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Building Brand Momentum: Chapter 5 Other chapter for review: Overview | Contents | About the Author | To Order | Home |
Note: Sample chapter does not contain illustrations and is abridged.
Chapter 5
Essential Brand Concepts
There are a handful of philosophical issues that must be addressed as you begin the brand development process. Taking the time to understand, discuss, and settle these issues at the outset of the process will help you be more effective, efficient, and ultimately, successful.
It is all about brand clarification
Keen-eyed readers of my previous works have likely noticed that I have been careful to use the term "brand clarification" or "brand development" rather than the terms "brand building" or "brand creation." I used previously.
The use of the words "clarification" and "development" is intentional. In late 2005, I spent some time reviewing the brand strategies we developed for more than a dozen institutions and noted that the brand promise and brand attributes were, in most cases, the public declaration, or refining, of existing institutional core values rather than the creation of new values.
This "ah ha" moment has enormous implications. First, this revelation affirms that your brand strategy is directly related to your overall mission, vision, and strategic plan. It is not merely some marketing deal. Rather, it is an institution-wide commitment; your central organizing purpose. This elevates the creation of a brand strategy to a much higher place in the strategic hierarchy.
Second, it made me rethink how to design the brand clarification process, how to build internal support, and how to orchestrate the brand launch. Because the brand is built on institutional values that have already been affirmed, more emphasis can be placed on the "how" of brand marketing and perhaps less on the "why".
Effective brands are relevant
Next, we must remember that effective brands must be relevant to both external and internal audiences. The idea of relevance includes a couple of important notions:
• If something is relevant it is also crucially noteworthy or significantly important
• If something is relevant it is likely irreplaceable
• If something is relevant you can charge more
• Target audiences decide relevance, not colleges, universities, and schools
Interestingly, while a strong brand is not relevant to everyone, it must be very relevant to enough people who will provide the resources to sustain the brand. Volvo is one of the smallest car manufacturers in the automobile business. But the handful of Volvo owners are pathologically loyal and willingly pay a premium price to partake in the Volvo brand.
In the same manner, each college, university, or school must seek to be relevant, irreplaceable, and unique to an audience large enough to sustain the organization. There is an important tension here: large enough to sustain, but not so large that you lose focus.
Before you can have relevance you must have awareness
Before relevance, however, there must first be awareness. In other words, among the 3,000 or so other messages they will receive this day, did your audience members notice yours? Did your message stand out from the background clutter? Did they sense that what you were saying filled a need they had?
These two ingredients—awareness and relevance—are essential components of an effective brand. If people are not aware of your brand, you will never have a chance to be relevant. This is much like the great academic program that no one ever hears about. The quality may be there, but if the marketplace is not aware of it, the quality is for naught.
At the same time, if the brand is noticed, but the relevance is not there, the target audience will respond with, "so what?" It's OK for some people to respond, "so what?" as long as enough people respond, "hmmm, that looks interesting."
Options for communicating your brand will be explored in greater detail in chapter 14.
Focus
Colleges and universities have a tough time focusing their energies, efforts, and resources. Many believe that the surest path to institutional safety involves offering more programs to more people. Rather than depth, they have sought breadth. One administrator said it best when he said, most colleges and universities think that the words planning and more are synonyms. David W. Leslie and E. K. Fretwell, in Wise Moves in Hard Times: Creating & Managing Resilient Colleges & Universities, remind us that strategy is often used as a "euphemism for indiscriminate expansiveness." Unfortunately, in an era of scarce resources, most colleges and universities find that offering more majors and programs means, despite the hype to the contrary, razor-thin margins and sometimes marginal quality.
Marty Neumeier, writing in The Brand Gap, says, "the three most important words in branding are focus, focus, focus. The danger is rarely too much focus, but too little. An unfocused brand is one that's so broad that it doesn't stand for anything. A focused brand, by contrast, knows exactly what it is, and why it's different, and why people want it."
He goes on, "Yet focus is difficult to achieve because it means giving something up. It runs counter to our most basic marketing instinct: If we narrow our offering won't we narrow our opportunities for profit? Answer: Not necessarily. It's often better to be number one in a small category than to be number three in a large one."
For your brand marketing efforts to be successful, you must rail against expansionism. Instead of being everything to everyone, you must strive to be something very special (remember the idea of relevant?) to a select few. Instead of broad often vague promises and messages (we will be "the best," we will be "nationally known,") your promises and messages must be more focused.
