Tell Me a Story, Chapter 2
In our last post, we wrote about the importance of telling a clear story about your university brand as well as the real, tangible impacts of brand clarity on enrollment and financial outcomes.
If communicating a brand is an exercise in storytelling, then university brands have parts of their stories to tell. Speifically, the educational experience a college offers is the “plot” of that story and the students who enroll are the “characters.”
This framework—plot and character—is useful in thinking about how institutions market themselves to prospective students. On one hand, marketers can focus on the experience students expect to find at the institution (i.e., plot orientation). On the other, marketers can focus on the types of students at the college and the community prospective students can expect to find (i.e., character orientation).
Most institutions employ some combination of both when trying to engage prospective students. But how much should marketing and admissions teams focus on one vs. the other? And does the ideal mix vary between different groups of students? For example, do students of one demographic prefer a different focus on plot vs. character than another?
We found in our survey of 3,500+ prospective students that the educational experience students can expect (i.e., the “plot” of the brand story) is more important in determining students’ choices than finding affinity with the people who attend (i.e., the “character”).
Remarkably, when we break down the data by demographic groups, there is not a single statistically significant difference by gender, race, household income, or even GPA. In other words, students are united in the importance they place on finding the educational experience they want vs. finding a fit with the students who attend. For once, marketers need not worry about segmenting.
This result was initially surprising in light of the discourse on creating and finding “tribes.” People, we are told, seek out others who share their beliefs and interests. It stands to reason, then, that it would be highly important to prospective students to find affinity with the types of students who attend the colleges they’re considering.
However, if we look at these results from a different perspective, we may find that prospective students are doing precisely that…but they’re doing it through the lens of the product the college offers. Consumers make educated guesses about the people who choose certain products all the time. Just as one can surmise the differences between someone who drives a Toyota minivan and someone who drives a Porsche 911, prospective students can surmise differences between those who go to Oberlin and those who go to Ohio State. The educational experience a college offers determines the type of student who’s interested. Therefore, having information about one gives you information about the other. Tell me about your product and I can simultaneously learn about your customer.
The implications for colleges are twofold:
When communicating your brand story, lead with a focus on the educational experience students can expect. Communication to prospective students should follow approximately a 2:1 ratio between focusing on educational experience and focusing on the types of students who attend.
By communicating your brand plot—i.e., the educational experience students can expect—you simultaneously inform the audience about your brand character. This doesn’t mean you can’t also be explicit in communicating the types of students who enroll, but it means your audiences are already picking up on who you attract based on what you offer.
The institutions we worked with on this research have already shifted the focus of their marketing based on these findings. They’ve raised the focus on the education and experience they offer to match what students look for when they’re learning about colleges. I hope this can likewise inform how you and your teams engage audiences with the content that provides the most effective insight into your institutional brand story.