I recently read Gilbreath’s The Next Evolution in Marketing. He makes the case, much like Godin and others, that today’s audiences are tired of intrusive, self-serving advertising. He believes that the only way to connect with your customers involves creating marketing with meaning.

The idea of marketing with meaning is not new. What is new, however, is that most marketing had meaning for the people creating it, but generally much less meaning for people receiving it.

Lurking beneath the surface is a concept is called “centricity.” Too often, marketing is institutional-centric (what we want to say) and not so much customer-centric (what the customer wants to hear).

Marketing that is not audience-centric he explains, is in large measure why most marketing fails.

Creating marketing with meaning that demands a customer centeredness is counterintuitive. As a guide, Gilbreath offers us a Maslow-like pyramid (see below). At the very least, your marketing must offer solutions. Once you have gained proficiency at the solutions level, you must then seek to create marketing that allows your audiences to connect not only with you, but with others. Finally, your marketing must help people achieve some improvement goal or objective.

I think most of us are capable of creating marketing that offers solutions (10 ways to help you get into college).

Marketing that offers connection (join a social network of like-minded prospects) is also relatively easy.

The challenge, I suspect, will be marketing that helps prospective students, donors, and others achieve a level of improvement. Interestingly, this is a promise that most colleges make…and keep. So imbedded within this top level of marketing is another conundrum: how do we differentiate our product from the product offered by our competitors?

Gilbreath notes that this level of marketing might require us to give away some of the products, services, and experiences that we once tried to sell. This is what MIT does. A significant portion of MIT’s courses are available online at no charge. Making these materials available clearly helps students and others improve themselves, their families, and perhaps the world.

Gilbreath has raised the bar and I suspect that schools that become comfortable with, and proficient in, developing marketing with meaning will garner a significant and enduring edge over their more faint-hearted competitors.

A friend of mine used to train helicopter pilots during the first Gulf War. He used a term, “target fixation,” in which pilots would focus so completely on the target that they were completely oblivious to other obstacles or hazards.

I think many colleges are suffering from higher education’s version of target fixation with an enlarged devotion to evaluating and enhancing their academic core. Unfortunately, even as they focus on their academic cores, they are letting other issues slide. They seem to believe that a strong core offers enough protection in today’s turbulent times.

Based on my experience, it will not.

Before I go on, let me be perfectly clear: the academic core is of paramount importance. Strong colleges all have strong cores.

But strong colleges have more than strong cores. They have strong brands, strong recruiting, strong fundraising, strong retention, strong financial controls, and strong leadership.

It will always be important to focus attention on your core, but it must never become your sole fixation.

Photo by Jack Vance

Tamar Lewin’s NYT article, “Facing Cuts in Federal Aid, For-Profit Colleges Are in a Fight,” offers a glimpse into a scary future for all of higher education, not just the for-profit sector.

She writes, “The regulations, known as the ‘gainful employment’ rules, are an effort to rein in the high debt loads students take on when they enroll in for-profit colleges that offer certificates or degrees in fields like nursing or culinary arts. Students at for-profit colleges are much more likely than others to default on their loans.

“Under the regulations, a draft of which came out in February, for-profit colleges would not be eligible to receive federal student aid if their graduates’ debt load was too high to be repaid, over 10 years, with 8 percent of their starting salary.”

Though this legislation is aimed at for-profits, one can easily imagine the federal government turning its sights on the non-profit sector next. While it is true that students who attend for-profits typically have twice as much debt as students attending non-profits, the debt rate for many students at these schools is alarming and climbing.

A copy of Lewin’s article may be found here.

Photo by tsuihin – TimoStudios

There is no shortage of articles and seminars on the challenges facing higher education.

At the same time, there is a clear shortage of significant conversations on how to deal with these challenges.

Based on hundreds of conversations with campus leaders, I know why these conversations are so scarce: people are afraid. They fear they will be ostracized by the higher education community of which they are a part.

Consider, for example, the issue of high cost. While most agree that high cost is an issue, almost no one wants to look at ways to really reduce cost. One president called any such discussion “a real career killer.” A second described the cost issue as a “third rail”; referring to the third rail on a subway track that carries the electric current that powers the train. Anyone who touches the third rail is electrocuted. Another president said the cost issue was simply “untouchable” and his hope was to retire before having to deal with it.

Unfortunately, while higher education dithers, the challenges mount. At the very least, we need significant dialogue to identify these third-rail issues. But more importantly, we need to begin developing solutions.

