Month: September 2014

Branding rules in Cornell’s ‘breaking the rules’ campaign for engineering

Cornell Engineering's Brand Ambassador Kit focuses on "breaking the rules"
Cornell Engineering’s Brand Ambassador Kit focuses on “breaking the rules”

Maybe it’s because I work at a STEM-focused university where engineering has been a big deal for nearly 150 years.

Or maybe it’s because I’m a geek for stories about brand strategies in higher education.

Maybe (probably) it’s a combination. But this tweet from Allen Ward of Cornell University’s engineering school caught my attention.

The magazine article discusses the rationale behind a recent rebranding of Cornell’s College of Engineering. Or as they like to call it on their website, Cornell Engineering — no reference to “college of.” This is part of the brand strategy, for according to the engineering alumni magazine article, “Simply connecting the word ‘engineering’ to the reputation of Cornell changes the outcome dramatically” in terms of equating the college with the reputation of Cornell.

I was intrigued by this brand strategy because, at first blush, I wouldn’t think that Cornell’s engineering programs to have much of a brand identity problem. They’re baked in to a 150-year-old Ivy League university, so the prestige of the Cornell name is in the engineering college’s DNA. The latest U.S. News & World Report rankings place Cornell Engineering seventh among all doctorate-granting engineering schools. Furthermore, “The college … [has] world-class faculty, students, staff, and alumni working at the frontiers of their disciplines in fields as diverse as nanobiotechnology and satellite design,” the article points out. But market research revealed that “the broader public didn’t know much about” the college.

Then came the article’s money quote, from the college’s dean, Lance Collins:

There is a humility here at Cornell Engineering that might be called humility to a fault. I realized that we need to tell our story more effectively.

This seems to be a universal concern among leaders of STEM-focused institutions. Our hard-working engineers and scientists are more concerned about solving problems and making things than about promoting what they do.

So Cornell Engineering hired Dawn McWillliams, its first marketing director, and a marketing firm to build a brand strategy and get the word out. They developed a brand identity around the theme of “breaking the rules.” (This notion of rule-breaking was not immediately accepted by the cautions engineering faculty. As McWilliams says in the article: “Some people raised the question: Do we really want to be telling 18-year-olds to break the rules? In the end, it was good to hear their concerns because they helped us sharpen our message.”)

A branding microsite for the college provides a wealth of information to help the college students, staff and faculty share the brand. It goes into great detail — all the way down to specific phrases. The humble but (very likely) detail-oriented engineers at Cornell ought to appreciate the site’s level of detail.

In addition to the marketing firm, Cornell Engineering has hired a creative firm to develop some promotional videos, like this one:

There’s a lot to like about Cornell Engineering’s approach with the new brand rollout. It emphasizes strong visuals, marshaling brand ambassadors among students, alumni, staff and faculty, and content marketing (i.e., storytelling). Yet as with all marketing campaigns, the storytelling must be informed by listening. The humble engineers of Cornell and their leader, Dean Collins, must do more than tell their story more effectively. They must be sure that those they want to hear the story are listening.

Overall, this approach to branding doesn’t break any new ground. But it appears to be well-thought-out and well-planned.

To break the rules, you first have to know the rules. And it seems that Cornell Engineering know the rules well.

Friday Five: Review: The Innovation Book

Innovation_bookThere’s no shortage of books and articles and blogs about innovation. In fact, the term itself has become such a junk word that I hesitate to bring it up.

But I asked Max McKeown for a copy of his latest book, The Innovation Book, which was released earlier this year, and he was kind enough to send me one to review. So I knew I couldn’t get away with not using the i-word in this post.

Given the volume of writing on this topic, McKeown isn’t exactly plowing new ground with this book. But if you’re interested in the subject, as I am (especially as it pertains to higher education and marketing), you might find this book valuable as a resource and reference.

Here are five key takeaways I got from reading The Innovation Book. (Disclaimer: Since I’ve read very little on this topic, my take on the contents of McKeown’s book may be considered naive by innovation fanatics.)

  • A practical handbook for would-be innovators. This book is organized in a way that serves as a handbook or manual for would-be innovators. It’s broken into six sections, each with “action topics” related to its section. McKeown encourages readers to “dip in and out of each topic as you choose.” The final section — “the innovator’s toolkit” — is filled with approaches to problem-solving and creative thinking designed to help the reader think differently about a problem. There, and throughout the book, McKeown emphasizes the point that innovation is about “practical creativity.”
  • Written for organizations. McKeown emphasizes that innovation is a team sport. No matter what business you’re in, innovation seldom occurs in a vacuum, or by the hand of a lone tinkerer. It is a collaborative endeavor. The Innovation Book is written with that in mind. It addresses innovation from an organizational standpoint. He discusses the benefits and drawbacks of different organizational approaches (open versus closed systems, for example) or team composition (functional, lightweight, heavyweight or autonomous) and notes that different types of work environments tend to encourage different types of innovation. He also points out that organizational culture can be a significant factor as to whether innovation thrives.
  • Challenging to-dos. Each subsection, or action topic, of McKeown’s book ends with a challenging assignment for the reader under the header “Do this now!” At the end of Part 1’s first action topic (“Nurturing your creative genius”), he urges readers to “Spend 10 minutes finding out why other people love a new idea that you hate.” The point of each exercise is to apply the lessons of that section to our everyday lives. And it’s a good practice (in theory, anyway; I’ve yet to implement any of the to-dos).
  • Off-the-beaten-path examples. As I said, I haven’t read a lot about innovation, but much of what I’ve read tends to focus on case studies or anecdotes from well-known companies — such as Apple or Google — or in higher education, from a handful of institutions (MIT, Stanford, Arizona State). And much of my reading has been USA-centric. So it was refreshing to read about many examples of innovation from around the world. These include Dassault Systemes, a French company that is merging virtual reality and 3-D printing, and Kweichow Moutai, a producer of Chinese liquor that brought innovation into a 2,000-year brewing tradition.
  • Not a recipe for innovation. The one thing I liked most about McKeown’s approach to this topic is his objectivity. He does not approach innovation with a pre-conceived idea that Idea X will work for Situation Y all of the time. Based on his research, he shares the pros and cons of various approaches and lets the reader decide which ideas might work best for a particular situation. More than anything, he acknowledges the innovation can be a messy business.

While The Innovation Book is not written specifically for those of us in higher education, or even in marketing, the principles it outlines can serve us well as we think about ways to do things not just differently, but also better. As McKeown, ever the pragmatist, cautions: “Some people are so new-idea hungry they have a kind of novelty fetish. These change addicts are not as interested in whether the new idea makes anything better as they are in the newness itself. … You want to make room for new ideas without gutting systems that already work.”

Follow Max McKeown on Twitter: @MaxMcKeown.