I’m not sure what the longterm implications of this innovation will be. Readability might actually suffer, since many of the print fonts do not perform particularly well in on-line environments. Will we someday look back nostalgically at the clarity and readability of Georgia and Verdana?

One thing that is clear is that your potential for projecting a brand personality on the Web has just expanded exponentially. The chances are now quite good that whatever fonts are stipulated in your graphic standards manual can be used throughout your website as well as in print.

Working with my talented colleagues at Door No. 2, we just launched a college website that takes advantage of Typekit’s capabilities. The website for DePauw University uses the same two typefaces – Adobe Caslon and Futura – that are used throughout the college’s print program. If you haven’t explored the potential offered by Typekit, it wouldn’t hurt to spend a few minutes poking around the site. You will find the same style sheets, employing, for example, the rather stylized Caslon Italic, operating throughout the site (save the athletics pages). This alters the user experience. To me, the site feels a bit less utilitarian and a bit more pleasurable. It certainly has a different impact than a site with more traditional style sheets.

As I wrote in my last post, the emergence of Typekit makes it pressing to review one’s identity manual to evaluate the applicability of your current typefaces to the Web. From here on out, graphic standard systems will need to take the Web side of the house seriously. We now have the potential to employ the same fonts in both Web and print. It’s up to the university or school communications teams to review the fonts that are currently being used, and retain or replace them. The convergence of Web and print technologies offers enormous potential for expanding the reach of one’s brand image. It’s up to institutions to take advantage of this great potential.

So the question arises – how long is one of these things good for? Or alternatively, if I produced an identity system a while ago, does it need to be refreshed or can I just stick with it?

The answer is you should refresh it. If you produced an identity system more than five years ago, you should undertake a review of the system and consider updating it to fit evolving design tools and sensibilities.

What I am not talking about here is changing your logo. That’s not a refresh. That’s a new identity system. You only want to do that when the previous work was inadequate or inconsistent with your current strategic goals.

But even if you think your identity system is working well and you like your logo and your colors, it’s worth updating it to extend its useful life.

The main catalyst for such a review are dramatic developments over the past few years in font design and capabilities. The greatest of these is the ability, through services such as Typekit, to employ a wide range of fonts on the Web. Five or six years ago this capability did not exist, and most designers spec’ed Verdana, Georgia, Arial or similar fonts for Web applications. Today, the world of print typefaces has opened up for Web application. That doesn’t mean that all of these fonts are appropriate for the Web. But it does mean that it’s worth reviewing your system to see whether there are new ways to build a stronger shared identity between your print and Web communications.

There have also been enormous strides in font design over the past few years that give designers many new tools for excellence in design. Adobe, among others, has produced new font families that support corporate branding goals much more comprehensively with both serif’ed and sans-serif’ed communciations. An institution should not make a change simply for novelty’s sake. Consistency of appearance is what a good identity system is all about. But if you are operating with a set of fonts that a communications firm gave you several years ago, the chances are good that there are new fonts that might give your institution a better tool kit.

While you’re undertaking this review, it’s worth looking at the new colors that Pantone has released to see whether any of those can support your color system.

None of this is radical, or indeed, high priority work. I worry, therefore, that most institutions won’t go to the trouble However, if you want to keep your communications professional and effective, it’s worth reviewing and  updating your identity system from time to time – not to alter the design sensibility or intention, but to take advantage of new resources and the ways that design is evolving.

Before you assume I’m a complete radical you should know that I’ve got a project rolling out for another client that features a large, beautiful viewbook. I’m very excited about that one too. For me, marketing solutions are situational. No solution is right for every circumstance. The viewbook should do wonders for my one client while Tufts, I hope, will thrive without one.

We didn’t just eliminate the viewbook for Tufts. We got rid of the entire suite of traditional admissions publications. There is no search brochure, visit brochure, financial aid  brochure, mailing postcards, as well as no viewbook. They are all gone. Finito.

What we replaced them with is not a radically new idea. It’s been around for a few years. We created an admissions magazine that will be produced trice annually and mailed to everyone in the admissions funnel. This saves enormous cost and direct-mail headaches. A printer with a high-speed web-press spits out the magazine in two weeks and mails it the next day. A great advantage of the magazine approach is that it enables us to be much more responsive to changes and trends at the university. We don’t need to wait for a semi-annual viewbook update to feature a new program. We can simply feature it in the next issue of the magazine.