What I am proposing is a three-step process to help us move beyond dialogue.

First, I would like you to post what you believe to be the top three untouchable issues facing higher education.

Second, I will organize your responses into broad categories. My goal is to identify the top three to five issues.

Finally, Stamats will organize a dialogue around each of these issues. We will try to find the best thinkers and doers from across higher education and create a venue where their work can be shared.

Let’s begin with a question: what do you believe to be the top three challenges facing higher education? (Please either post a comment or e-mail your three challenges to info@stamats.com.)

Thank you in advance for your interest,
Bob Sevier

Photo by hexodus…

There is no shortage of challenges facing higher education. As a result, getting the right information you need to make the decisions you must has never been more important.

If there was a mission statement for our annual Strategic Integrated Marketing (SIM) Conference, I suspect that would be it.

Each year, we bring together some of the smartest and most innovative people in the country to help colleges and universities frame the issues, clarify the options, and develop tools to execute.

This year’s conference will continue that mission. Here are just a few of the sessions you can expect.

• Strategies to Increase the Marketability of Your Academic Programs, Becky Morehouse, vice president, marketing and research, Stamats
• Overthrowing Dead Culture: The Gumption to Change College Marketing, Brian Niles, CEO, TargetX
• Generation Digital: Photography, University Marketing, and Young People Who Think They Know Everything When It Comes to Pictures, Jason Jones, President, JonesFoto, Inc.
• How Social Media and Integrated Marketing Come Together, Fritz McDonald, Vice President, Creative Strategy, Stamats
• We have also scheduled three sessions of Topical Roundtable discussion to give you a chance to connect with the experts as well as your colleagues on a few of the most important issues in higher education marketing today.

This year’s SIM conference will be July 18-20 in Chicago. For more information, go to www.stamats.com/sim2010 or download your own comprehensive conference guide. If you have a specific question, please let me know. I can be reached at bob.sevier@stamats.com.

See you in Chicago! I hope you can join us.

Photo by s.o.f.t.

I wanted to post a response to Seth Godin’s post: “The coming meltdown in higher education (as seen from a market)”

All in all, Godin has some great points. While I don’t agree that most colleges are organized to give an average education and that the link between education and success is tenuous, I do concur that cost, a lack of differentiation, and accreditation are problematic.

Not surprisingly, these issues are curiously entwined. College costs so much, at least at one level, because many colleges insist on having the same programs as their competitors regardless of the number of students interested in that program. In addition, colleges often have large academic cores that are designed, in part, to keep lots of faculty teaching lots of hours. Of course, the cost issue is exacerbated by the fall in family savings rates, a decline that began long before the current economic crisis.

If colleges largely offer the same programs taught by the same great faculty, then differentiation will always be difficult. Finally, accreditation, under the banner of maintaining quality, actually instills an academic sameness that further clouds the picture.

There is a notion among physicians that you never get someone’s attention until they have their first heart attack. Many colleges are having that heart attack right now. Revenue is falling far short of costs and there is no sense that the economic picture will turn around in the near future. As a result, they are forcing themselves to ask and answer tougher questions and to make decisions that should have been made long ago.

Dickeson, in Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services, has a wonderful yet sobering quote: “Most colleges cannot afford to be what they have become.”

This has become the tagline of higher education. I fear, and dread, that it may become its obituary as well.

Bob Sevier is a senior vice president, strategy, at Stamats, Inc., a higher education research, planning, consulting, and marketing communication company. Download your copy of his presentation in assessing institutional vulnerability.

A Harvard Business Review article from last summer (HBR, July–August 2009) offered an interesting article entitled, “Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis” by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky.

I have often felt that until higher education has its first heart attack, there will be a powerful temptation to maintain the status quo. Of course, over the last year or so, higher education has had its first heart attack.

This article expanded my analogy a bit. Instead of a first heart attack, what if the heart attack is ongoing? The authors posit that when the economy recovers, things won’t return to normal—and a different mode of leadership will be required.

They write, “It would be profoundly reassuring to view the current economic crisis as simply another rough spell that we need to get through.  Unfortunately, though, today’s mix of urgency, high stakes, and uncertainty will continue as the norm even after the recession ends.”

