Summer is a relatively quiet time for the Gustavus campus. However, this August, only weeks before students returned and the familiar buzz of activity resumed, the uneventful exterior was misleading: big things were developing amidst the calm.
A small group of students chatted in the Liedholm room when Vice President of Marketing and Communication Gwen Freed entered, accompanied by another woman. Every inch a self-assured executive, Eilzabeth Scarborough introduced herself and posed a question to the students around the table: “What makes Gustavus distinctive?”
Scarborough is partner and president of SimpsonScarborough, a consulting firm based in Washington D.C. Discovering just what makes an institution unique is her area of expertise. She flew from New York City to spend time on the Gustavus campus in an attempt to gain a better impression of the school. It is the first step in an on-going project to improve public relations at Gustavus.
SimpsonScarborough specializes in marketing for higher education institutions. It promises to deliver “the most sophisticated marketing and branding strategies and tactics” to its clients. In short, Scarborough works with a team of advertising experts that colleges and universities hire for advice on how to sell themselves in a manner that will give them a competitive edge.
“We are really putting a whole new level of emphasis on marketing,” Freed said. “We’re moving ahead with the most ambitious re-branding initiative in our history.” The effort began last spring when President Jack Ohle was selected to follow former President Jim Peterson. When Ohle was introduced in Chapel in May of last year, he emphasized his belief that Gustavus is a great school but does not let enough people in on that fact.
“It’s very important that everybody has a sense of who we are,” Ohle said. “It’s when an institution isn’t focused that it begins morphing into something that people don’t really know, and we want the college to be very clearly defined and identified as who we are.” A detailed step-by-step plan was created to make this goal a reality.
Good marketing campaigns comes in phases SimpsonScarborough is simply one component of the first phase of this process. “They will do the research and institutional positioning phase of the work,” Freed said. “We go forward from there to do some creative realization of that brand as well as a communications audit and a full-scale marketing and advertising plan.”
A task force entitled the “Marketing, Research Initiative and Working Group” was formed to lead the way as the process moves forward. Don’t expect a flood of new marketing materials coming from Gustavus in the near future, though. “It goes in phases,” Freed said, “you won’t see an ad blitz immediately when this phase of the project is done.”
Taking time to collect data is crucial in launching a successful marketing campaign, Freed said. “It is very important when you are going to invest time and money and resources in marketing that you don’t just do it based on your own gut hunch but that you have strong empirically based research, both quantitative and qualitative,” which is what the task force will work with SimpsonScarborough to produce.
“What I think will come out of that is an understanding by our entire community of how we are going to talk about who we are,” Ohle said.
Marketing and higher education history 101
Higher education is a competitive arena, and in the last thirty years marketing has become the weapon of choice used by colleges to compete for everything from prospective students and donations to media attention and an improved reputation. This was not always the case. Thirty years ago marketing and higher education rarely had anything to do with each other.
College officials once rejected the principles of public relations as something for the corporate world and were content for it to remain there. But when the last of the baby boomers received their high school diplomas, the old attitudes in college admissions went with them.
Edward Fiske, editor of The Fiske Guide to Colleges, remembers witnessing new efforts taken by admission offices in response to fears that seats would go empty as a smaller population approached college. “Their response was to increase their marketing efforts to assure that they got their necessary share of the declining number of high school graduates,” Fiske wrote in a Septebmer 27, 2008 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“At first there was a lot of skepticism,” Vice President for Finance and Treasurer Ken Westphal said. “[People asked,] ‘Why do colleges need to be branding? That’s the corporate world. … We’re non-profit.'” Eventually, these attitudes passed, and high school seniors today receive a steady flow of glossy brochures, view books, DVDs and whatever innovative tools colleges create.
“Once out of the bottle,” Fiske said, “the notion of higher education as just another item to be sold and purchased took on a life of its own.”
Freed agrees, “For the last decade, at least, we have a different scenario in which higher education has really embraced good, strong marketing principles,” she said. Now, marketing is a fact of life in higher education, and if colleges want to remain competitive, they have to accept it.
“People have come to realize that something that has been recognized in the corporate world for a long time has equal importance in higher education,” Westphal said.
Standing out from the pack
Gustavus is not immune to the times, and like most schools nationwide it now devotes significant resources and time towards marketing and advertising initiatives.
