Resources
Thoughts from our team to help you differentiate and reach the next generation of learners.
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 all sorts of ways to do that—ranging from public relations campaigns to referral programs, promotion (specifically, paid promotion) is one lever over which we have a high degree of control. As… Continued
Higher Education about Higher Education You don’t have to look (or listen) hard to hear a great deal of negativity about the value of a college degree. If you run a Google search on ‘college isn’t worth it anymore,’ you’ll find studies, surveys, and rants about why college (according to them) isn’t worth it. Headlines… Continued
Understanding all of the factors related to an institution’s return on investment, what value does your institution deliver for the costs your students pay in tuition? It is likely that the role you play in delivering benefits in exchange for the remuneration you receive in tuition and fees is dramatic. So why not frame that… Continued
“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” —Warren Buffett Calculated and Characterizing Value As consumers, we’re faced with value calculations all of the time. We’re constantly being presented with products and their prices and making decisions whether over the course of months of deliberation or within seconds. We might shop for a… Continued
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
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