I would never have gone down this road if I could not simultaneously realize another, ultimately more important, goal – integration of the Tufts Web and print marketing campaigns. Our new magazine, entitled Jumbo, can be found both in-print and on-line at the brand new Tufts Admissions Website. Everything hinges on the user friendly CMS produced by my colleagues as Fastspot, and provided to Tufts through Door. No. 2. This CMS  enables the magazine’s writers and the entire admissions staff to regularly update content without any help from IT. The CMS offers a platform for building social media community around Tufts admissions. So, no, print is not made obsolescent in the new era of Web-based marketing, but it does change its stripes. Print becomes more flexible, streamlined, and nimble. It reflects the tone and pace of the Web which is becoming the pace of our world. Jumbo is our attempt to keep one institution up with the trends. Let’s see how it fares.

But that’s not me. I believe that a brand strategy must be built on an extensive foundation of market research. Without it, one cannot achieve the results that are trumpeted for brand-based marketing.

I know I’ll never win this argument and, indeed, remain politely silent when others speak about this other idea of brand. But let me take a moment and try to explain the different deliverable a school or university can expect to receive if it engages someone who uses market research to build a brand strategy versus someone who does not.

If you hire a firm to develop a brand strategy based on market research the results will likely be more concise and less flattering than one developed by a firm that believes brands are inherent in organizations. You’ll probably find that the recommendations seem obvious, indeed, unimpressive. The thinking will be streamlined and simple. And it will be conveyed with an air of definite certainty.

This is because the firm that bases a brand strategy on market research is focused on one thing – how to move the marketplace to that it inclines toward your organization and you can better achieve your marketing goals. The research firm has gone out to the marketplace and assessed its perceptions and priorities. Generally at that point the fulcrum for moving the market becomes fairly small. Given the limitations created by the real culture of your organization, you find there are few options for moving the marketplace. The research shows you that you will be most effective if you put your energies behind one particular theme or approach. In a crowded and cluttered marketplace, specificity and a clear narrative are crucial to marketing success.

Yes, flattering an organization is important. No institution is going to adopt a brand strategy if it does not feel that the strategy reflects well on its culture. But there will be much less emphasis on a self-serving, flattering narrative from the research-based firm than one that is not. This is because the firm that does not conduct rigorous research is essentially dependent on the organization to buy in to its recommendation for it to have a satisfied client. It doesn’t really know what will work. Such a firm is using its instincts (good though they may be). In that situation, who wouldn’t build into the brand narrative material that reflects the perspective and priorities of leaders of the organization? So a brand strategy not based on research will be longer, less concise, and more flattering. You’ll also be revisiting it four years later since without the research, brand strategy is little more than a mere advertising campaign.

• school marketing plan
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I conclude from this that there’s significant unmet need among independent schools for marketing tips. I don’t get nearly the same level of traffic for my college and university posts.

I’m a little shy about all of this because I wrote that entry back in 2009 to be provocative. I didn’t intend it as the final word or any sort of a comprehensive take on independent schools marketing plans. I really wanted to make a point about the growing obsolescence of traditional viewbooks (which independent schools in the U.S. do have an unhealthy attachment to).

So how do I feel now that  this one entry has had a consistent readership over two years with an average read time of 5 minutes? I went back and read the post and I’m still basically comfortable with the advice presented therein. The entry is far from comprehensive, but I don’t think there is anything that is fundamentally wrong. If an institution followed that advice they could in fact dramatically improve their market position.

Two years on there is one major caveat. What I’ve learned in the intervening time is that the mainstream of independent schools (at least in the U.S.) are wedded to a model of website production that locks them into falling short of the goals set out in the post. The independent school industry has grown dependent on certain high-volume industry specific providers for their websites: finalsite, SilverPoint, and WhippleHill. There are strong and valid justifications for hiring one of these firms. They offer a turn-key service to overworked communications staffs. They understand the independent school industry. And they are familiar with the school back-end data-bases. However, all of those firms, perhaps because of high-volume approach they take, are weak in the area of brand messaging and positioning. The sites all look the same. They are competent. They serve essential information well. But they are poor vehicles for conveying a brand platform.

