Guess what, readers? It’s the final Friday of 2011, so I bet you can guess what’s coming: A year-end list of five things about … something. Yep. You’re on to me.
For the final Friday Five of 2011, I present to you my list of:
Five things I wish would go away in 2012, but probably won’t
1. Collegiate sports scandals. Seriously. We’ve seen enough in 2011. I long for the day when I can read the sports page just for stories about last night’s games and not child molestation, grand jury indictments and NCAA rules violations.
2. The higher ed humblebrag. The humblebrag creeps up all the time on my Twitter and Facebook timelines. It’s the act of “[s]ubtly letting others now about how fantastic your life is while undercutting it with a bit of self-effacing humor or ‘woe is me’ gloss.” Harris Wittels writes a terrific monthly column about humblebragging on Grantland, where his focus is mainly on celebrity humblebrags, of which there are many. But the humblebrag bug has bitten higher ed, too. None of us are immune from it. I’ve bragged about speaking gigs, people I’ve met and other bits of awesomeness, often with the requisite self-deprecation. As Wittels writes, the need to brag “is ingrained in us and our desire to be validated,” and while “humblebragging is annoying … it is less annoying than just bragging.” So if you must brag in social media, keep it humble.
4. Facebook. Yes, I know quitting Facebook would be like quitting air. Impossible. But I’m going to try to limit my interaction on the world’s biggest social network to wishing friends a happy birthday. Wish me luck.
5. Bloggers’ year-end lists. Enough said?
What about you? What would you like to see less of in 2012?
I’ve been reading Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul (affiliate link). This book, published a couple of months ago, is Schultz’s account of how he returned to lead the company out of economic doldrums and to renewed prosperity.
In some ways, the book is the typical heroic narrative of the business titan returning to save the company, a la Steve Jobs or Michael Dell. But in reading Schultz’s account about the struggles of one of the world’s strongest brands (No. 72 globally, according to the latest BrandZ report [PDF]), I couldn’t help but take away some lessons that could apply to higher ed branding and marketing.
So what can a highly successful chain of coffee stores teach us higher ed folks about branding and marketing? For starters, we can look at how both entities – Starbucks and (generally speaking) higher ed – got into trouble for some of the same reasons. When Schultz returned as CEO of Starbucks in 2008 after stepping down eight years earlier, the company had stagnated. Obsessed with growth, Starbucks had, in Schultz’s view, abandoned its principles in a quest for greater profits.
“Companies pay a price when their leaders ignore things that may be fracturing their foundation,” Schultz writes (p. 32). “Starbucks was no different.” Likewise, higher ed in the USA has expanded greatly since the 1960s, and perhaps many colleges and universities have also abandoned their core values in their quest for growth, or prestige, etc.
Here are five lessons we in the higher ed business can take away from Starbucks’ turnaround, as described by Schultz in Onward:
1. Don’t dilute your brand. Starbucks became great because it offered something different — both the environment of its stores and its bold coffee — than most Americans could find. A Starbucks store is no truck stop coffee joint, and its product ain’t Nescafe. The company stood for bold brew and a third place environment where people could hang out. But Starbucks got into trouble when they started to overreach and extend the company brand into endeavors that didn’t align with their core. “Confidence,” Schultz writes (p. 40), “became arrogance and, at some point, confusion as some of our people stepped back and began to scratch their heads, wondering what Starbucks stood for. Music? Movies? Comps?” Losing focus leads to confusion and a weaker brand.
2. Growth isn’t always good. Starbucks became too obsessed with constant, continuous growth. In parallel with Starbucks’ forays into entertainment and other fields came the desire for bigger profits from these endeavors. “The business deals looked great on our profit and loss statements,” Schultz writes (p. 21). But that wouldn’t last. While Starbucks was focusing on this expansion, by 2008 the fissures in their foundation turned into major ruptures. That year, when the company announced plans to close hundreds of stores, a Motley Fool newspaper column said Starbucks was being pushed out of the market by a “tag-team of doughnut shops, fast-food joints, and quick-service diners.” When the recession hit shortly thereafter, many consumers decided to forgo a $4 latte, further damaging Starbucks’ balance sheet.
The idea that growth is always sustainable met reality for many college and university endowments during the recession as well. Growth is not always sustainable.
3. It’s the experience that matters. Starbucks is more than a product. It’s an experience. Schultz talks a lot about the Starbucks Experience and references the idea of Starbucks stores as being the “third place” of a community: “A social yet personal environment between one’s house and job, where people can connect with others and reconnect with themselves” (p. 13). Similarly, higher education is an experience. The act of obtaining a college degree or learning a subject is more than an exchange — more than a transfer of knowledge from one entity to another. How well do we in higher ed emphasize the experience — in terms of sense of place (even with online or distance learning) — for those who come to us for betterment?
