One of the great distortions in the selective college admissions process is the extent to which young people who desire entry to highly selective institutions treat the process like a prestige commodity purchase. They know that getting into a top school is not one of life’s necessities. No, it is a highly desirable bauble – an all important confirmation of one’s status in a materialistic and prestige-driven community.

There are two problems with this – one obvious and one perhaps a little less obvious. The obvious problem is that in treating the college selection process like a prestige commodity purchase, young people obtain a distorted view of the institutions they are considering. They tend to look at the wrong things – for example, the opulence of a dorm room on the college tour – and overlook important things that will actually impact the quality of their experience once they get to college.

The less obvious problem is that in taking a consumerist approach to college admissions, young people actually diminish their chances of getting in. The admissions officers who function as gatekeepers generally do not live in super-affluent communities, are not highly paid, and recoil from the thought that their institutions are little more than prestige commodities. The worst thing you can do if you actually want to go to one of these institutions is to telegraph through word or deed that you see entry as primarily a glittering prize.

None of this is particularly new or earth-shattering, but I’d like to add an additional thought. Although admissions officers recoil from the idea that their institutions are nothing more than prestige commodities, their marketing products – the elaborate viewbooks and on-line animations – can (inadvertently) reinforce that perception. With skill and savvy, it is possible to use your marketing to do the opposite – to undermine the commodification of higher education and convey a sense of an authentic educational experience. What a wonderful New Years resolution that would be – to make an effort to be conscious of and resistent to the role marketing plays in the commodification of higher education. Happy New Year to all. I hope it offers many opportunities to make a difference in our lives, families, and communities.

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.

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.

Honestly, it’s a hard problem to solve. If you are the one responsible for the management structure, you need to empower a single individual as a leader in the communications area with the experience and professional standing to take an institution where they are not inclined to go. Just as difficult, you need to minimize collegial decision-making processes so that good work doesn’t die the death of 1,000 edits.

There is something else . . .  it is helpful to have a coherent brand strategy based on rigorous market research. Academic cultures may not understand creative work but they do understand arguments based on research. And they do feel the urgent need to survive and prosper in our post-1997 world. With a brand strategy in hand, you can explain to vice-presidents and deans that the creative risks you want to take are not arbitrary. Instead, they are the implementation of a researched survival strategy for the institution.

Honestly, neither of these things are will work in every case. Creativity vs. bureaucracy is an age-old battle. It is a battle worth fighting for those of us who care about academic institutions because creativity can accomplish certain goals in a unique way. For example, want to improve recruitment or retention? build alumni support? improve the climate on campus? increase access? If these things are important to you, figure out a way for the creatives to do their work well. If not, you’ll be tackling major problems with one hand tied behind your back. In these times, no one can afford that particular handicap.

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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.

I do educational marketing. Schools come to me saying, “Help me sell my school. Help me get more students, or raise more money, or build great public awareness, or all of the above.” I help them in part by doing something they can’t easily do themselves: gain perspective from beyond the walls of their institution. How do they look to high school students considering college, or parents considering a day-school, or alumni considering causes for their philanthropic dollars? To make the sale more effective, institutions need to understand the perspective of people beyond the fold, people who have not yet chosen to fully affiliate with their institution.

Everything I’ve said above is commonplace, known to virtually everyone who is involved with educational marketing. The part that’s less commonplace, or maybe it’s a matter of denial, is the extent to which the solution to more effective selling involves turning inward, how it involves the institution being willing to reengineer actual functions and activities to be more effective. This is the third rail of marketing. It’s the root of many anti-marketing sentiments within the academy: “If I listened to you marketing people, you’d force me to compromise my values for the whims of the marketplace. But I’m an educational institution. My job is to educate people, not cater to their desires.”

Yes, but . . . marketing has its own kind of integrity. You can’t say something unless it is true. Selling on false pretenses is shortsighted and ultimately counter-productive. In truth, marketing does want schools to compromise their values. It asks them to reengineer themselves so that they are truer to their values, so that what they say has a better fit with what they deliver.

I can help you sell but I can’t be very effective if you view marketing as purely an external function. It needs to turn inward as well as outward. Then we can truly close the sale.

Nonetheless, the temptation to apply lessons from other institutions is great. One factor is resources. Market research, which is the backbone of any true marketing effort, has costs. Even leaving aside the issue of cost, it is challenging to execute high quality market research in the educational setting. Issues are complex and nuanced. It is easier to find work done at another institution and hope it applies to your institution. After all, educational institutions do share close sibling relationships. College A is really not that different in its offerings, history, personnel, and ambitions from College B. Applying such work is better than nothing – isn’t it?

Here is one reason why I don’t go along with such an approach – why I’ll want to do my own unique work-up for each institution, even when I’m constrained by limited resources: in my experience, the market for independent schools, colleges, and universities, is more stratified into social micro-niches than common wisdom or the national press would allow. We all know the shortcoming of the U.S. News and World Report rankings, which combine institutions from across the country into national rankings as if they all share the same goals and audiences. In this regard, the highly influential educational reporting of The New York Times is equally, if not more, at fault than USN&WR. The NYT regularly features articles about national trends among colleges or private schools, using the same group of “usual suspects” for its sources.

The thinking that schools exist on a single scale and play in a single pond has pervaded much thinking about educational markets, even the tactical thinking that goes on at particular schools or colleges. But when it comes time to design a marketing strategy, when the economic well-being of an institution is truly and genuinely at stake, then such thinking needs to be abandoned. In truth the social layers into which schools and universities fit are much more finely grained and segmented than public perception or articles in the NYT allows. School A does not in fact cater to the same audience as School B. And, here is the key point:  not only can it be wasteful, it can be destructive for School B to make marketing decisions based on the assumption that it shares an audience with School A. The task of market research for schools is to define accurately the market within which the school operates. Without the research, schools can go off in the wrong direction. Whatever expenditures they make on marketing will prove futile and counter-productive.

The answer has broader implications so I’m posting it here. And it’s not what you think. I suspect I know what many of  you would say  – Find some young, hungry web designer, maybe somebody at art school or just a few years out, and have him or her crunch on your website.

But hold up for a minute. That’s not the right answer. Here’s the right answer – Find a web writer, a content strategist who is experienced at executing text strategies for websites and let him or her be your guide. Let the content strategist put together the team, find the designer, architect the site, and get things up and running. When you’re done, you may have a modest website, but you will also have one that is well written, provides a positive user experience, and advances your goals.

That this answer is not the common one tells us something about the topsy-turvy world of web development. All too often, the writer/content strategist is an afterthought when building a website – especially on a budget. Programming and design come first. Some people even tell you to write your own site and save your funds for professional assistance in design and programming.

But that’s not right. The core of a website is content. The site won’t achieve its goals unless the content is conceived to provide a pleasing, effective user experience. Content strategy is the heart – and that’s the truth whether you’re developing a bare-bones start-up site or a major project for a large, well resourced organization.

• 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.