Developing a Positioning Statement for your Institution

Put Your College in a Box

Ideally, we want those 7 words to make a prospective student feel something.  They must have a visceral connotation of some sort—that combination of “I can make a difference in this crazy world in which I find myself” and “I feel shot out of a cannon and can’t wait to get started.”  It’s the inspired feeling we get when we listen to a song to feel something or when an advertisement moves us.  For an example of this, Google ‘Volvo’s The get away Car’ to see how a car company can help us relate to the challenge of finding meaning in life.  But before we get to the feeling, let’s get to the position.

As prospective students encounter your school, they will undoubtedly be attracted to any number of things.  From the vibrance of your social media presence and the stories and anecdotes they’ve heard from their friends to experiences they’ve had with your brand in sports venues or magazine ads, there’ll be a few things about you that have stirred their interest.  But as their attraction grows to consideration, they’ll begin to size you up within the context of the other schools or options they’re consider.  They, along with their parents, will begin to put you in a box.

They’ll want to know if you’re an expensive arts school for students who aren’t into mainstream educational disciplines or you’re a two year option for those who are ready (but not totally ready) for the workforce.  Or maybe you’re a campus with a broad ideological canvas where students come to form their own personal values while learning.  Maybe you’re a school that’s all about life skills and making a difference in the workforce.  Perhaps you’re a conservative campus rooted in religious values that are still very much alive and well.  They’ll want to put you into this sort of box.

This “box” mentality is a bit challenging because we’ve all been told to think outside the box and to resist people putting us in boxes.  But determining a box for ourselves can actually be a source of strength:  a firm place where we stand.  And while perhaps we’re not completely rigid, maintaining flexibility for grey area around the box, our right fit student will appreciate this approach because we are articulating who we are and, by extension, who we are not.

In her book Obviously Awesome:  How to Nail Product Positioning, author April Dunford describes positioning as a tool used by brands to “[help customers] grasp something they haven’t seen before.”  Dunford challenges marketers to define “the market you describe yourself as being part of” along with “introducing a unique point of of view into an existing category.”  These thoughts can help us shape a positioning statement (or canvas, as Dunford prefers) to help us help our prospective students understand which box to put us in.

Positioning can also help from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective.  By putting yourself in a box, you’re able to become visible to those searching for you that may never have heard of you.  I came across a college’s home page recently that put themselves in a box right within the home page’s <Title> tag:  the highly prominent place where a school can customize the text that appears in the title of the browser window and also what populates in the browser bookmark by default when a user bookmarks the home page.  This particular school, after their college name, added a line that said “a conservative Christian college teaching traditional values.”  This tag is seen by search engines as among the most influential in developing rankings.  For those prospective students searching for a school in this particular box on Google, this institution will be near the top.