“The task of leading during a sustained crisis is treacherous.  Crisis leadership has two distinct phases.  First is that emergency phase, when your task is to stabilize the situation and buy time.  Second is the adaptive phase, when you tackle the underlying causes of the crisis and build the capacity to thrive in a new reality.  The adaptive phase is especially tricky:  People put enormous pressure on you to respond to their anxieties with authoritative certainty, even if doing so means overselling what you know and discounting what you don’t.  As you ask them to make necessary but uncomfortable adaptive changes in their behavior or work, they may try to bring you down.  People clamor for direction, while you are faced with a way forward that isn’t at all obvious.  Twists and turns are the only certainty.”

It’s kind of like triage and long-term care all at the same time.

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I was chatting with a board chair who is also a CEO of a publicly held company. He mentioned that in difficult times, organizations believe that their salvation will come from hitting a home run, and they spend an inordinate amount of time trying to find that fat pitch.

It’s seldom that easy, he said. I concur. Hitting a home run is difficult, particularly for institutions that do not have a recent history of making good decisions or executing well.

Most institutional failures do not occur overnight and their salvations will not occur overnight either.

Rather than aiming for the fences, colleges and universities would do well do try to consistently hit doubles.

Not too long ago we did an informal investigation into schools that were either involved in a dramatic turnaround, or were able to achieve huge successes in difficult circumstances. We looked at TCU, Elons, Highpoint, NYU, USC, and others.

We discovered that these schools all shared five or six common ingredients:

• A great leader who was appropriate for both the college and its competitive environment
• A compelling vision that attracted both talent and resources
• An extraordinarily strong and talented senior team that was able to agree upon the major challenges and develop a concrete plan for addressing those challenges
• Board support that was both political and monetary
• The ability to raise significant amounts of money
• A willingness to stay the course

These schools didn’t swing for the fences. But they routinely batted well above average.

Network with Bob and many other higher education experts at Stamats Integrated Marketing Conference this July in Chicago! See more details at www.stamats.com/sim2010.

Photo by Trev Stair

I recently had lunch with a social media director from a large private college on the West Coast. He was waxing eloquent about how Twitter was responsible for the amazing success of Kogi Korean BBQ.

In case you don’t know the story, Kogi Korean BBQ is a blend of Korean and Mexican flavors that is sold from trucks on the streets of LA. What makes the Kogi story so incredible, said my lunch mate, was how they use the Internet, especially Twitter, to tweet people on where the trucks will be parked. And when they find the location, people line up by the hundreds for the savory fare.

My colleague was convinced that Kogi was so popular because of social media. Of course, I couldn’t resist asking, “Do you think the quality of the food has anything to do with Kogi’s success?”

This dialogue highlights both the power and the shortcomings of social media. If you have great BBQ, or offer a great college experience, people will talk to one another. They will assemble over watercoolers, back fences, and online. Of course, if the experience is not that great, they will assemble as well. Social media is a channel, and we must never forget that it is what is being said in the channel that matters most.

Photo by davecobb

In the March 2010 issue of Fast Company, Dan and Chip Heath (the authors of Made to Stick) make an interesting observation about Van Halen, brown M&Ms, and the importance of managing all the details.

Most of us know the tale of the brown M&Ms, or at least thought we did.

Heath and Heath write, “In its 1980s heyday, the band became notorious for a clause in its touring contract that demanded a bowl of M&Ms backstage, but with all the brown ones removed. The story is true—confirmed by former lead singer David Lee Roth himself—and it became the perfect, appalling symbol of rock-star-diva behavior.

“Get ready to reverse your perception. Van Halen did dozens of shows every year, and at each venue, the band would show up with nine 18-wheelers full of gear. Because of the technical complexity, the band’s standard contract with venues was thick and convoluted—Roth, in his inimitable way, said in his autobiography that it read ‘like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages.’ A typical article in the contract might say, ‘There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes.’”

Back to the brown M&Ms.

“Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract. It was called Article 126. It read, ‘There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.’ So when Roth would arrive at a new venue, he’d walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he’d demand a line check of the entire production. ‘Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error,’ he wrote. ‘They didn’t read the contract…. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.’”

“In other words, Roth was no diva. He was an operations expert. He couldn’t spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention—whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. In Roth’s world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine.”

How many of us actually use brown M&Ms as guideposts, milestones, and the odd canary in the coal mine?

Join Bob Sevier and other industry thought leaders at Stamats Integrated Marketing conference this July! Check out www.stamats.com/sim2010 for more information.

Photo by Jared Browarnik