Category: branding

Boring old brand-building

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.

‘College (Un)bound’ and the frog in the kettle

CollegeUnboundYou don’t have to read too far into Jeff Selingo‘s new book, College (Un)bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students, to learn that Selingo takes a jaundiced view on the way many colleges and universities try to brand themselves.

And who can blame him? As an editor of a major media outlet for higher education, he’s heard more than his fair share of pitches from college presidents who aspire to elevate their institutions to greatness. Over and over again, these academic leaders deliver the same sales talk.

“In my fifteen years at the Chronicle of Higher Education, I’ve seen this horserace play out daily,” Selingo writes in the very first chapter of his book.

Hundreds of college presidents have come through our Washington offices, accompanied by an army of public-relations staff, piles of slick brochures, and inch-thick strategic plans. The sales pitch would usually go something like this: We want to be in the top ten of (fill-in-the-blank) ranking and to achieve that goal, we plan on some combination of the following: Build a new medical school, start a cutting-edge academic program, capture more federal research dollars, lure star faculty, attract better students in places we never recruited before, and so on.

They are angling for news coverage of their grand ambitions so colleagues at other schools will know that so-and-so university is getting more exclusive.

Their hope, Selingo adds, is that other college and university presidents will see the coverage, think more highly of these institutions, and give them good marks in the annual beauty pageant known as the U.S. News & World Report rankings. Because for many college presidents, that’s what matters most. “Prestige in higher education is like profit is to corporations,” Selingo writes.

A pitch of his own

In College Unbound, Selingo is delivering a sales pitch of his own. He’s asking readers — ostensibly students and their families, but I know a lot of people in my shoes have also picked up the book — to think differently about the business of education.

“The colleges and universities enrolling most Americans will be radically different places in ten years,” Selingo writes. “Ultimately, it is the students of tomorrow who will drive colleges to reimagine the future of higher education.”

These future college students are tech-savvy and are growing up immersed in a digital, hyper-connected world. “They feel comfortable in a social world that lives online,” Selingo writes. In the classroom, however, “they remain largely uninterested in learning through traditional teaching methods.”

It’s a solid pitch Selingto is making. Throughout College (Un)bound, he supports his argument with loads of data and examples of the myriad challenges facing higher education, and illustrations of institutions that are thinking differently about how they conduct business. He writes extensively about some of the more visible and successful all-star innovators of higher ed, like Paul LeBlanc of Southern New Hampshire University and Michael Crow of Arizona State. He shines the spotlight on programs and campuses that are more focused on students and learning than on reputation and rankings.

Yes, it’s a terrific pitch. But I wonder if higher ed is ready to buy what he’s selling.

The frog in the kettle

Despite the stark news reports about the state of higher education in the United States over the past five years, it seems the great mass of college and university leaders are still like the proverbial frog in the kettle. For years complacent in the room-temperature waters of the status quo, they managed over time to adjust as the water grew slightly warmer and warmer. A budget trim here, a program cut there, a slight tuition increase, a new fundraising campaign — adjustments that allowed the frog to cope  with the changing environment and adjust to the kettle’s new normal.

But with the recession of 2008 and the rise of online learning, the heat is on. How will the frog in the kettle adjust now?

If you know the story (which is not grounded in scientific research, by the way), things did not end well for the frog.

The good news

The good news for higher education is that some colleges and universities are jumping out of the kettle and into new approaches. Some are aided by startups (not only the infamous MOOCs but also by companies like Knewton, an “adaptive learning” software designed to help students find the right courses and majors) while others are taking a more businesslike approach to operations (at Crow’s ASU, residence hall management is outsourced). While some of these approaches are innovative or distinctive, none of the examples Selingo cites appear to be irreplicable. For that matter, many of the approaches are probably under way, to some degree, at scores of other universities not cited in his book.

Are these approaches the path out of our current crisis in higher education? The jury is still out. No doubt some of the approaches will fail, and over then next decade we’ll probably see some go out of business. Some of the approaches will require a paradigm shift in the way colleges are run — moving from a faculty-focused approach to a more customer-focused approach, where students (and other customers, such as research agencies or the companies who hire our graduates) have a greater say in how we run our institutions. (Speaking of those other customers, Selingo doesn’t talk much in his book about the impact federal funding cuts will have on research universities. Nor does he discuss the big business of Division I athletics. It would have been nice to read his perspectives on both.)

So, some institutions will succeed in this new student-centered world. Others will fail to come to terms with the changing environment and slowly boil to death.

The road to marginalization?

But the largest group of institutions may well end up not closing their doors, but becoming marginalized. This is something Bob Sevier of Stamats discusses in a recent blog post (At a Crossroad).

The road to marginalization “would be wide and well-traveled,” Sevier writes. “Unfortunately, we are already seeing some traffic as schools, in response to revenue shortfalls, are turning to the cost side of the ledger and reducing expenditures in staffing, co- and extracurricular activities, facility maintenance, and other areas.

“While this reduction in expenditures may help balance the ledger in the near term, it almost always leads to an obvious loss of quality. In other words, marginalization. Unfortunately, marginalization almost always leads to more marginalization.”

It seems Sevier and Selingo have a similar perspective. But both offer hope. It just requires us all recognizing the kettle we’re in and having the will to jump out of it.