"IPod" Webs -Webs for the ME Generation

So how does one market to ME?

The I'll Manage my own Experience thank you very much Generation?

Well, to some extent, you don’t. Not in the old sense of marketing. Not using the old marketing 101, Madison Ave control the image approach. In fact, what needs to be done is to cede much of the control to the audience. Let the potential students manage the experience as they manage their own. Try and make the college a marketing IPod.

That can be done with some of the technology we have today. For example, your college’s web site. Without even looking at it right now I can assert that it is probably killing sales…I mean applications. Your web site was designed by the people at the school for the people at the school and not for potential students. The home page is all cluttered with stuff that make the internal community feel good about but does not respond to the needs or wants of the customer. That by the way is a classic definition of poor customer service. Not listening to the customer and then telling them what they can have and that’s it.

“Your Website Hoovers” (a verb)
Now I know, as you do, that the homepage was a compromise anyhow to try and keep people happy. And the marketing people felt they needed some control too so the Campus of Dreams image comes across because that is how they6 want to see their school. So we end up with the same bland homepage as every one else. In fact, it is so compromised that it could represent any college in America with just a change of the headline name. What is worse, it does not sell to the market.

And the internal pages!!!!!! They are often done by everyone. “Let’s not offend anyone so we will let each department create its own page to make sure it is happy.”

”What about the students? Do they have a say?”

“Huh? On the college’s website?”

Right. Why should they be involved? How about because it is a primary point of contact for them and potential students? Therefore it should speak to them and what they want. Moreover, remember this is a generation that wishes more control itself – not be controlled or given reheated, old marketing to eat or go hungry. They won’t go hungry though. They’ll go somewhere else.

IPod Websites
So Step 1. Ask students what they think of your web and how you could make it better for them. Not just the students you’ve got either. The students who might apply. Go to high schools and get some focus groups going, surveys or get someone to do it all for you with a national audience.

LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS.

Then, step 2. GIVE UP CONTROL. How about providing an IPod homepage. A homepage that allows the visitor total control over what will be on it. That’s right. A homepage you don’t design but the visitor does. Just as a student decides what he or she wants to download onto an IPod, the student downloads what he wants on your college homepage thereby making it his own. It can be done.

CoreDataCenter (our technology partner) has been working with us to develop a webpage that has a cluster of graphic images with simple captions to allow visitors to assemble their webpage of your school. They get to select the information they want and not what the college wishes to give them (or actually itself). This places the control in the mouse of the visitor.

Granted they still get to choose from images and information that you may provide but you can also open up the image and information to students who can create videos and information for other students.

“OH MY G-D! YOU WANT TO LET STUDENTS POST WITHOUT OUR MARKETING CENSORS VETTING WHAT THEY SAY? ARE YOU MAD?”

Not yet, but your students and I will be if you don’t place some trust in them. And in the fact that they can talk to your potential students much, much better than you can and will ever be able to. As for the danger and marketing potential, read the WIRED article “And Now a Word from Our Customers” by Frank Rose in the December 2006 issue. (BTW, if you aren’t reading WIRED, you are missing the boat that has already sailed. A must read for college marketers for certain and most everyone else too if you want to have an inkling what your students are doing, thinking and going to do and think.)

Okay, so here is how what is currently being called LeadWiseWebs™ works.

The potential student comes to your landing page. That was your boring, overly wordy homepage. Clicks on some areas that interest him or her like a graphic or picture of a diploma for academic programs, a dollar sign for tuition costs ,a mob picture for adjunct faculty, or a football helmet for administration decisions………That leads to some other graphic-based choices to click on. For instance, if she clicks on the diploma, that moves to a page of a group of graphics representing the majors. A briefcase for business, an apple for education, a jail cell for criminal justice, and so on. They in turn guide other choices like scholarship information (a hand giving you money maybe). So if a student clicks on the jail cell and also scholarships, only scholarships that relate to CJ majors show up. That eliminates the dreaded list of all the scholarships for left handed nursing majors from Podunk which only turn visitors off and wear them down since they have nothing to do with their interests.

The end result is that LeadWiseWebs™ generates the student’s homepage for the school with just what he or she wants. And since it is an offshoot of our already prize and enrollment-winning Leadwise™ personalized view book generator, everything can be fully personalized with the student’s own information like his name. Then the student can save that homepage and even change or update it later.

This would also be a fantastic portal creator tool too. Ever wonder why students don’t use the portal you created for their use? Because you created it actually for your use. To let students do what you wanted to let students do to make it easier for the school.

