information on what the search term is. What happens when someone already knows what something is – higher ed marketing, for example – but wants to find out who is going to do the best job of putting it into practice?
My guess is that they’re not going to go to Google first. Most likely, if someone’s looking for a good marketing company for any field – be it health, wealth, or wisdom – they’re going to go to the list that they’ve gathered while doing research about marketing in their field. This may be a mental list or a physical list, but it’s going to have companies with name recognition and who have already proven themselves to be the authoritative sources in their field. Searching for “health marketing” is just a way to round out the list.
Getting this sort of name recognition comes from two things: creating new content and starting a dialogue with other content creators and consumers. Both of these tasks are deceptively simple. In the case of the latter, creating a dialogue doesn’t mean just linking to other blogs, it means writing articles that respond to articles on other sites, notifying the original author that you’re trying to start a dialogue through trackback links, and commenting on articles on other sites. For the former, new content is an important part of a good site, but it shouldn’t be the only content. It’s tough to add 100% new content several times a week, but it’s pretty easy to add all-original content once every week or two and supplement it with dialogue-creating links and commentary. The good, well-known sites not only create content, they make sure that everyone else knows they’re creating content and encourages others to respond. In turn, this not only boosts their Google PageRank (the algorithm that logs who’s linking to who and factors it into search result placement) but also their name recognition in the marketplace. To start moving beyond the search results, there are several things you should keep in mind:
• One of the first mistakes a lot of newer blogs and websites make is to offer up links without any reciprocation. Putting a site’s link anywhere on your site is gives another site free publicity. If you like a site and want to link to them, make sure they’re going to link back.
• Don’t just reach out to the big guys. Start talking to smaller blogs and marketing sites that are informative and legitimate. The best way to do this is to send a personal email asking to exchange links. Don’t just send a mass email out to a lot of blogs; that won’t impress anyone.
• Utilize trackback links to both your friends and your competitors. The good, well-rounded blogs don’t just link to static sites, but start up a dialogue with other blogs, commenting on posts and encouraging other bloggers to respond. That opens up potential for getting permanent cross-linking or responses via comments and future blog posts. It’s all about getting the communication going (and this communication can carry over to Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
Above all, the important thing to to worry less about search engine rankings and more about making an impression that causes people to immediately think of you when they think of an industry.
This month, February 2009, we’re celebrating our fifteenth anniversary and we want to give back to a cause we love and believe in: higher education.
We plan to donate $250,000 of agency time and talent to a college or university interested in developing its
institutional brand. We’re prepared to offer one U.S. college or university up to 1,500 hours of “mindpower” for a brand development engagement.
How? We’re issuing a reverse RFP. Any college or university interested in participating should submit a response by March 20, 2009.
Once upon a time, Isaac Newton stole a phrase from Bertrand of Charles and said that he only achieved his success because he was “standing on the shoulders of giants.” A few hundred years later, we’re still progressing through the leverage of the shoulders of various giants that came before us. However, the task of identifying what shoulders to stand on is still an important task. There are lots of giants to choose from: those of philosophy, science, and marketing to name a few. In creating an authentic brand, narrowing that field is extremely important.
When developing a brand, there are a number of different routes to pursue, but the important thing to keep in mind is to choose the right giant as inspiration. We’ve written briefly about authenticity in marketing, but there’s more to the game. If you’re going to create an authentic brand, you’ve got to choose the right inspiration. There are many people “out there” proclaiming that you’ve got to follow a particular path to forming a brand, whether its integrating the latest technology or segmenting the specific audience that you speak to. When it all comes down to it, however, there’s no fast track to creating an authentic brand.
To develop an authentic brand, you’ve got to choose your own giants. The shoulders of giants, frankly, don’t support just anything. You’ve got to be able to build upon already developed principles in a particular area in order to contribute something unique and create a one-of-a-kind brand. This involves a rigorous process of questioning: “What do you stand for?”, “What are your long-term goals?”, “Are you pursuing the right methods to achieve these goals and develop these principles?”
While it’s easy to get caught up in the technological revolution, it’s also important to realize that only a segment of the population is really on the cutting-edge of technology. A lot of people blog and use RSS feeds and Facebook, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it fits your brand. A large part of creating your brand means admitting who you aren’t, however difficult that may be. I’ve seen a lot of institutions implement cutting-edge technology when their demographic isn’t ready for it or would rather see a more straight-forward approach.
