Report from Brand ManageCamp 2009

DAY 1

Marketing is a pretty diverse field. I know a thing or two about the subject, but I am constantly amazed at just how many niches have evolved in the increasingly complicated post-secondary marketplace. For example, I had never before thought much about “sonic branding," not until the woman who sat at my pre-conference breakfast table told me everything there is to know about it. It’s her business, and as one of the conference vendors, she felt obligated to share. Everything. Now I feel like an expert.

What I’m saying is that she talked at length about sonic branding and I probably ought to be an expert by now. Maybe I would be if I hadn’t been goofing off, giggling to myself about fart sound effects. She had that kind of effect on a person. In the end, I wasn’t sure if the loud, long blahblahblah about her sonic branding business was ironic, or just very clever self-promotion.

In any case, the early-morning harangue presented an important insight: Canadian post-secondary marketing is far behind our American cousins, in terms of resourcing, sophistication, and flatulence. The average marketing and communications team is running to play catch up, leading where we can, making the best with poorly-resourced tactics where we can’t . We don’t have time or money for considering the sonic branding of our institutions. I’m not making fun of such niche businesses. I’m just saying they are irrelevant until our priority task is taken care of: strategic marketing from the rear. That’s not another fart joke; it’s a comment about the necessity to bring Canadian post-secondary education leadership into the 21st century with respect to the importance that marketing plays in cleverly, compellingly articulating a value proposition for increasingly fewer students who have more choices than ever. Right now most PSE marketing shops are small and over-worked and not necessarily leading from the front.

Another important insight: I am extremely jealous that I don’t have an official American-type business title like “technology evangelist” or “market prophet," even though my friends and marketing colleagues in Canada would make fun of me if I did. I would even make fun of me. I would, in fact, give myself a roundhouse kick to my own head in the best Chuck Norris tradition.

Despite this, Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s technology evangelist, gave a great talk at the conference, and managed to come across as being extremely cool, smart, and, one more time: cool. Nobody made fun of him. He talked about the art of “intrapreneuring” – being an innovative entrepreneur from within the organization.

Brand management/marketing take homes:

1. Make meaning. This is what public post-secondary education is all about: changing the world. It isn’t about making money, it’s about changing lives and making Canada a better place. Kawasaki is now a big shot venture capitalist, so he has the street cred to say that we should define ourselves around the meaning we are making in people’s lives. My take: we are on the side of the angels. This makes me happy, and happy to work hard at marketing a community college on Vancouver Island.

A less noble, but just as interesting (and far more profitable) example: the “meaning” Nike makes around the world. Nike works hard to downplay the child labour sweatshops, obviously, in favour of a more compelling meaning: efficacy, power, liberation. It makes you want to buy their shoes.

2. Make mantra. Vision statements and long-winded mission statements are dumb, because nobody remembers them, and nobody cares about them. Wanting a vision is not the problem. We need a vision. But it’s important to be able to define yourself in a couple of meaningful words. For example, here is hamburger vendor Wendy’s mission statement:

“Our guiding mission is to deliver superior quality products and services for our customers and communities through leadership, innovation and partnerships.”

Leadership, innovation and partnerships??? If you’re laughing now, you’re my kind of marketer (and if you’re drooling about a hamburger, give me a call and let’s go for an early lunch). Wendy’s mantra is something far more simple, memorable and meaningful: “healthy, fast food." It’s something the company can believe in. Other examples:

FedEx: “peace of mind."

Nike: “authentic athletic performance."

Mantra is more important than mission statement. Mission statements are a dime a dozen:

"We have committed to synergistically fashion high-quality products so that we may collaboratively provide access to inexpensive leadership skills in order to solve business problems."

"It is our job to continually foster world-class infrastructures as well as to quickly create principle-centered sources to meet our customer's needs."

"Our challenge is to assertively network economically sound methods of empowerment so that we may continually negotiate performance based infrastructures."

If these mission statements (from Scott Adams’ Dilbert Mission Statement Generator) make you want to cry, or at least leave work early and take me out for a cheeseburger, seriously...give me a call.

3. Get going. Don’t just make incremental changes in your marketing work – break from the usual. Effective post-secondary education marketing requires that we think differently, and that we not be afraid to polarize people. That’s not to say that we annoy or piss people off; rather, it’s the reality that when we do great things, our actions have great consequences. Sometimes it upsets some people.