4. Embrace social media. One of the transformations Schultz realized Starbucks had to make, in addition to the financial and economic one, was a digital transformation. “The times were changing, with or without Starbucks,” he writes (p. 32). “I knew we could no longer tell our story only in our stores. … In addition to tackling mounting problems inside our company, we also had to innovate in the digital domain, to discover new ways to reach out and be relevant to consumers.” Starbucks has succeeded, growing strong followings on Facebook and Twitter as well as initiating sites like MyStarbucksIdea.com to engage with consumers. “For us,” Schultz writes on p. 265, “social networks were proving to be an area where Starbucks could lead instead of using the defensive tactics the company had fallen into employing elsewhere. As long as we did not bombard our followers with coupons, as long as we conversed about issues that were important to both Starbucks and our customers — from coffee to recycling — and as long as we listened as well as talked, people would stick with us and perhaps even become more attached.”
Starbucks may not be doing everything right in social media, but we in higher education should look to what’s working for that company — and other organizations — for inspiration.
5. Innovate, but stay true to your heritage. Colleges and universities are big on talking about heritage and tradition. So is Starbucks. But as Onward points out, the company has learned how to innovate with new products to meet changing consumer tastes. One case in point Schultz recounts is the company’s creation of Pike Place Roast. The product, unveiled in 2008, had “a flavor profile that did not abandon Starbucks’ roasting philosophy but, whether it was served black or with cream and sugar, delighted more people’s palates” (p. 86). Its name also connected with customers, as Pike Place is the location in Seattle where Starbucks began. The product “ushered back in some of what had been missing in our coffee experience. Aroma. Freshness. A little theater.” It connected with Starbucks’ heritage but also demonstrated innovation.
How do we in higher ed connect with our heritage while continuing to innovate?
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I’m not a huge fan of the CEO-as-hero genre, and Onward did not change my perspective in that regard. But Schultz’ account contained a few choice morsels about redefining a brand that were worth sharing.
Have you read this book? If so, I’d be interested in hearing your reaction to it.
Photo by Melanie Cook, http://www.flickr.com/photos/wiccked/133164205/I first started thinking seriously about open systems back in 2002, after I heard a conference speaker talk about the advantages of open-source software development versus a proprietary, closed approach. Taking an open approach in a business that has traditionally been a closed system, this speaker said, would be to our advantage in the future.
The speaker wasn’t a educational technologist or a marketing expert, and the conference wasn’t about computing, the Internet or higher ed marketing and PR. It was a ministry conference, and the speaker was theologian Leonard Sweet.
The fact that a higher ed PR/marketing guy like me got psyched about open-system theory from a theologian while sitting in on a ministry conference underscores my thoughts about the virtues of openness and, by extension, about connectivity, creativity and the genesis of good ideas. (I’m also a youth minister on the side, and that’s actually why I attended the 2002 event. But I also picked up some ideas of value to my day job and other pursuits.)
We never know when or where we’re going to find our inspiration or our next great idea, so we should try to stay open to as many possible channels as we can. Even more, I think we ought to actively seek out diverse viewpoints and perspectives in order to improve and innovate in our own narrow niche of higher ed marketing. We ought to look beyond our areas of expertise and our communities of practice in higher ed for inspiration from other disciplines — even if they seem far-fetched or irrelevant to our own.
But I’m troubled by what I see as a trend among many of us in the higher ed marketing field. We seem to prefer our closed systems, even in the wide-open ecosystem of the Internet. We tend to focus on our narrow areas of expertise — higher ed marketing and PR, for instance, or higher ed web, graphic design or whatever our field happens to be.
Inadvertently (or maybe intentionally for some?), we sometimes wall ourselves off from resources that could benefit our institutions, our faculty and staff, our marketing programs and ultimately, our students.
We do so at our peril.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for communities of practice, and I see the value in focus. I often seek guidance from experts in higher ed, and the very title of this blog — higher ed marketing — tends to pigeonhole me into a particular niche that I try hard not to stray from, much.
But I also look for inspiration and guidance from people and resources beyond the narrow straits of higher ed marketing and PR. I try to connect with a variety of viewpoints in my online interactions.
As you can see from my blogroll, I attempt to connect with a lot of people in the higher ed world and beyond. My blogroll includes links to some very good marketing, PR, news and tech sites outside of higher ed. (Admittedly, I don’t read all of those sites on a regular basis, although I should. I also list them in hopes that you might serendipitously discover a great read outside of your own field.)