Critical questions
To help focus your institution and your brand promise, the following questions must be answered at the very earliest stages of your brand marketing efforts:
• What do we do extremely well?
• What do we do that our competitors will not, or can not, do?
• What do we do that if we quit doing would be missed?
• What target audiences that matter most?
• From what states/region/area do we get 85% or our students?
• What is our target geography?
You can't be everything. And while almost every institution in the land describes itself as a "university" and is seeking to broaden its scope, most simply cannot afford both breadth and depth. Rather than being focused, they are diffused and, more often than not, sound they too much like their competitors.
Second, rather than trying to develop and maintain relevance with every target audience you can imagine, you must focus on a handful, even just two or three, the target audiences that absolutely matter most.
And finally, instead of seeking to build your brand across the whole United States…or even the world, you must target specific geographies, the much smaller geographies that generate most of your students and where most of your alumni and donors live. Make sure you "own" these geographies before you begin to invest heavily in secondary and tertiary markets.
Strategic focus
Some time ago I listened to a college president talk about the high academic quality at his institution. It was clear that he was enthusiastic and well-intentioned but he was having a difficult time reining in the hyperbole. When he paused, I asked two questions. First, how many faculty members he had. He replied, "42." I then asked how many majors he had. He replied, "39." Of course, that faculty-to-major ratio suggested that the institution did not have a great deal of academic quality. And while this is an extreme example, most would agree that many colleges and universities have a difficult time delivering the academic "walk" that must coincide with the academic "talk."
Of course, the question emerges: If you can't afford quality through and through, should you:
• Settle for less quality … or
• Offer fewer programs of higher quality?
From a strategy and brand marketing perspective, the second alternative is much preferred. Narrowing an array of highly relevant majors will allow you to focus critical resources. It will also allow you to more clearly identify your target audiences. And finally, it will allow you to more consistently target your messages.
Programmatic focus
Al Ries, in his insightful book, Focus, makes the case for narrowing your academic focus. He writes, "education, next to health care, is one of the biggest businesses in America. With annual expenditures in the neighborhood of $270 billion, education alone accounts for four percent of the gross domestic product. In the educational arena, you find few specialists. Virtually everybody is a generalist. Many college presidents, for example, can't wait to become chancellors by turning their institutions into universities. Yet a better direction might be to focus on a single field of study. Only a handful of undergraduate institutions have specialized, notably Juilliard School in Music, Rhode Island School of Design in design, Fashion Institute of Technology in fashion, and Babson College in entrepreneurship. Some have achieved a specialist reputation almost by accident, notably The Johns Hopkins University in medicine.
“More” almost never attracts students and dollars while “better” will. Fortunately, some colleges and universities are beginning to specialize and focus. The University of Phoenix serves adults. Appalachian State focuses on the people and community of Appalachia. Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa delivers its academic programs "one-course-at-a-time." It is only interested in students who value that approach to educat Audience focus
One of the most important outcomes of strategic focus is a narrowing of the number of audiences with which you must interact. For example, the decision by the University of Phoenix to focus on adults means that they can immediately turn their attention away from middle school and high school students. St. Johns, on the other hand, is keenly interested in the handful of students who are interested in a truly classical approach to the liberal arts.
By definition, when you narrow your focus you narrow the number and kinds of people who are interested in your programs. Some people are frightened by this exclusionary outcome. However, by declaring and announcing a specific direction, students, donors, and others who are interested in your mission will actually begin to seek you out. Instead of communicating vague messages to too many different audiences, you are now able to communicate more precise messages to more narrowly defined audiences.
Serving and communicating to more narrowly defined audiences will pay enormous dividends because it allows you to more effectively steward resources, segment benefits, and tailor messages as you seek to communicate more effectively with and deliver programs to fewer and more highly focused audiences.
Geographical focus
I routinely hear or read about a college that wants to be "nationally known." And when I poke around this aspiration I generally find tremendous institutional ego (after all, we have students from 35 states) masking a complete misunderstanding of what it takes and what it costs to build a national reputation. While most colleges get students from many different states, they also get the majority of their students from a much smaller region; typically a state or two.