Bless your hearts, you presidents, vice presidents, CMOs, college deans and provosts, who somehow think you can “do” branding without doing any soul searching or gut wrenching. Sorry, folks – ain’t gonna happen.
Branding is about finding and sharing your “essence,” your raison d’etre. That sounds innocuous. Don’t kid yourself. It’s like going through adolescence all over again – the agonizing process of understanding who you are and how you fit in (or don’t). Think psychotherapy, with a twist: You have to shine a bright light on every zit, scar, and ingrown hair and – worse yet – you have to do it in front of strangers.
Bless your hearts (again), some of you just aren’t up to it. Maybe what you really want is a little teeth-whitening, a little hair-fluff, a nip and a tuck. But that isn’t branding – although there are plenty of firms who will be happy to give you an instant makeover and hurry on down to the bank.
Not me. Not Mindpower. If you ask us to be your branding partner, we’re going to “do” real branding, as messy as it can get. Count on us to slip past your facade and examine inside, underside, and backside. You’ll squirm a little, grunt and groan, and will (frankly) feel a little like someone’s going through your underwear drawer.
You’ll live through it. Better yet, you’ll come out of the process more sure of who you are than ever before. And (surprise), you’ll find out that people out there (your “market”) will actually like you for who you really are. You never needed that facade, after all.
To all you presidents, vice presidents, etc., who are reluctant to do “real” branding, I have but one thing to say:
What bus you ask? Why the Brand Bus, of course. When we sign on as a client’s marketing partner, we tell them that one of our goals is to help them unleash their own mindpower. It’s kind of like the relationship you have with, say, your doctor or tax accountant. You hire them to give you expert advice but ultimately it’s up to you to eat your veggies and spend wisely.
It’s the same with us. We’re expert marketers, and although we do draw the map and typically ride in the front seat, we don’t want to be the ones driving. Your brand belongs to you. And this week we’d like to give our very first Driver’s Seat Award to the Augsburg College Auggies for getting behind the wheel and putting the pedal to the metal.
Kelly and I visited the downtown Minneapolis campus last week and were as proud as Georgia peaches to find that the campus community is living and breathing its brand. Ask anyone on campus what it means to be and Auggie and they’ll have an answer based on their own experience and passion for the place (Imagine how that works with prospective families and donors!)
Take a quick photo tour of how admissions, student life, physical plant, and campus planning are all driving in the same direction.
Remember back in February when Starbucks closed stores from 5:30 to 9 to get back to basics? Yeah, I remember, too. It was February 26th.
As a marketer, I thought “how cool is that! Starbucks is willing to lose revenue for a few hours but those losses will payoff tenfold plus after the fact.” I even used the store closings as an example of embracing your mission and living your brand in numerous meetings with clients and colleagues.
Wow! Go Howard Schultz! Now that’s sticking to your guns. Six-weeks after returning as CEO, and five days before the store closings, Mr. Schultz shared an email with Starbucks’ partners and staff about his plans for changes that would enhance the customer experience and return to the company to its core: all things coffee. Read the message here.
Earlier this week, I opened USA Today and an interesting ad caught my eye. I had to read it a couple times to realize it was a Starbucks’ ad. The ad was introducing Vivanno smoothies.
Whatever! So much for gun-sticking. On the heels of making a big deal about closing stores for the bettering of baristas, enhancing the customer experience and getting back to their coffee-core, and of course, closing 600 stores, Starbucks, a branding case study, is adding a non-coffee product to their lineup.
To make sure I wasn’t being unfair to my perception of what was happening, I visited the Starbucks’ website to read their mission statement. Yep. It’s supposed to be all about the coffee. That’s (supposed to be) their “brand.”
Damn. I’m disappointed.
My advice to Starbucks, my clients, and clients-to-be: Don’t be emulative. Don’t be all things to all people. Just because everyone else is doing “all this” or offering “all that” doesn’t mean you should, too. Be bold enough to be who you are and do what you do best. Stick to it. Do “that” better than anyone else and the “right” people will find you and love you for it and they’ll stay loyal for a long, long time.
See ya. I’m going to Dunkin’ Donuts. And, I don’t even have to shower first.
