books – Page 44 – Andrew Careaga

It’s the final Friday of 2013, which means it’s time to do a backwards glance at the contents of this blog over the past 12 months. And time for a bit of introspection.

At a time when the experts are saying (again) that blogging is dead (again) — or at least dead for anyone except “40-somethings with kids” (I’m 50-something and have no kids) — I do have to stop and wonder whether there’s any value in a traditional blog like this versus, say, a tumblr. (Except, as I reported earlier this year, I haven’t exactly gotten the hang of the whole tumblr thing.) But then I look at the handful of fine higher ed-focused blogs that are out there, and the value they bring to their target audiences, I have to think that blogging still has a purpose.

And therefore, I plan to continue to publish this blog in 2014. And just as it was in 2013, the frequency of posts will likely be sporadic and sometimes off-topic, but I hope that some of you find some value in the topics I write about, just as you did this past year.

Here are the five (or so) blog posts that I thought brought some value, if not a little bit of insight, to the higher ed community in 2013:

The elements of a great #highered Twitter account. First on the list is a two-part post, and its success belongs to all of you much more than it does to me. For this reason, the topic is probably the best example of how these old-fashioned blogs can still foster conversation among members of a community of practice, and tap into the hive mind to generate great ideas. The discussion began with a post last April in which I took Education Dive to task for their approach to ranking the top Twitter accounts in higher ed. (Education Dive relied on two criteria — number of followers and Klout score — plus an undefined “subjective appraisal” to determine the best of the best.) In that April post, I called on the higher ed community to share their thoughts on what makes a great Twitter account, and you responded in droves. I sifted through those comments to create the second part of this discussion in May: The elements of a great #highered Twitter account.
‘College (Un)bound’ and the frog in the kettle. My thoughts on Jeff Selingo’s 2013 book College (Un)bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students. One of my highlights in 2013 was getting to meet Jeff Selingo at the CASE Annual Assembly last July in San Francisco.
Content strategy is fine, but… A suggestion that, instead of focusing so heavily on content strategy, we take a look at the needs and wants of our customers and come up with an audience strategy.
Media relations in a disintermediated world. As a former journalist turned PR/media relations practitioner turned brand manager, the role of media relations and the news media is a recurring topic for me. I wrote this back in October, and will also be presenting on this subject in June 2014 at a regional PRSA conference in Springfield, Mo.
Boring old brand-building. A post that builds off of a quote from the greatest branding book ever written, Al and Laura Ries’s The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.

Thanks so much for reading in 2013, and for sharing your thoughts in the comments, on Twitter, and elsewhere. I wish you all a successful 2014 in all measures.

Brand building is boring work. What works best is absolute consistency over an extended period of time.

Al Ries and Laura Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding

The Rieses are right. Building a brand can be tedious work.

And who likes tedious? Certainly not creative people like us, right? We want variety. We want new.

And certainly not academic schools, departments, research centers or programs that want to do their own thing — “make a big splash!” — rather than stick with the university brand.

Tim Nekritz wrote about this issue recently. He describes it as a personal branding issue. Which it certainly is. Personal branding applied to academic programs is a new twist, and one I hadn’t thought about before Tim wrote about it.

But this issue of everyone wanting his or her own brand — of every department, every program, every student group, every sports program — is even more deeply entrenched in our culture. Because it’s embedded in our human nature.

We humans are easily bored.

We get tired of the same old thing. We crave something new.

Think about it. What graphic designer would be content to merely enforce an institution’s graphic identity standards, day in and day out, without desiring a more creative outlet of some sort? That’s why they’re doing freelance work at 1 in the morning. (More about that in this infographic. But I digress.)

The most successful brands are those that find a distinctive niche in the marketplace and stick with it. Which means they must be consistent — in their messaging and identity. Even established brands, when they make changes, are most successful when those changes are not jarring to the customers. (Contrast Starbucks’ successful minor tweaking of its graphic identity in 2011 with the great Gap logo debacle of 2010.)

One of the key takeaways from the recent CASE Summit, which I wrote about in my previous post, was “routine matters.” People notice the regular, not the irregular. This applies to the world of branding as much as it applies to our behavior.

Safe sports cars?

Or consider an example from Al and Laura Ries in The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.

“Volvo has been selling safety for thirty-five years,” write Al and Laura Ries. (My edition of this book was published in 2002, so tack on another 11 years to that figure.) And selling safety has worked for Volvo. Even when Consumer Reports ranks some other make and model as the safest brand, Volvo is usually perceived as the standard for safety.

But “every once in a while,” the Rieses write, “someone at a company like Volvo gets a bright idea. ‘Why should we limit ourselves to dull, boring, safe sedans? Why don’t we branch out into exciting sports cars?'”

A Volvo sports car? (Yes, there is such a thing. To Volvo’s credit, they stick with their brand messaging, pointing out that the C30 Sports Coupe provides “large car safety in a smaller package.” Still, I’m not sure the two ideas — safety and sports cars — go together so well. I agree with the Rieses here. Volvo has diluted its brand by expanding into the sports car line.)

The higher ed example

Let’s apply this principle to higher education. The president of a liberal arts college decides it should add engineering programs, because STEM is all the rage. I think we see some schools jumping on the MOOCs bandwagon because they’re either 1.) afraid they’ll miss out on a hot trend or 2.) wanting to be perceived as a leader in the brave new world of higher education. But does the question ever occur to them: Will this dilute our brand?

“You should limit your brand,” advise the Rieses. “Your brand has to stand for something both simple and narrow in the mind. This limitation is the essential part of the branding process.”

Maybe that’s why colleges and universities have such a tough time with branding. They don’t like the idea of limiting themselves. That’s just human nature.

But “Limitation combined with consistency (over decades, not years) is what builds a brand,” say the Rieses.

Decades, you say? That’s a long time to be doing boring brand work.

But if we stick with it, it will pay off.