Tell Me a Story, Chapter 1
If you were to walk past my house with the windows open, there’s a good chance you’d hear my 3-year-old daughter say, “tell me a story.” Stories are everything to her right now - the longer and more conflict-ridden, the better. The stories don’t need to be especially realistic, logical, or even relevant. Case in point: for several months now I’ve been telling a series of stories about a furniture store in Massachusetts that deals with lost shipments and silly employees. And sometimes dragons.
What matters is that the story captivates, that it holds interest and helps—in some way—organize all the things she’s seeing and experiencing for the first time.
Stories are one of the ways societies have made sense of the world for tens of thousands of years. Communities with strong storytellers have been shown to experience greater levels of cooperation and protection. Storytellers themselves are more likely to receive acts of service from others and good storytellers are more likely to find mates. It’s not hyperbolic to say the arc of our evolution bends toward storytelling.
This is critical for how we communicate information. It is tempting in a world rich in data to convey provable, quantifiable points. But it is also true that while data may be more truthful, it may not be the best way to communicate information. In the battle between numbers and narrative, narrative wins. This happens for a few reasons:
People don’t always want more information (“information overload” is real)
Information alone is meaningless without proper context or clear benefit (looking at you, student-to-faculty ratio)
People are not always rational and are more likely to trust anecdotes than hard data
Without narratives to back them up, numbers can be manipulated, used to hide bias, or to intimidate those not in the loop
In turn, stories that are not anchored to or connected with numbers can veer into fairytales, leading to misunderstanding or even fraud (WeWork, Theranos, FTX). When communicating, you need both, but one should lead with narrative and support with numbers.
It was against this backdrop that I started thinking about the stories colleges and universities tell about themselves. That is, after all, what a brand is - the story people understand about you. “Brand” and “story” are so intertwined that instead of talking about strengthening a brand, many simply say, “we just need to tell our story better.”
But what is the value of having a clear and compelling brand story? Does it have any real impact on enrollment? What elements of the story are most important? And how should colleges and universities communicate their brand stories?
These were the questions swirling in our minds and we set about answering them in the way market researchers are wont to do - collecting data. We conducted a survey of over 3,500 prospective students from around the country and asked them to evaluate how clearly they understood various aspects of universities they were familiar with.
While I won’t go into the methodological details here (though happy to elaborate if you’d like), it is critical to understand that what we assessed was clarity, not perception. We didn’t want to know how strong they thought a college was on a given factor; instead, we wanted to know how clearly they understood that aspect of the college. Factors ranged from academic quality to what to expect from student life to the ability to recognize “whether or not I would be a good fit.”
I will share more of the results of this research in subsequent newsletters, but for now I want to focus on the key question of whether having a clear brand story matters. Does the clarity of a university’s brand actually have any impact on enrollment?
To answer this, we ran a correlation between an institution’s composite Brand Clarity Score derived from the survey and several enrollment and financial metrics. Results of this correlation test are shown below:
The clarity of a university’s brand has a relationship with some institutional metrics but not others, and not always in the ways we expect.
Brand clarity has no relationship with the volume of applications a university receives (correlation value of +0.06) or even how many students enroll (+0.09). Instead, there is a clear and positive relationship with how desirable the university is seen to be, as indicated by the institution’s draw rate (+0.56). (Draw rate, or yield divided by acceptance rate, is a useful signal of an institution’s overall desirability.) Put differently, a clear and compelling brand may impact how much students are interested in a college, but not necessarily how many.
This extends to when students enroll as there is a positive relationship between brand clarity and retention (+0.45). Having a clearer brand in the marketplace makes it easier for right-fit students to find you. More right-fit students enrolling at the institution leads to greater student satisfaction with their selections and therefore higher retention.
Finally, there is a negative relationship with discount rate (-0.34) and a positive relationship with net tuition revenue (+0.38). Institutions with clearer brands have lower discount rates and generate higher tuition revenue than institutions with less well-defined brands. These institutions have more pricing power in the marketplace – they can afford to discount less and generate more money per student.
The results validate what we have long known or suspected to be true: Clearly defining and communicating who your institution is to the marketplace matters, and it matters in real and measurable ways.
Anyone who communicates on behalf of the institution is, in effect, a storyteller. The audiences are many, but the most important is prospective students. They—like my daughter, like any of us—use stories to make sense things and they want something compelling.
When institutions communicate their brand stories, they must tell students what they offer and give them a compelling reason to write themselves in.
This is the first of three newsletters I’ll share on this research, each highlighting a different key finding and what it means for how colleges and universities conceive of and communicate their brand stories.
Thank you for reading this longer-than-usual post and, as always, please reply with any thoughts or questions you’d like to share!