To follow the advice set out in my post, a school would need the skill and self-confidence to build and manage a web-site outside the prevailing model. There are examples of such schools around the country but they are the exception. Unfortunately, the schools that are most in need of a marketing turnaround are just the ones with the greatest tendency to hire one of these three firms. So the advice from 2009 stands, but if you are going to follow it, be prepared to part from the fold in your approach to your website.

• The site should be well-organized.
• Navigation should be clear.
• The design should be fresh and reasonably consistent across the site.
• Content should be timely and up-to-date.
• Design should be fresh.
• The messaging should be clear and direct and help visitors learn about what is special about your institution.
• The search tool should be effective.

Herein lies the problem.

Without intending to, this consultant has given us perspective on what is wrong with college, university and private school websites.

All of these things are important. And they are all secondary – they are means to an end and not the end in itself. When you approach your website ask not seven but a single question. Here’s the question:

What story does my website, through the experience it offers the visitor, tell about my institution?

Good websites are damnably complex. They need to solve all the issues the consultant laid out in his list. But college, university, and independent school websites don’t only fall short on this list of criteria. The most important way they fall short is the big picture issues. Even if they meet all these criteria, they don’t tell a story about the institution. (At least not a positive story. Some of the worst websites tell the opposite story from that any marketing professional would ever want to tell about his institution.)

Please. I am not talking about “stories” at the top of a website. I am not talking about theme statements, or rotating banners, or Flash animations (which I suspect the consultant had in mind in bullet point 6). No. I mean that the total experience of the site, as the visitor moves around stopping at various spots, absorbing content, and interacting with the site features, should tell a story about the character of the institution.

If you want to understand the shortcomings of  your own website start by asking this single question. If you are involved in a website development project, always keep this question front and center. What story does my website tell? What story do I want it to tell?  All the bullet points in the world are irrelevant if you are not using your website to project a compelling image of your institution.

As this example shows, a lot of the use of the word “brand” is just an update of the earlier preoccupation with logos. Twenty years ago someone would have piped up at that same meeting and asked, “who is going to design our logo.” Back then, the result would have been an amateurish logo – unless the dog park was in an urban neighborhood with lots of creatives. Then the logo would have been really good. It’s unclear if the brand question is any real advance over the earlier question.

I’m an old marketing guy – 0r, to avoid unpleasant implications, let’s say I’m a marketing guy in the “classic tradition.” Anybody who’s been around a while understands that brand theory, pioneered by Reis and Trout in the late 1970s, is a dimension of marketing itself. There is nothing dramatically new or radical about the brand approach. It is a reframing of concepts that are implicit to classic, good marketing practice.

I part company with many branding gurus and all those folks sitting around meetings like the one described above in insisting that brands are not inherent in goods and services. Brands are the result of hard, deliberate labor, luck and talent – they result from marketing professionals conducting copious research, thinking in disciplined and inventive ways, and developing detailed plans for implementation. So, no, not everybody has a brand. And, no, you can’t figure out your brand by sitting around a community meeting – or any meeting, staff retreat, or brainstorming exercise. The currently trendy conception of brand leads you down the wrong track. If you want to do brand work, go back and study classic marketing theory. Then hire a market researcher and get started on deliberate, methodical research into audience preferences. In fact, brand work is an extension of the science of marketing not something that a group of volunteers or staff members deduce sitting around a table.

The campaign attracted a great deal of national publicity as an obvious and awkward misstep. You can read stories about the campaign here, here, and here. The university was forced on the defensive as was the firm that had produced the campaign. You can read Stamats’ defense of the campaign here.

Was the campaign a bad idea? Of course it was a bad idea. Stamats defends the campaign as “edgy creative,” suggesting in their defense that if you don’t get the campaign, you’re just not comfortable with edgy, cool advertising. They claim that in this age of saturation in the college market, edgy creative is needed to break through the clutter.

Edgy creative? I feel like I’m in an episode of Mad Men. Would somebody please tell the people at Stamats that edgy ad campaigns went out in 1991? The reason they went out is because they made you beholden to your agency. Sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t. But at the end of the day you discovered that you had spent considerable resources on something without staying power — something that didn’t move the needle in substantive ways and just forced you to spend more and more money on edgy creative.

The old advertising approach has been replaced by an emphasis on brand building. And one of the keys to brand building is integrity – brand work needs to connect deeply to realities about the product or service. Ultimately the problem with the D+ campaign is that once you break through the edginess there’s nothing there. What is the brand? The Drake advantage? What is that? To me, that sounds like a clichéd tagline. The slogan tells me nothing. Is the campaign trying to connect to the edginess of Drake students? Are Drake students edgy? I’ll leave the answer to that question to others.

