Fall 2010
Making The Grade – Educational Branding
Colleges and universities are facing stiff competition in the quest to attract students. A decade ago colleges were not very involved in developing branding campaigns. Each school was simply judged by prospective students by reputation, educational opportunities that were offered, campus location and other tangible characteristics. Today, as tuitions rise and the list of student’s expectations grow, colleges are now promoting themselves to prospective students in a different way.
Schools are looking to branding gurus to help them break through the onslaught of materials flooding high school seniors, gain prestige, build alumni loyalty and fill freshman classes. In their efforts to attract students, the industry’s once conservative approach has busted out of the box. The new branding campaigns for universities have met with mixed results.
American University in Washington, D.C., which was not well known outside of the Capitol beltway, wanted to give their student recruiting efforts a boost and strengthen their reputation for research. The university launched a campaign featuring the phrase “American Wonk” to convey that school’s students were smart and connected. American University students returning to campus this fall were given free T-shirts emblazoned with different versions of the wonk sayings including, Global Wonk and Green Wonk.
Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa hired a marketing communications firm to create an edgy recruitment campaign that would play off of the university’s existing “The Drake Advantage.” The goal was to convey that by attending Drake students would unleash their full potential. The new campaign materials featured a bold, blue D+ symbol, which was intended to be slightly ironic and catch student’s attention.
Recruitment materials that featured the D+ were mailed during the summer and seemed to be striking a chord with the target audience. The number of visits to Drake’s campus was up by 20 percent and inquiries received had jumped 66 percent.
About two months into the campaign Drake hit a snag when bloggers began making fun of the D+ campaign. Faculty, alumni and others critical to the campaign began voicing their concerns about associating Drake with a failing grade. University officials explained that they felt the kind of students that Drake wanted to attract would easily understand and appreciate the irony of the D+. The public furor forced the school to modify their marketing to eliminate the failing grade motif.
Viral Video Can Help Crack The Consumer Market
YouTube is fast becoming the favored launching pad for new consumer products, leap frogging items over the traditional start-up and distribution issues faced during a more traditional product development. Normally, once a new consumer product has gone through the prototype and development stage, it must first be vetted in a test market. If successful in a test market, the product must then win shelf space from retailers and expand distribution. All of these product development steps take lots of time and money. Frustrated by the traditional method of bringing a new product to market, a number of entrepreneurs have harnessed YouTube to fast track their consumer products.
Inventor Robert Wagstaff had spent ten years of his life and $50,000 trying to launch Orabrush, a tongue brush designed to cure bad breath, all to no avail. It wasn’t until he posted a humorous video about bad breath on YouTube featuring a giant tongue, named Morgan, that Orabrush began to appear in stores. Convinced by the $1 million in sales from online videos, drugstores agreed to stock the product in stores..gif)
Humor is also key in the series of videos used by the blender manufacturer, Blendtec, which regularly adds new videos to its series,
“Will It Blend.” The series features Tom Dickson, a lab technician and promoter, who conducts experiments to see if unusual items will blend in a Blendtec blender. The videos have demonstrated what happens when
you put everything from an iPhone to a vuvuzela in a blender.
Simply launching a video on YouTube certainly doesn’t guarantee instant success for a product, but the viral nature of the site and the ability to provide millions of potential purchasers with a demonstration of how your product works can be a winning combination.
A Picture is worth a Thousand Words
Conveying A Message Using Signs & Symbols
A picture is worth a thousand words, which was a lesson learned long ago, when man realized that sometimes complex messages could be conveyed with a simple shape. From squares to circles and polygons to ovals, each shape develops a meaning within the culture where it is being used. The same shape can even elicit different reactions within the same culture, depending on who is viewing them.
Using symbols to communicate has been occurring for thousands of years, from drawings on cave walls, to shop sign in medieval times. Symbols were the only way to convey a message that the mostly illiterate population could understand. Now, even through the world has become more literate, symbols are still widely used.
Studies show that men and women interpret the same shape differently. For most men the circle shape conveys a feminine, soft message, while women associate the circle as tender, loving, and warm. For men, the square represents something solid, predictable, and sure. Women tend to view it as brittle and hard. Most men view a triangle as exciting, and powerful, while women interpret the shape as threatening and dangerous.
Not all shapes generate this gender-based dichotomy. Both sexes interpret the oval shape as secure and pleasurable. With such positive associations for most people, it’s little wonder that the oval shape can be seen in many car company logos, including Subaru, Hyundai, Kia, Toyota, and Ford.
Shapes do not need to be one dimensional, often different forms are combined to convey a message. An example is Facebook’s symbol, which combines the solid, sure feel of a square with the rounded warm corners of a circle. As such, the Facebook symbol incorporates shapes that appeal to each gender. 
It’s important to keep in mind that the interpretations of symbols can change over time. As shapes are used in different ways by people and as changes continually take place within the culture, the collective interpretations change. One example would be the swastika shape. It is believed that the swastika first appeared in Sanskrit on the Indian subcontinent and was once a popular symbol of good luck. Conscripted by the Nazis, it has since become to be viewed as a symbol of hatred. So, even though changes in interpretation take place, using shapes and symbols will remain a universal way to convey a message.