The same goes for my RSS feed and my 1,200-plus Twitter connections, which includes musicians, branding and marketing people in and out of higher ed, techies, entrepreneurs, writers (fiction and non-fiction), artists, theologians (@lensweet is there) and sundry other categories of people. Also, some of my favorite higher ed tweeps post about life beyond college and university life. Some of these things are of mutual interest: music, baseball and bacon. Some post about topics that aren’t really in my wheelhouse — like NASCAR, fashion and child-rearing — but sometimes I learn from those posts, too.
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What really rebooted my thinking about open systems recently was Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (affiliate link). I really enjoyed Johnson’s book, so much so that I included it in my list of five good reads for 2010. As I wrote in that post, I find Johnson to be “[a] master of the art of lateral and cross-disciplinary thinking” who “brilliantly threads together ideas and patterns from a variety of fields.” In other words, he has a knack for examining a lot of discrete fields and disciplines — evolutionary biology, urban planning, computer science, entrepreneurship and astronomy, to name just a few — and uncovering the patterns and commonalities in them that offer clues to what enables the creation of good ideas.
Johnson talks about seven fertile “environments” that are needed to grow good ideas. Each of these seven areas — the adjacent possible, liquid networks, the slow hunch, serendipity, error, exaptation and platforms — interconnect and overlap to form an ecosystem of sorts in which good ideas may thrive.
But at the core of each of these areas, I believe, is a reliance more on openness than on closed or walled-off systems. Openness is where good ideas can take root and grow.
Regarding liquid networks, for example, the question arises: Does the web hinder serendipitous discovery or foster it?
We can point out how the web can easily reinforce narrow thinking. It’s easy to find like-minded people online who share your perspectives, and if you choose to interact only with those who reinforce your perspectives and biases, you’re less likely to run across any new ways of thinking that will spur you to think differently about a situation or a problem. That’s the closed-system approach to using the web.
But if you view the web as an open system, you’ll find that the Internet does in fact foster serendipitous discovery. Recent favorites I’ve saved from my Twitter stream reinforce this. Without Twitter, I doubt I’d have found out these gems:
As Johnson points out, “… the web is an unrivaled medium for serendipity if you are actively seeking it out” (p. 121).
Granted, we all use filters to screen out noise. But are we in the higher ed marketing and PR field — or any other field — in danger of filtering out too much? Again, Johnson points out that along with serendipity, error and noise play a vital part in discovering good ideas. “[G]ood ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error” (p. 142).
Finally, maybe opening up your filters just a bit will help you with your career path, creativity or quest for entrepreneurial independence. Johnson cites a study of Stanford University grad students from the late 1990s that seems to support this idea. “Diverse, horizontal social networks … were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks” (p. 166).
In recent weeks, we’ve witnessed the power of open networks in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. Revolution 2.0, as it’s being called, is helping to topple regimes that were presumed secure.
Opening your network a little bit more might not lead to a revolutionary idea, but it might. And how will you know until you try?
So go ahead. Add some more diverse perspectives to your Twitter feed. Open up that blogroll beyond the usual higher ed suspects. Listen to some different music. Watch a silent movie. Read outside of your discipline. Maybe you’ll gain a new perspective.
If this post has inspired you to open your networks a bit more, please let me know how it goes.
Note: During the final week of 2011, I’m revisiting some of my favorite posts of the year. Below is the first installment. These posts are not necessarily your favorites, or the ones that brought the most traffic. No, these are those posts where I actually had something relevant to say, and said it fairly well. Or so I think. – AC
There’s a wonderful chapter in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (affiliate link) called “We Are Not the Poem.” It’s my favorite chapter of the book, and it’s one I’ve gone back to many times in my professional and personal life, for many reasons.
I’ve shared with writers and designers when they’ve had to deal with particularly trying edits or critiques — or what was perceived as personal attacks disguised as edits or critiques.
I’ve handed out copies of the chapter to a journalism class right before I handed back their first assignments, covered in my red-ink edits and remarks.
I’ve read and reread that chapter to remind myself that whatever I create — a blog post, an article, a book, a song — is not me, but merely a reflection of an aspect of me and my thoughts at a particular time and space, and that I should not interpret reactions (positive or negative) to my creations as critiques of me as a person.
And now I’m about to use it to talk about branding and logos.
“Sometimes when I read poems at a reading to strangers,” Goldberg writes, “I realize they think those poems are me.”
It is important to remember we are not the poem. People will react however they want; and if you write poetry, get used to no reaction at all. But that’s okay. … Don’t get caught in the admiration for your poems. It’s fun. But then the public makes you read their favorites over and over until you get sick of those poems. Write good poems and let go of them. Publish them, read them, go on writing.