Becoming a national brand is a truly Herculean undertaking that is simply beyond the reach of most institutions and attempting to do so will rob you of the resources you need to communicate your promise to the primary markets that might literally be right across the street.
While it may not be sexy, it is almost always more effective to "think small" when comes to defining your geographic focus. Pinpointing a smaller target geography allows you to bring a critical mass of resources—media work, advertising, alumni programming, high school visitation, special events…even where the president speaks—to bear. Widening this geography will diffuse and blunt the impact of those resources.
In an era of tight resources, a marketplace that is inundated with thousands of colleges and universities describing themselves in largely similar ways, and audiences that are increasingly distracted, your best bet is focus.
Your brand will prosper when you declare a singular direction; identify five or six "signature" majors you want to push aggressively, define your target audience carefully, and focus on a tight geography.
Differentiate at all costs
The purpose of strategy, at least in part, is to differentiate yourself from your competitors in ways that your target audience's value. Differentiation will not occur when you and your competition all describes yourselves as friendly, caring, and supporting. It will not occur when and your competition all offer the same programs taught by the same high quality faculty. And it will not occur when you and your competition choose to communicate to prospective students and donors in the same way.
Differentiation will only occur when you think, look, act, and communicate differently then do your competitors. Differentiation will be addressed in depth in chapter 10.
Brands build equity
One of the most important of all brand marketing concepts is the idea of brand equity. Essentially, brand equity represents the value (to a customer) of a product (or service), above that which would result for an otherwise identical product without the brand's name. Brand equity represents the amount of value which a brand's name alone contributes to the offer.
Consider two bags of cashew nuts. The quality of the cashews in each bag is virtually identical. One bag is labeled, "Planters." Another bag is labeled, "Sam's Choice," the house brand for Wal-Mart. Of the two, which bag is able to charge a premium?
The idea of brand equity is critically important because it means that institutions—like cashew producers—with stronger brands can charge more for their product.
Brand equity for colleges and universities
Let's assume we have two institutions with similar academic programs, academic quality, and academic facilities. For our discussion, the quality of the education a student will receive at either institution-by any reasonable measure and institutional ego aside-is largely identical.
One institution is a member of the Ivy League. The other is a regional liberal arts college. Both are located in the Boston-Cambridge area. Tuition, room, and board at the Ivy League school are $40,000. Tuition, room, and board at the liberal arts college are $32,000. It is the Ivy League school's ability to charge $8,000 per year more for the same basic education that suggests the power of brand equity.
While the two institutions may offer largely identical programs with identical faculty and facilities, the Ivy League school is able to charge premium dollars because of the prestige factor. Charles Fombrun, in his book, Reputation, calls this prestige factor "reputational capital." Bruce Hammond calls it "the Chivas Regal effect."
In this way, brand equity has two important qualities:
• The premium price that the brand can support
• The impact of the brand on customer preferences
Measuring and building brand equity
I want to close this section by looking at some insights offered by David Shore. He notes, first, that institutions, including colleges and universities, can measure their brand equity by focusing on three key issues. First, do customers ask for your brand by name? Do students self-refer? Do they originate the contact rather than respond to yours?
Second, do customers see a difference between your brand and a competitive brand? Can they describe the difference between you and Denison or you and the University of California, Irvine? Third, are customers willing to purchase your brand? An important distinction on this third point is whose money is used to make the purchase. If you are discounting tuition and students are effectively using your money to purchase your product, you can make the case that you do not have much brand equity. However, if a student and family are willing to incur significant personal debt to finance an education or if a student and family begin an aggressive "work and saving" program while the student is still in middle school, then you can make the case that you have greater brand equity.
Brand leadership
Because of the two different orientations toward brands—brands as image and brand as promise—it is not surprising that there are two different approaches to brand development as well. These two approaches—brand management and brand leadership—are codified by David Aaker:
• Brand management focuses on the short term. Its primary tool is promotion and is very concerned about issues of look and logo.
• Brand leadership is based on the premise that establishing a brand not only creates brand equity, but is necessary for institutional success. With brand leadership, the institution's most senior leaders recognize that building the brand will result in a competitive advantage that will pay off financially.