According to writers Thomas Hayes and Roy Adler, colleges face a difficult task in trying to distinguish themselves from the pack. They are journalists for the magazine Currents, and point out that there are approximately 3,640 colleges and universities in the country. Each of those schools shares the same goal of finding some sort of “differential advantage” that will set them apart from the pack. The playing field in Minnesota is even more competitive because of the hotbed of high-quality private schools concentrated here, Freed said.
Villa Julie College, a school of 3,000 students in Maryland, recently took drastic measures in the name of public relations. In their first step towards articulating who they are, the college decided to start by changing their name altogether and in one board meeting became Stevenson University.
According to Ohle, Gustavus does not need to take such drastic measures to find our identity. He said the school already has a strong identity and the challenge lies in articulating that. What is it that makes Gustavus unique, especially compared to the St. Olafs, Carletons and Macalesters of the world? For Ohle, the five core values of faith, community, excellence, justice and service are crucial aspects defining Gustavus.
For the group of students who were posed that question this summer, the fact that Gustavus is such a tight-knit community is central. It remains to be seen what trademark, logo or brand the school will use to embody Gustavus.
“We’ll talk about the five core values,” Ohle said. “From that people will define us. And if we use the right words and if we talk about ourselves consistently, that will be how others will identify us.”
Adler and Hayes warn that schools like Gustavus have to avoid getting lost in the shuffle of schools that appear very similar. “A truly strong brand has two core components: relevancy and distinctiveness,” Adler and Hayes said.
Often schools make the mistake of marketing themselves in ways that are,”virtually indistinguishable from the competition,” Adler and Hayes said.
“Almost all small, religiously-affiliated colleges and universities make claims of rigor, personal attention and value-laden education. Where there may be a robust demand for what is being offered, if there are multiple competitors offering it, someone will not survive.”
Junior Scandinavian Studies Major Andrew Nelson believes that the school should be less concerned with its image. Ohle said, “We can’t be an institution that pleases everyone.” Nelson worries that Gustavus tries to do just that too often and avoids taking strong stances on issues out of concern for alumni they may offend.
Ohle pointed out that the college will not take a position on political issues. Nelson believes there are some political issues that influence the daily lives of students.
“Saying you don’t want to take any political stance is different when there are direct issues that are affecting students that they are failing to act on.”
Marketing and fundraising: do the two go together?
Despite the challenges that accompany marketing, Ohle says it is an instrumental element of improving the college’s budget over time. “We are extremely financially strong,” Ohle said. Even so, he does recognize areas where the school could improve: building the endowment and attracting more alumni donations so that Gustavus can become less dependent on tuition are just two examples.
Westphal points out that colleges operate financially in ways that are often contrary to a classic business model. “The business model is that you lose money from your core business,” Westphal said. That core business is students, and when the cost of running the college is subtracted from the revenue garnered from student tuition, Gustavus loses anywhere from six to seven million dollars a year. According to Westphal, this is the same situation most schools have. “That’s just the nature of the beast,” Westphal said, “the economics of the ballgame.”
As a result, building the annual fund and increasing the endowment are important priorities for colleges to focus on. It gives schools a measure of stability, and the flexibility to be less influenced by volatile admission numbers. “We don’t rely on tuition any more heavily that most institutions in the country,” Ohle said.
In the 2008 fiscal year, tuition was approximately 57 percent of the total operating revenues. “Tuition-dependence is something we all talk about and something we want to control, but at the same time, unless the college has an endowment that is very high, it really must rely on student tuition.”
Building the endowment, a source of revenue whose principal is comprised of contributions that the school invests and profits from the interest on, has three steps. Westphal said it requires increasing the outright gifts that increase the principal amount, making good investments and controlling spending.
Ohle has a long history in fundraising. “I have been involved in fundraising all of my professional life,” he said. With a new marketing campaign to support the school, Ohle and others hope to bring in more money and improve the institution. “We have not asked our alumni to support us financially as much as we probably should. But that will come over time,” he said.
Ohle is excited to see the process unfold. “I think that we are in a very strong position to take the next step toward differentiating ourselves,” Ohle said. “I [am] really pleased about the willingness of people to think outside the box in trying to think about how we can strengthen this institution for a strong future.”