We are not the poem. It’s a good way to think of ourselves and the work we create.
We are not the award-winning articles we’ve written, or the rough drafts we’ve wadded and tossed into the wastebasket. We are not the deck we built last summer, or the garden we tended, the marvelous magazine cover we created, the website we redesigned, the blog post we published.
Which brings me back to branding and logos.
Our brand is not the logo. Right?
On Wednesday, Twitter and the marketing/branding blogs (including this one) were blowing up with chatter about the new Starbucks logo. (Here’s my contribution.) In the wake of that news, several of us higher ed marketing types spent about 20 minutes exchanging a flurry of thoughts on the topic of branding and logo design. It began when Paul Prewitt tossed this morsel to me and Seth Odell:
Why do people equate brand to graphic identity? The graphic elements are only a small part of a strong brand. @andrewcareaga @sethodell
Seth and I responded, as did Travis Brock (via @EMGonline) and Eric Hodgson. Due to Twitter’s 140-character limit, none of us could very easily respond to Paul’s question, but I believe we all agreed with the second half of his tweet, that “graphic elements are only a small part of a strong brand.”
At one point, Seth tweeted, “I think graphic identity may be the strongest point of brand connection for low level stakeholders.” And he’s probably right — especially when it comes to big brands, such as Starbucks, that spend truckloads of money to get their logos, slogans, taglines and other more tangible brand elements out into the media space.
But back to Natalie Goldberg and poetry. I think people assume that an organization’s visual identity — i.e., its logos — is in fact the brand.
Because, despite what Natalie Goldberg says about the differences between the poet and the poem, what people see and react to is not necessarily the poet, but the poem — the tangible creation.
Let’s do a little word association. Let me toss out a name to you — Robert Frost. Now, what do you associate with that name? Perhaps one of his more famous poems, like “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” or maybe one of the passages from that poem, like “But I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep.”
Now, why would those associations come about? Because you’ve read or heard them so many times. They’ve become what you associate with the “brand” of the poet Robert Frost.
Maybe poetry isn’t your thing. So let’s try Baha Men. What comes to mind? (I’m not going to type the song title here, but if you listened to the radio or went to a club at all in the early 2000s, I’m sure you and I associate the same tune with this band.)
But I’m supposed to be talking about logos here — visual things. If logos are supposed to embody and communicate the essence of an institution’s brand in a visual sense, then the best ones should be associated strongly with the institution they represent. Just like a Picasso looks like a Picasso, and a Dali looks like a Dali.
So, your brand is more than the visual identity. But these days, in our highly visual culture, the visual identity is a crucial component.
Also, creating a brand isn’t writing poetry. It’s more like alchemy. That’s the way Scott Bedbury, the guy who helped create the Starbucks brand, describes the process it in his book A New Brand World (another affiliate link).
The alchemical process … — the transmutation of “base” materials into gold — occurs in the deepest recesses of the human brain as a memory. This memory may be sharp, or it may be out of focus; it is of everything that the consumer in question has seen, heard, or felt about that particular brand. The products themselves are just one contributing factor among many in this mental construct.
On those days when I’m feeling unloved and need some positive reinforcement, nothing warms my heart more than looking at the comment spam that shows up on this blog.
Yes, comment spam may be annoying, but the spammers, despite their often poor command of English, say some of the nicest things! Here are a few — nay, five — of my favorites from 2011:
1. Keep writing such more posts.What more could one ask for from a good blog.This post is very precise yet loaded with information.
Yes! That’s exactly what I’m trying to do: Write posts that are precise yet filled with information. This commenter gets me.
2. Interesting entry. I was terribly impressed and felt had to induce a valuable expertise when reading your info. Bookmarked this page, will come back for more and subscribed in Google Reader as well.
Regards,
Evelina
I love that this one even bothered to sign her name. Pleasure to meet you, Evelina.
3. The post is absolutely fantastic! Lots of great information and inspiration, both of which we all need!b Keep ‘em coming… you all do such a great job at such Concepts… can’t tell you how much I, for one appreciate all you do!
And I, for one, appreciate the comment love.
4. Hi Friends, This day am very lucky. I saw good post in your blog. I pass this news to my friend and share to my FB. My work is [redacted] and [redacted]. Please Post different news for catch the all people. bye and all the best for your future project. bye.
I love that this spammer was thoughtful enough to say “bye” — not once, but twice.
5. What a great post! thanks a lot for sharing with us!! like it!
*blush*
If comments like these don’t warm a jaded blogger’s heart, then I don’t know what will.