Based on these two approaches, we can posit that:
• Brand management is tactical while brand leadership is strategic
• Brand management is visual while brand leadership is visionary
• Brand management is icon-driven while brand leadership is promise-driven
• Brand management stresses what the institution does in the marketplace while brand leader
ship focuses on how students, donors, and others interact with the brand
• Brand management is interested in brand image while brand leadership is interested in brand
equity
Tactical and reactive vs. strategic and visionary
Brand management has a short-term focus. Every new idea is a good idea and must be pursued. Projects are continually delayed, sidetracked, and changed. Output is more valued than outcomes. Brand leadership, however, is visionary. As such, it is focused and deliberate. And, while it is always open to new opportunities, it stresses sticking to the plan.
Less experienced and less power vs. higher in the organization
Under brand management, the 20- or 30-something marketing director will seldom have the power or authority to provide true brand direction. Instead, she or he will be perceived as little more than a coordinator; someone who will spend all of their time trying to scrape together an ad budget. The brand leader, however, is a senior player who sits on the president's cabinet. Working well beyond issues of promotion, the brand leader is interested in the institution's most strategic issues; issues often derived directly from the 4 Ps and 4 Cs.
Brand image vs. brand equity
Brand managers are preoccupied with the visual. Their domain is the three Ls of branding: look, letterhead, and logo. A brand leadership position, on the other hand, concentrates on building brand value; value that will be translated into students and donated dollars. Metrics are in place to measure progress. The goal is brand equity.
Short-term vs. long-term
Brand manager's never have enough money and seldom have true control over the dollars they do have. A brand leader, however, understands that building brand equity takes time, money, and talent. Brand leaders know a successful brand is not built in one budget year.
Brand coordinators measure effectiveness by how many column inches they generated or how much media they purchased. In the mind of the brand leader, collaborations and sponsorships are more important than column inches. They understand that successful brands require a rich pallet of media options, not just print, certainly not radio, and never just billboards. Finally, they are media agnostic. They are not loyal to any media. They are only loyal to results.
The idea of a chief reputation officer
Charles Fombrun, in Reputation, suggests the creation of a chief reputation officer to help build brand equity. While Fombrun is concerned with only one dimension of brand marketing: reputation, his holistic approach is philosophically consistent with that of a brand leader.
Marty Nieumeier has a slightly different take on how brands should be lead internally. In The Brand Gap, he writes, the more a brand becomes distributed, the more it requires strong, centralized management. Creativity can quickly turn to chaos in the absence of adult supervision (as any parent knows). And while controlled chaos is necessary for innovation and change, uncontrolled chaos can make a brand schizophrenic and confused.
The growing need for internal stewardship has given rise to the appointment of what we might call chief brand officers, or CBOs. CBOs are highly experienced professionals who manage brand collaboration at the highest corporate level. They are rare birds, because they need the ability to strategize with the chief, and also inspire creativity among the troops. In effect, they must form a human bridge across the brand gap, connecting to the company's left brain with its right brain, bringing business strategy in line with customer experience. A CBO is the executive who lies awake at night thinking, "How can we build the brand?"
Five outcomes of brand leadership
Martin Lloyd, as part of an ongoing discussion in a branding chat room, outlined the five stages of brand leadership. As you look at these five brand stages, note how they are tiered; you need to firmly establish one before you can go on to the next. The five stages include:
• Your brand is the sum of the experiences that your customers have whenever they are exposed to your product or message. It is this breadth across all college and university offices and functions that gives a brand depth and endurance.
• You control your brand if these experiences are planned and conform to your vision. At this level, branding is strategic, not tactical.
• Your brand is consistent if these experiences all say the same thing to your audiences. Do customers in financial aid and housing and the student union all feel that they are valued and cared for? Do donors, small and large, understand their worth to the institution? If they do, your brand is consistent across all venues and will experience great synergy.
• Your brand is working if these experiences create the desired impression in the minds, hearts, and pocketbooks of your target audiences. And remember, the impression you want to own is one of relevance.
• Your brand is successful if the perception you have created makes people act in the right way. In other words, do people follow through? Do they enroll? Do they give money? Do they commit? Or better yet, do they talk you up? Do you get buzz?
Brand management and brand leadership represent two ends of a vast continuum. For many, brand leadership might be initially out of reach and their quickest gains might actually be generated by a consistent brand management strategy. However, regardless of where you are on the continuum, you should be moving from brand management to brand leadership. In this manner you will begin to build a brand promise that your audiences value and thereby build brand equity as well.