Comments for Marketing Education

Comment on What’s Wrong With University, College, and Private School Websites by Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:40:36 +0000

Personal opinion – there is context missing here. Yes, story is important – critical in fact. However, the purpose of the website, the purpose of the story, is to engage prospective applicants. If you end your story with they lived happily ever after and the prospective applicant leaves thinking ‘oh how nice’, your website and your story haven’t done their job. Every page on the site should create the opportunity for an applicant to engage in the process of learning more about your school based on the applicants particular interests or needs. The reality is that if your site is not satisfying this need that every applicant has, they will satisfy that need somewhere else – somewhere much further removed from your control. A really great college website does tell a story but it tells the story with the express purpose of assisting a prospective applicant to self select engagement with the school. Most school websites do not accomplish this objective. They are either cookie cutter online brochures with an ineffective contact us form or they are eye candy that hangs on the wall and looks magnificent but never really connects with the fundamental questions an applicant is asking. There is a lot that independent school websites can learn about selling from premium e-commerce sites like Amazon.com. I’m not saying that a school website should look like a product catalog but if you really think about the process you go through on every page you look at while on Amazon.com, you have to appreciate that in a very short period of time you have the information you need to choose to look at an alternative or make a purchase. In the case of schools, that choice may be to identify yourself and dig deeper rather than out-and-out submit an application online but each time a prospective applicant chooses to an affirmative action, the relationship deepens and gives the school the opportunity measure its interaction with an applicant, just like Amazon.com does when you navigate its site.

Comment on My 7 College Admissions Myths by Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:23:16 +0000

I have one child graduating from college this year and one who is a sophomore. Between the two of them we visited over 20 schools and endured the presentations and tours of nearly that many. Without exception, and I did not learn this until part of the way through the process with my first child, the single most valuable experience in evaluating a school was when we could find a student studying in the library or the student union and get them to talk candidly about the school. Typically these conversations lasted 30 – 45 minutes and in that time we learned more about the school than the 2- 3 hours we’d spend on the program tour and presentation. My advice is to take the tour during a time when school is in session (not mid-term or finals prep week) and jump off the tour in the library or the student union when you find a student who will engage with you about their experiences. You’ll spend less time and learn a lot more so that you can make an informed choice about whether you and your child want to invest 4 – 5 years and $250K in this little patch of earth.

Comment on Typekit and Academic Websites by Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:12:10 +0000

Mark,
I’m going to share a contrarian perspective on this one. As an alumni interviewer I get to ask a lot of applicants about the way they chose to apply to the school I represent. I get a variety of answers, many of them clearly designed to be what the applicant thinks I want to report back to the school. But those answers that are genuine rarely focus on the aesthetic of the website in general or typeface choice specifically. I like visually appealing presentations as much as the next person but if we consider that the purpose of communications in the school marketing process is, at least in large part, to initiate and develop a relationship between prospective students and the institution, there may be factors that rise above the level of aesthetic uniformity between a school’s printed marketing material and its online presence. Increasingly the responses I hear from prospective applicants about the process that led them to invest in an alumni interview involve social media reviews,chat room conversations and content that clearly does not carry the school’s brand elements. The trend I am seeing is that schools increasingly are out of direct control of the material that most heavily influences engagements with applicants. So I’m not at all sure that to TypeKit or not to TypeKit is really the question

Comment on Cheeseball Marketing by Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 14:54:39 +0000

Hmm… agree and disagree on this one. Agree that there is a high cheese factor in the production of some of this personalized marketing coming out of schools. However, step back and consider that the purpose of marketing isn’t to create something that hangs in the Guggenheim or wins a Pulitzer (in spite of what some agencies may claim). The purpose of this type of marketing is to engage a prospective applicant – get them to start a relationship with the school so each can evaluate the other. Sometimes it is the piece or message that agitates us – that bit of sand in the oyster – that gets our attention (look, we’re talking about cheesy Haverford marketing right now! How many great marketing pieces never even get mentioned?) that is the most effective. I’m not advocating for anyone to go out and cover their marketing with cheese-wiz in order to get noticed, but a piece that uses a technique like personalization in a less-than-artistic form can be very effective from the perspective of getting noticed and starting that relationship. So for me, it’s a step back and a look at how the piece performs its required function rather than judging it solely on its aged-dairy-product content.

