“In every crowd there is a silver lining.”
– P.T. Barnum
All of business begins and ends with your crowd. You have to find your crowd because that’s where your prospective students come from. What your crowd thinks of your school determines your success. Branding exists in the minds of your prospect base. So you can’t really own or control the greatest asset of your business. You can proactively promote, influence and passively attract. Marketing then is a balance of finding your crowd and letting your crowd find you.
If the truth be told, even if you think you can sell your school to anyone, there are lots of prospects who will never be recruited by a human being working in admissions. High touch is not always the answer. Advertising often has no effect. In fact, there are many, maybe most marketers, who do not believe in any type of persuasion. In fact, persuasion may have a negative effect.
So what works?
Brand salience connected to a crowd.
Let’s take a non-higher education example: Apple computers vs. Microsoft. In the early days of their existence apple latched on to two crowds – schools and creatives. Their slogan was Think Different. They had user friendly operating system, creative software, multi-colored computers and positively exploded when they embraced music (iPods) and photography-oriented cell phones. Well those school kids grew up. Creatives became a much larger crowd. Apple used brand salience connecting to their crowds to achieve success.
Did Apple go out and twist the arms of CEOs and large IT departments in order to grow?
No. That is Microsoft’s brand salience attached to a business crowd.
Both very different and outrageously successful companies used exactly the same growth model – they attached themselves to crowds and grew their Brand salience to those crowds.
That is why most savvy marketers are brand builders and crowd finders.
So where does persuasion work? It works on fence sitters. Politicians spend millions on fence sitters. These are people who are not associated with a crowd like Democrats, Republicans, or Libertarians. Fence sitters determine most elections. But you are not running for office. So fence sitters are secondary for you.
You may say that on your last campus tour most of the kids were fence sitters. Let me suggest that almost all of those kids already had their minds made up based on a crowd they are in. They may have had reasons for being on your tour – parent’s request, looking at backup schools, pretending to be open minded, wanting to travel or visit your city, had nothing else to do, or my personal favorite; wanting to collect reasons not to go to your school instead of the school of their choice.
So if you think Brand salience with a crowd is more valuable than persuasion tactics, then the first task is to find your crowds. Then roll up your sleeves and tackle a big problem for them.
The people for whom you solve that problem are now your crowd.
Once you identify your crowd, join them. Read the magazines they read, go to their events, make contact, and stay in touch. Practice “finger-on-the-pulse” marketing. Find out what keeps your crowd up at night. Understand what they can’t do without. Don’t be like United Airlines® and spend thousands on research to find out what your prospects want – by the time you read the report, the data is irrelevant. Be like JetBlue’s® Dave Neelman, who initially built his airline by keeping in direct contact with his crowd by flying on his own planes weekly, hanging around the ticket counter, working in the baggage area and even serving prospects as a flight attendant. Be like Tony Hawk. As we said, there’s not a 12-year-old in the United States who doesn’t know his name. The skateboard park in his yard and his nationwide tours assure Tony that he will not miss a beat. If there is a shift in his market, Tony will know way before any research firm. Be like Dr. Raul Cardenas, director of CU Denver Student Affairs, who set up a “Lucy Booth” on campus to converse with students, ostensibly selling them advice for 5 cents.
Just watch.
What’s odd is they can be your crowd if they say they are your crowd. Jeep® noticed an increase in women interested in their rugged 4-wheel vehicles. The Jeep® Grand Cherokee and Jeep® Liberty with a few comfort concessions opened a whole new market. The other side of this coin was Jeep’s decision to sell pink Wranglers. That’s perfectly logical for the new female Jeep crowd, right? Wrong. Women liked the Wrangler for its rough masculine look. It’s better to listen carefully to your crowd than to make assumptions. No more pink Wranglers.
Your crowd is now interactive. If you cheat on your crowd and give them an unacceptable Flagship product on Monday (like Coca-Cola’s®“New Coke” for instance), the whole crowd will rebel against you by Tuesday morning.
“Markets (crowds) don’t want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in conversations going on behind your business firewall.”
— Assorted Authors, “The Clue Train Manifesto, The End of Business as Usual”
Your mission statement then, if you must have one, is the same for every school: Support and inspire your crowd! Your students on campus have become your crowd and are members of other important crowds. As a recruiter, it wouldn’t hurt to hang out in the student union or the local dive bar sharing a libation or two with students.