4. Define a business model. Marketing isn’t just airy-fairy stuff. The typical business marketplace driver is to think like this: “Figure out who has your money in his wallet right now, then go get it.” We’re not strictly after money in post-secondary marketing, but we are after students and credibility in an increasingly competitive marketplace. A simple, specific business plan is necessary to direct resources and measure success.

5. Hire infected people. Education and work experience are important when hiring new staff, but so is passion. In fact, sometimes education and work experience are irrelevant. My own Master’s degree is in Wildlife Biology. Does this help me be a better marketer? Probably, but not in ways that are easy to define or are obviously relevant. The take home is that we want good people in marketing, people who are going to make a difference. To that end, we should ignore the irrelevant, and hire people that are better than ourselves. Handy aphorism: A players always hire A+ players, while B players always hire C players.

6. Don’t let the bozos grind you down. You know what I’m talking about. Yes, you do.

DAY 2

Brand bubble?

The power of traditional brands – and our approach to marketing brands – is about to pop forever, according to John Gerzema and Ed Lebar. Gerzema spoke eloquently (albeit super-fast) about “the great unwind” that is happening in consumer behaviour today, including:

·       steep decline in trust given to brands

·       spending less and saving more

·       reduction of consumer debt

·       shifting values from what we carry, to how we carry ourselves

Their thesis is simply that many, many brands are in trouble. They are devaluing in a new economy made possible by the Internet, because the old-school marketing formulas to create sales and grow market share are becoming irrelevant, losing traction with consumers. The Internet and Internet-derived technologies, along with profound failures in traditionally strong industries (banking, insurance, real estate, automobiles, etc.), have allowed the birth of a fundamentally different consumer, with profoundly different consumer behaviour.

Dave aside: when are we going to stop capitalizing “Internet”? It takes time for me to hit that shift-I key ten million times a day (say, a fifth of a second X 10,000,000 = 555 hours per DAY!). Also, and more importantly, the Internet is just a tool. We don’t type “Hammer” or “Stereo Hi-Fi System”, do we? Let’s agree to just type it in lower case, okay? Pass it on: internet, hammer, stereo hi-fi system.

Back to the bubble… while the thesis is simple, the working out of it is pretty detailed. I recommend The Brand Bubble to you, and I’m only half-way through the book. It’s not Seth Godin simple, but it might be just as important. Here are a few key points to consider as you ponder how these new culture values might affect post-secondary education marketing in Canada:

1. Liquid life. This means less stuff in our lives. More and more, gross capitalism is seen as a kind of uncool or déclassé consumption, requiring corporations to move towards simple, straightforward communication with consumers. Real life example: New York Prada and Gucci buyers asking for plain, brown paper bags to hide their purchases from the rest of humanity. (Now we see them as they are: uncool.)

2. Ethics and fair play. Empathy and respect are becoming popular again, despite eight years of creeping barbarism under the Bush regime in America. It’s the return to nice, meaning that corporations need to value values, and value community (and not just pretend that they do so).

3. Indestructible spirit. Across nearly every sector there is a growing interest in “durable living” and “do-it-yourself” idealism, manifesting in urban farming and “flash packing” (back packing with all your tech gear) and home canning and reinvented Old American (and Canadian) values. The required corporate response is to create goods and services that last. Regardless that the economics don’t usually make sense, obsoletism is out. Hooray! (Dave drives a 1982 Buick that is still going strong.)

4. Return to the fold. Cooperative consumerism is now big, for example “cow pooling” (where a group of people buy an organic cow and share the meat) and “carrot mobbing” (the practice of using the carrot rather than a stick to shift corporate behaviour in a particular – usually sustainable – direction). In order to survive, businesses must become community organizers, as consumers move from mindless to mindful consumption, from quantity to quality.

While the Brand Bubble message is one of doom and gloom for companies (colleges?) that are not able to meet the challenges of the new marketplace, the overall message is one of hope. Brands are a tremendous asset that must be managed at the highest level in an organization. Will post-secondary education providers figure it out in time? Will the C-level suite get that academia is NOT different from the rest of the world, because the people who go to school, and the people who teach school, and the people who sweep school hallways, and the people who stock school bookstore shelves, are, and always have been, PEOPLE. People who are consumers that now act in increasingly different ways.

My bet is that they will. (But I’m in Las Vegas right now, and betting is kind of the thing to do.)