Resources
Thoughts from our team to help you differentiate and reach the next generation of learners.
Positioning and the X/Y Axis If the price of being tossed into a big category like “state schools” or “community colleges,” is irrelevance, then the job of positioning is to elevate the short-hand to something more distinctive and memorable. We need to think of positioning as a process by which we can help prospective students… Continued
Scrolling through college and university home pages is a revealing exercise. The use of photography, graphics, and story is always evolving. Much can be learned by scanning layout and imagery decisions as well as navigation and the evolution of the all of the above over time. But one of the most interesting factors to examine… Continued
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… Continued
Dimensions of Decision-making Once we have identified the schools that keep us up at night, the next step is for us to identify the competitive factors that present decision-making dimensions for our would-be students. For a car buyer it might be about Apple CarPlay or a tow package but for a high school senior, the… Continued
Asking the Key Question When my wife and I were expecting our third child, we both knew it was time for us to re-think our family car. At the time, she and I both drove smaller SUVs perfectly capable of taking two kids to school or out to dinner. But having a third child just… Continued
“Don’t be the best, be the only.” —Kevin Kelly Positioning is one of those strategy terms that is often said yet seldom understood. Candidly, I have to remind myself fairly often because it is routinely used (perhaps mistakenly) interchangeably with other terms. In the realm of marketing, positioning is an important concept to grasp… Continued
Categorization in Higher Education Marketing Just like any product or service, prospective students and parents use categories to relate to colleges and universities. We know this innately because we all use categories as short-hand to talk to one another about different schools. Is it a small school or big school? Is it a 4-year school… Continued
Persona creation, in the realm of marketing, is like having a map that guides you directly to your customer’s needs and desires. It involves sketching out detailed profiles of ideal customers based on solid research and data from your current customers. These personas are more than just demographics; they’re a mix of motivations, pain points,… Continued
“If you aim at nothing you’ll hit it every time.” Zig Ziglar Suppose you were opening a high-end restaurant where you had hired a world-renowned chef from Paris, engaged an expert architect and interior designer to guide your multi-million dollar restaurant build-out, and secured exclusive relationships with the most sought-after food purveyors in the world. … Continued
Along the lines of infusing values into marketing, broadening your marketing efforts to focus more on customer needs and aspirations (instead of mere product attributes and features) can be powerful. To explain this, the late Harvard Business School Professor Theodore Levitt coined the term “marketing myopia” to refer to the tendency of organizations to be… Continued
If there’s one thing we know about marketing it’s this: if we don’t build awareness we won’t have any customers. And while there are
Man is a storytelling animal. He is a teller of stories that aspire to truth. —Alasdair Macintyre The Hidden Stories Within I was once talking with a client
Along the lines of infusing values into marketing, broadening your marketing efforts to focus more on customer needs and aspirations (instead of mere product