Did you know for example, that we found that students would rather have their grades mailed to them than have to go to your portal and get them. That’s why some of them never see their last semester grades and sign up for wrong courses.

But, let students generate the portal they want and they may actually use it.

The college can still maintain full control in the classroom if it wants to. It can also lose more students by doing that as I have written before but let’s face it; academia is a control-focused universe. But as long as we realize that finally it is the students who are in full control of his or her decision to enroll and stay, we will focus on them and work to provide them the customer service they need and deserve.

Campus of Dreams Marketing to the ME Generation

So how do you market to the Me Generation? Maybe you don’t. At least not in the old traditional academic way. You know, the Field of Dreams view book approach in which you shape a reality you want the potential students to see. (Even if you have to fake aspects like pictures of students who don’t go to a school.) The goal of this approach is to manipulate the reality and the image to manipulate the target audience. So the Campus of Dreams.

I am sure you can picture it now. A group of four or five students (one white, one black, an Asian, an Hispanic and maybe a male of an alternate lifestyle) walking together (all healthy, well dressed like a TV show teen) across a sunlit but slightly shadowed green campus with some wonderful building slightly out of focus in the rear of the scene. Then in other pictures – reading a book while leaning against a tree, sitting in class while a better looking faculty member or a model hired to look like a teacher smiles while writing on the board and so on and on.

You know, the campus of dreams where marketing ideas from the past are supposed to attract students to that new dorm you just built out in what was a parking lot. The Build it and they will come. Not the building but the image. We think the cliché worked in the past. Maybe then. Not at all now.

This was a marketing concept built on control of image and the buyer. It was marketing 101. If we marketers control the message and the image, we can control and manipulate the mind and emotions of the market. That will get us the results we want. We will make the school look like the college we wanted to go to. That’ll do it. And for a while it did just that.

An example. When I designed a community college marketing campaign in 1998 for a school that had eleven years of enrollment decline with “traditional college marketing” we came up with a campaign called “Harvard on the Hill” (a traditional slight against community colleges) we decided to position ourselves against well know schools in the first two years as a transfer option. Most community colleges can compare themselves very favorably in those years against name brand schools in class size, student teacher ratios, cost…followed by transfer to a four-year school. So we developed billboards that had text such as “A Harvard education. Just $62,540 off.” Start here. Go there” Or “First two years of Georgetown. Just less Hoya Paloya. Start here. Go there.” And so on. We backed it all up with detailed advertorials that flushed out the numbers and details.

I received letters from other schools complaining that this was no way to market a school. It was “anti-collegiate.” “Not academic.” “Too (choking sound) commercial.” They were bothered by the humor we used and by comparing ourselves to othet schools. These all came from colleges and universities which were then having no enrollment issues. Now..? A couple school trustees even questioned the marketing as perhaps not appropriate to an educational institution. “They seem out of control” one said.

Ahhhhh. Perhaps that was the secret.

Now the real test of marketing. Marketing is to finally sell product, services, and purchases. That’s what even image marketing or branding is supposed to do. So, if the campaign worked and enrollment went up, it worked. It worked. Then when there was a change in leadership, they went back to the old academic marketing and enrollment dropped again.

Lesson. The old ways are not the best ways. They do not work. We just put so much money and tradition into them that we must believe they will work. They don’t. they are control-based.

Perhaps what needs to be done is realize that to a very large extent what we call marketing doesn’t work. And maybe didn’t really work well in the past. Though it may have pleased the internal campus and even won an award from peers, did it really sell enrollments? Not really sure. But I am sure now that what is thought of as traditional collegiate marketing will not sell to the ME generation market.

As Scott Donaton, Editor of Advertising Age was quoted in the December 2006 WIRED (p 231) The era of control is over: “You can either stay in the bunker, or you can try to participate. And to not participate is criminal.”

It is criminal because schools are spending huge, ever increasing amounts of money to market for enrollments. But they are doing it with traditional collegiate control the image and message approaches that will not work with the ME generation. This is a generation that does not respond to a message unless they can at least participate in forming it.

So now, what will work?

College Tours to Nowhere Can be to Additional Enrollment

One of the most important parts of the enrollment sequence – the campus tour - is also one of the worst for many potential students and their parents. We have cited before that at least 12% of potential probable enrollees is lost as soon as the interested potential enrollees encounter the campus. The poor customer service of the tour is a major contributor. Not the only one by any means, but can be a major one.

