ICAA Summer Conference

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ICAA Summer Conference

• Branding Building on Reality

Prepared by Tim Westerbeck, Executive Vice
President and Principal Lipman Hearne
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Presentation overview

• Branding defined
• Why do you need to build a brand?
• Lessons learned ingredients for success
• Critical steps to building a brand
• Discussion

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Branding defined
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Common misconceptions

• Brands are superficial.
• Brands are
• A tagline
• An ad
• A visual identity
• You can dictate your brand.

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First rule of brand management

• Get better reality.
• -- Guy Kawasaki

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What is a brand?

• A product, service, or concept of an organization
  that is publicly distinguished from other
  products, services, or concepts offered by other
  organizations
• Unique names, terms, signs, symbols, actions
• Exists in the mind of the marketplace
• Is based on elements you can control, and those
  you cant

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Terms

• Brand equity the residual value of your brand,
  built over time, by both deliberate and
  accidental factors
• Brand management the process of positioning the
  brand through the development and implementation
  of strategies to enhance, redirect, or reinforce
  the brand

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Why do you need to build a brand?
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In todays competitive, information-overloaded
environment, your fundraising success depends on
it.

• The unique value you provide is not as clear as
  you think among constituents.

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Why brand matters

• Cut through the clutter
• Improve the perception of worth
• Position the institution as the preferred
  solution to a perceived need
• Attract and retain constituent loyalty
• Attract resources

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Lessons Learned

• Ingredients for success

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Ingredients for success

• Strong leadership and an avowed commitment from
  the President
• Linkage with a smart, resourceful volunteer or
  volunteer group
• Structure that has key players at the table when
  marketing decisions are made
• Commitment to internal communications

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Integrated marketing program outcomes

• Two-thirds of survey respondents report gains in
  visibility
• More than half also report enhanced positioning
  and enrollment-related gains
• Increase in applications
• Increased yield
• Private institutions experience somewhat greater
  results than their public counterparts
• Source Lipman Hearne/CASE IM Survey

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Importance of internal communication

• High commitment to internal communications
  greatly enhances marketing results
• Institutions that regularly shared external
  marketing goals and strategies with internal
  audiences reported a broad range of positive
  outcomes
• Low or moderate commitment led to reduced
  marketing success
• Source Lipman Hearne/CASE IM Survey

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Why is communication so important?

• Breaking down the silos
• Synergy
• How can alumni affect yield?
• How can current students affect corporate
  relations?
• How can faculty affect retention?
• Consistency (repetition establishes clarity)
• Fulfillment delivering on the promise

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Critical Steps to Building a Brand
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Understand how your institution defines
marketing

• News releases?
• Admissions advertising?
• Mailings to alumni?
• Web site?
• Publications?
• Presentations?
• A hundred other things?

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Determine if there is a marketing plan. To test,
ask the following

• Is there a written marketing strategy, with key
  divisions operating from the same game plan?
• Would each unit agree on specific strategic
  marketing objectives?
• Is message development and tactical planning
  explicitly based on market research?
• Can everyone involved in marketing confidently
  articulate the institutions brand positioning?

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If the answers to these questions is no, your
institution does not have a brand-based marketing
plan.

• If it doesnt, it should.

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On changing behaviors

• Faced with the choice between changing ones
  mind and proving that there is no need to do so,
  almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
• -- John Kenneth Galbraith

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Push for a formal, precise definition of the
institutions brand

• Determine what constituents value about the
  institutionfrom all angles
• Distinguish between what we are vs. what we do
• Use objective external research
• Analyze your competitors
• Focus on your unique mission
• Understand what is consistently valued across all
  constituent segments

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Key process points

• Meticulous segmentation
• Thoughtful, detailed research plan
• Correct composition
• Sophisticated interrogation
• Objective analysis and interpretation
• Competitive analysis

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Key process points (continued)

• Structured comparative analysis
• Market mapping
• Compelling message development (visual and
  verbal)
• Channel analysis
• Tactical development and delivery
• Reconnaissance loop

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Some friendly advice

• Your brand is not excellence, that one is
  already taken. (Its not quality either).
• Be brutally realistic about your institutionits
  strengths, weaknesses and major characteristics.
• Focus on meticulously defining unique,
  value-added differences.
• Brands exist only in the mind of the marketplace.
• The short version, please.

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Tactical Planning
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Tactical Options

• Advertising (Image-focused)
• Media Relations (Issues-based)
• Sponsorships (Strategic)
• Publications (Brand-based)
• Public Service Campaigns (Issues-based)
• Web

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Advertising

• Powerful medium for brand-building
• Quite often, advertising fails to advance a
  unified image
• Ad creative must be
• Grounded in a knowledge of constituent
  perceptions
• Present one clear, direct message
• Targeted in appropriate media vehicles with
  adequate frequency or high visibility

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Issues-based Media Relations

• Becoming an expert on the issues.
• Proactive insertion of your thought leaders
• President
• Faculty members
• Students and student groups
• Coaches and athletic directors
• Shaping the national discourse.

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Strategic Sponsorships

• Associating yourself with other causes related to
  your constituents interests.
• Opportunities to demonstrate your own giving and
  support.
• Must be focused, strategic and either
  high-visibility or sustained.

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Brand-based Publications

• If you go to the trouble, do it right. (Save the
  paper)
• Your publications should be powerful messengers
  for your brand.
• Its just not about making them pretty.
• Its not just a graphic design project, but core
  to your fundraising function.

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Points to Remember

• You are not a fundraiser, you are a marketer.
• Your most important fundraising techniques do not
  necessarily involve asking for support.
• Marketing who you are is more powerful than what
  you do.

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Points to Remember

• Conceptualize building a brand for your
  organization.
• Start with the marketplace.
• Respect the power of marketing and be analytical
  and strategic.

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Points to Remember

• Integration.
• Sustained.
• Function and process oriented.

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Points to Remember

• Brand building is an organization-wide
  function. From the highest level chancellor to
  the person who answers your departments
  telephone, your brand and marketing strategy must
  be well understood.

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Thank you for your time.
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Lipman Hearne

• Building stronger institutions through
• marketing and communications