As I was putting together this post, a friend sent me an article from the Washington Post about a new American University campaign that labels its students “wonks.” This campaign is everything that the Drake campaign is not: It is grounded in an authentic experience which is the wonkish culture of Washington, DC. At the heart of the article you find this quote from brand consultant Darryl Cilli:

It [the brand] has to be honest and genuine. You can never become something you’re not.

If you read the article, you see that American University used external consulting services to conduct research but the Wonk campaign was the result of internal brainstorming. Hats off to the folks at American University. They came up with a winner. American’s publicity for this campaign has been largely positive because there’s a real story there. Drake has not been so fortunate. Time to stop living in the past and start doing some real brand work if they want to help their institution.

(I wonder if that tiny gem I spent one of the best years of my life at, The Warburg Institute in London, has jumped on the bandwagon? Somehow, I think not.)

Leaving aside my own, my wife’s, and my children’s institutions, I connect with many institutions in a professional consulting capacity on the issue of fundraising. One thing that is clear, although rarely acknowledged, is that virtually all educational fundraising, successful or not, is bland and generic.

What do I mean by bland? The fundraising communications lack a strong, distinctive style or voice. The photographs, though generally of high quality, are predictable and middle-of-the-road. The lead lines and body copy are conventional and expected.

Why do I say generic? Virtually all of the appeals sent out by virtually all educational institutions say the same things:

• Give to [your institution here] for feelings of school pride and spirit
• Give to [your institution here] so that students today can enjoy the same wonderful experience you enjoyed.
• Give to [your institution here] because we depend upon your gifts to support our faculty, students, and program.
• Give to [your institution here] because our rankings depend upon a high level of alumni support (This last one only applies to colleges and universities and not to independent schools).

There are several reasons for the blandness of fundraising communications. One is the topic at hand, which is raising money. Fundraisers tend to be tactful, cautious and risk adverse professionals by nature. No one wants to alienate a prospective donor.

Another is the way educational fundraising has evolved over the past 20 years. The community has coalesced around a cautious, albeit highly professional, approach. Institutions are serviced by consultants who provide similar advice. These consultants do not possess much in the way of marketing expertise in their professional toolkit. Often the consultants are former fundraisers. They conduct prospect research in the context of feasibility studies. They do not fully appreciate the power of distinctive messaging and certainly do not know how to achieve it.

There is a road not yet taken – this is to build fundraising communications around a distinctive, research driven brand personality.

This alternate path involves incorporating a different professional skill-set into fundraising operations. Vice Presidents for Advancement would need to begin to take brand-based marketing seriously, not just for the admissions operation, but for their own operation as well. The creative services that support fundraising would need to move away from generic appeals and toward conveying a more distinctive “attitude” in their messaging. Organizations would need to overcome their tendency to be cautious and conservative at every turn.

In fact, this alternate path is the road to take. Academic institutions are all competing for pieces of the same pie in their fundraising. Eventually some will figure out that one way to increase their share is such brand-based marketing.

Dare to Be First.™

They write:

The brand brings our strategic priorities to reality, defining what we stand for and the essence of the UD experience. It highlights our internal strengths–the distinctive values and characteristics of our colleges, programs, people and initiatives–that provide the substance on which our core messages are based. And it takes into account the way external perceptions help to shape and differentiate our identity from that of other institutions.

You can read the rest of the article here.

So here’s the question – is “Dare to be First” actually a brand strategy or is it really a gussied-up tagline?

To help answer that question, here is a little background. A brand strategy needs to meet four simple criteria. There is nothing elusive or arcane about the criteria themselves. The challenge comes in meeting all four. Here are the criteria:

1. A brand strategy needs to respond to an established audience desire.
2. It needs to distinguish the product or service from the competition.
3. It needs to possess a high degree of authenticity.
4. It needs to possess “stretch,” providing direction for future growth.

How well do you think the University of Delaware did?

And here is a bonus question – if you believe that the University of Delaware spent significant time and money to end up with something that amounts to a tagline, where do you think they went wrong? That is a more difficult but ultimately more important question, since colleges and universities across the country are devoting major resources to just this sort of project and ending up with just this sort of result.