Comment on Where We Are Today And Where We Are Heading by Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 14:42:38 +0000

Completely agree with Mark on his assessment. As an alumni interviewer for one of the so-called elite private universities, it continues to amaze me that applications increase 20 – 30% year over year in spite of all the conditions Mark notes. Increasingly the class makeup is from non-US students, which also underscores Mark’s contention that schools are globalizing in order to maintain the high number of applicants in the midst of a softening market for expensive elite education in the US. It also shocks me that these same institutions, who wage a virtual class warfare by the increasing gap their tuition policies fuel between the cost of the education they provide and the state of the world economy, produce graduates who in turn rail against non-educational institutions for practicing the exact same type of policy that their schools practice. Please, give these students and the policy makers at the schools they graduate from a mirror! The other behavior of schools that Mark describes that concerns me is the extent to which these institutions pick winners and losers by their policies of income redistribution – by that I refer to the practice of using a smoke-filled-room criteria to choose applicants who can not afford the sky-high fees and using the inflated cost of resources collected from applicants who “can afford it” to subsidize the hand selected applicant’s education. Rather than mitigate the classicist aspect of admission to elite higher educational institutions, this type of policy only amplifies the gap between those who can and those who can not afford to attend these schools. I hope for more progressive leadership in this regard from school administrators but I’m beginning to lose faith. Great article Mark!

Comment on Look, Ma. No Viewbook. by Mark Neustadt

Mark Neustadt — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 16:04:11 +0000

Roberta – So nice to hear from you. Thanks for getting in touch. Hope things are good down at JSC.

Comment on Look, Ma. No Viewbook. by Roberta Gable

Roberta Gable — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:57:40 +0000

Wow, Mark! This sounds great. The folks at Tufts are to be congratulated for having the courage to move forward with your vision.

Comment on An Independent School Marketing Plan by Kere Menzies

Kere Menzies — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 08:30:50 +0000

It’s so easy to think along the same old lines of print media, esp when you have found it to be tried and true. Thanks for the fresh insight – I am about to lead a marketing team for our schol in rural New Zealand with a declining role. We are losing our pupils to a city nearby, however what we have not embraced is the city way of marketing. Our target parents are Gen x’s who live and breath online, yet we have a limited and somewhat boring presence there.
Time for a rethink, Youtube, Facebook and better management of social media will now heavily play a vital role.
Thanks
Any comments on our website would be appreciated – just email me.

Comment on Hipster Versus Bro by Mark N

Mark N — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:30:15 +0000

Dude, how totally hipster! -;))

But seriously, thanks for the thoughtful comment. I totally agree that my portraying this binary opposition is simplistic and doesn’t leave room for many nuances (and ironies) within the categories. However, what interests me is the degree to which these two identifiers seem to have become much more codified and concretized over the past few years. I never used to hear either term among high school students. Today, they are pervasive.
As to the issue of privilege, it seems so self-evident as to hardly require comment. One of the traits of the bro identity is a sense of cultural superiority based on affluence, race, and gender. The working class people in Brooklyn look at the hipsters and one of the main questions they ask is, “How do these folks support themselves.” Hipsters possess a cultural capital that enables them to avoid the challenges of the more mundane people in their midst.

Comment on Hipster Versus Bro by Swarthmore '12

Swarthmore '12 — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:14:03 +0000

Interesting comments that maybe you can expand a little further in the comment section. Namely, I’m interested in hearing more about how both affinity groups negotiate their relations to privilege, specifically White/Class privilege.

I attend a school with a hipster/bro ratio of roughly 2:1, though putting it in that terms erases the fact that most of the students at my school reject that binary or don’t find themselves on that spectrum like you said. Because of my White, privileged upbringing, I find equal points of identification with both poles on the spectrum. As a point of full disclosure, however, people would probably classify me as hipster due to my thick-rimmed glasses, long hair, obsession with post-anything, and indie music tastes. Oh, and I also live in West Philadelphia (and by that I mean west of 45th, where Penn students are too afraid to go.)

What I think complicates the binary, however, is when you add other axes of oppression to the mix. Hipsters are a lot less likely to balk at you when you ask them for their preferred gender pronoun. Bros are less likely to excessively lionize people of color within their midst and prefer to let character speak over social positionality. Both, in my experience, are fairly tolerant of people with differing physical abilities, and intolerant of other forms of ability differences. Whereas a woman-identified person can also identify as a hipster, she cannot identify as a bro or as fratty.

What I’m saying is that while it might be easy to separate hipsters and bros by their negotiations of race and Whiteness, as with most prevailing social identifications, they’re a lot more complicated than just a few variables can measure. And assigning value judgments to one’s social practice is tempting, but seldom a fruitful endeavor. Rather than binarize and dismiss hipsters and bros in favor of a “silent majority” à la 1968, maybe we should be complicating and troubling these classifications a little further.

Or maybe I should stop reading Derrida. He’s gotten so mainstream these days…