It happened again – somebody at a university started lecturing me that the great secret to success in recruitment marketing is telling stories. Stories convey the reality of the student experience like nothing else. If I’m going to be successful as a marketer, I need to tell stories.

As always, this pronouncement is made as if it is a rare and precious truth. This university official has hit on a brilliant concept: only if you present your institution by way of stories, will it be successful.

Maybe I’ve been doing this too long and I shouldn’t be so jaded, but what can I do? I’ve been hearing the same line about stories for fifteen years now – at conferences, workshops, and client and prospect meetings. It may be true but it’s certainly not rare. Everyone tries to tell their story by means of “stories.” Rather than being exceptional, this is the default approach to higher ed marketing. It is not a closely guarded secret, nor unfortunately, is it an approach that by itself will differentiate an institution.

Why don’t stories work? If you work at an institution and are immersed in the institutional culture, you know that there are some student stories that exemplify your institution. You know that student A coming from background B and having experiences C,D, and E with the help of faculty F, G, and H has gone on to do I, which is exactly what your institution is all about.

The problem is that a high school student looking at your institution doesn’t understand your culture and is not able to see your story as representative of something distinctive. To a high school student, this is just another story, of which there are far too many in college promotional materials. So big deal, you’ve got a successful student. How is the prospect supposed to connect that story to his own experience? He just sees it as a story of a successful student. Of course, he says, colleges profile successful students in their promotional materials. They’re not fools. But high schoolers don’t trust college marketing materials – they view them as self-promotional and one-sided. Stories do nothing per se to break through this skepticism.

Here’s the truth that I would have liked to say when I was talking with this university marketer but instead bit my tongue. Of course you’ll use stories (du-uh). We in educational promotion have a limited set of tools to use in assembling our materials and student profiles are one of them. There is nothing mind-shattering about that. But telling stories or not has nothing to do with success or failure. As a tool they are no better or worse than others. It all depends on how you use them.

What university marketing people sometimes miss is that because your culture is not known to prospects outside the institution you need to go through a creative translation process. You need to go through a challenging and difficult process of developing an aesthetic direction using words, images, tone, and interactivity that translate your culture into something that can be desired by someone who does not understand it. If you tell a good story, but use lame or conventional taglines and images for conveying it, it will have no power. The results of this aesthetic translation process are much more important than the particular tools you use – be they stories, or a single, running third-person voice, or testimonials, or whatever. There is no single formula whereby one tool, say stories, is better than another. It all depends on the distinctive image that you develop to convey your message. Developing this image is hard work, but all effective marketing depends on it. Once we’ve got the image, it’s easy enough to figure out the place of stories in it and make them work for the benefit of the institution. So don’t tell me about stories. If you want to arouse my interest, tell me about your positioning and what your creative strategy is for building your image in the outside world. That’s a story that will get me excited.