Most colleges relegate the tours to a group of students who likely start out enthusiastic and interesting but soon devolve into the bored rote voices of students who have more important things than this #$%ing tour on their mind. This is especially so for students doing the tours to make minimum wage.

And the tour itself…. “Here is a typical classroom (yawn). A computer lab (Woopie! Computers in rows) This is a sample dorm room (which is almost always staged much better than any other room). This is our cafeteria (where the food sucks but I have to pretend it is fine), And on and on. How exciting and motivating.

The tone of an article in today’s (2/13/07) New York Times summarizes rather well.

College tours are pretty standard. A student walking backward will show you the library, the athletic center and a typical dorm room. Then there will be the requisite safety talk. The tour guide will point out blue boxes -- emergency call buttons for the campus police -- and extol the security systems in the residence halls. The spiel usually includes a bit about how, if a student feels uncomfortable walking alone at night on campus, he or she can simply call security for an escort.

Gee, wouldn’t that tour just light up your “gotta go there juices”? Not really since most any tour of one school could also be the tour of another. Sort of interchangeable like school catalogs and websites. No wonder the student tour guides lose their enthusiasm too even though taking students to the library might be their only visit too.

The idea is that a student will provide a more authentic voice and customer service that will seem genuine. Can’t be done when the tour is trying to please two audiences at once – parents and students. These are two very different audiences and one rule of customer service is that it must e focused correctly on the correct audience. And well, let’s face it. Students have different interests than their parents.

Students want to know they will get a good education but also have a good time. Parents walk through the tour focused on the ROI for their tuition dollars, yes the library because they believe students will use books rather than the web, safety issues and how much this all is going to cost me.

Okay, the solutions. First, have two tours and two tour guides. The potential students should go off with a student without the parents. That way they can see the aspects of the school they really want to see and ask real questions like “where do people really eat? Is one dining hall better than another or should I skip them entirely?” “What dorms are the ones you don’t want to get stuck in?” “What’s with web access for downloading on campus?” “If I rush a frat/sorority which is really which?” And so on. Take them to where students really hang out. Buy them a cup of coffee or the such and talk there, in their habitat; not the schools official one. They will feel more comfortable and will feel as if they have joined the school community already. And community is one thing this generation craves. They feel isolated by the society so they have a need to feel as if they can belong in some community. Sitting and talking in an environment they are familiar with sets them into a sense of community with the group around the table. We already suggested this sort of structure for admissions to increase enrollment in another posting.

Parents should go with an adult tour guide and be shown a classroom, a library tour, safety including a brief meeting with the head of security, an introduction to the financial aid office and director to set appointments, an quick introduction to an academic officer, a dean or a chair if you schedule by academic interests. They should meet the Dean/VP/Dir/ Head Honcho of student services too. They want a feeling that there are real people there to help them and their potential tuition provider.

If it is not possible to have two tours, then hire professional tour givers or train the admissions officers to give the tour. And I do mean train. Do not assume that because a person is an admissions representative, he or she can give a good tour. Simply walking with people and pointing out the classrooms like a flight attendant pointing out the emergency doors “two doors aft and two doors in the back…” is not pointing out the safety aspects of our Boeing College 387. Teach them how to fake enthusiasm if it is not there and then wonder why you keep a less than enthusiastic admissions rep. Train them how to get the tourists to talk more than the reps. Teach them questioning and listening as a touring technique.

Combine aspects of the student tour with the parents tour on a checklist and ask the tourists what they want to see. Let them decide or at least provide them the illusion they are deciding. Ever been on a guided tour and felt like you were really missing the good stuff on the “okay everyone, over here now!” Find out what interests them and not what you assume they want to see. Then show it to them.

Keep in mind that this is the ME generation. The I will Manage my Experience generation which by the way is more a state of mind than an age. From what music they load on their IPod, to designing their own home and Face Book pages, to Tivo-ing to watch 24 when they wish to rather than the time the network set, to most everything, they want to make the decisions on how their experiences will be set up and managed. They want control and community. They want to control/manage their experiences. So let them make some decisions and don’t assume you know what they want to see and experience.

Also when setting up the basic concept of the tour, you may want to get external guidance that knows what students really want on a tour. There are consultants who can help. Or get some focus groups pulled together from high school students and learn from them. Let them guide you so you can guide them on their tours of their school - if the tour doesn't lose them somewhere out by Classroom Building B.

Feel free to contact us at AcademicMAPS with any thoughts, questions or issues you'd like to discuss. We are always there to help. Or contact Neal directly at Nealr@GreatServiceMatters.com at 413.219.6939.