CMOs Pushing Boundaries and Seeing Results
Higher ed marketing isn’t synonymous with pushing boundaries, but some CMOs are trying to change that. We sat down with Jenny Petty, University of Montana, and Gabriel Welsch, Duquesne University, to pick their brains on the importance of boundary pushing in higher ed marketing.
What do you think stops higher ed marketing teams from getting to higher stages of marketing maturity?
Jenny: I think it’s a couple of things. The first thing holding all higher ed marketing back is fear. Fear of doing things differently and the backlash you might receive from different audiences if they don’t like a choice you make. Another big one is budget restrictions. It’s really hard to move toward a higher end of marketing maturity if you don’t have the budget for staffing, martech, or resources to put you in the same tier as your competitors. It’s also the lack of understanding of the depth and potential of what marketing can do for a campus. To elevate the profession, we have to continually reframe marketing as institutional strategy, rather than the promotion-based mindset of the past.
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is how hard it is to set boundaries on campus when you’re trying to get to the next stage of marketing maturity. When you’re in a department that’s historically been a print shop or service on demand and you’re trying to become a strategic partner, it’s so hard to set boundaries and say this is what we’ve done in the past, but this is what we're doing now and why. It’s really uncomfortable—empowering people to have boundaries is difficult when they historically haven’t had that privilege.
Gabe: One, which is endemic to higher ed, is that shared governance is great for academic matters, the conduct of a university, and its relationship to students and faculty, but it's not great for operations—giving equal weight to non-expert opinions doesn't help.
But understanding where non-specialist faculty and staff input is worthwhile and where it isn’t is something that most marketing teams struggle with. This is particularly true if the marketing folks are put in the Kinko's position or are accustomed to being treated as a service unit, rather than a strategic unit.
The other is more structural and operational—it’s a lack of investment for what it takes to run a sophisticated marketing communications team. It’s not just making sure the budget is there to run enough ads; it's investing in professional development and measures, the type of budgets that are necessary to keep your group maturing. You can only talk aspiration for so long, until you simply run out of resources.
Being clear with your CFO and your president that you’re not asking for budget resources just for today, but over the next three or four years for what you’re going to need in order to mature. You need an advocate in senior leadership to successfully make that argument for resources.
If you didn’t have any limitations, what efforts would your marketing team initiate? Or are there limitations you’ve quashed to give yourself room to do something new?
Jenny: If we didn’t have limitations we’d burn the website down to its very foundation and completely rebuild it from scratch. We’d probably do more experiential and experimental marketing.
When resources are limited, higher ed marketing teams cling to the traditional efforts we’re comfortable with and that comes at the cost of innovation. But at the University of Montana, our team is empowered to run with big, sometimes scary ideas. One new area that we are focusing on is brand experience so, for the first time, marketing is a driver of experience rather than being in a backup dancer role. We’re looking at our many audiences and then working across the institution with departments like Enrollment Management, Student Affairs, Athletics, and Alumni to ensure that the brand is woven into everything we do and that we are leaving lasting impressions no matter what environment someone experiences the brand in.
Gabe: We do a little bit of everything, so the question is whether there is something we would do differently or new? I think we would move from executing at a B or B+ on everything and have the space and resources to execute at an A or A+. We’re at the point where we have a good sense of what to do and what works and we’d like the ability to execute at a higher level. We’re on the right path, but we need a better machete and better shoes.
What are you doing to push boundaries on your campus?
Jenny: We just launched a revitalized brand platform and out of the three concepts, we ended up following the creative testing and picking the concept most popular among current and prospective students. The concept made a lot of people (including me) uncomfortable. The first time I saw the concept the students picked I had a really strong reaction, but realized strong reactions mean something.
The development process involved a lot of managing the creative tension and bringing people along. Getting that effort across the finish line is the biggest boundary I’ve pushed; being okay with the criticism and standing by the work because it’s what our audiences want.
The response completely exceeded my expectations. We launched it in April with a day-long Brand Camp, inviting people from across campus. Until that day I wasn’t sure it was going to be successful, but it ended up being so transformational. People started to see campus and themselves in a new light—less about the hardship of the last ten years and more about starting a new chapter.
We’ve seen so much campus adoption it’s been startling. People are ordering swag like crazy and we continue to host monthly brand camps with over 100 attendees last month. The campus is engaged and hungry for brand affinity.
Gabe: Part of pushing conventional boundaries is to position marcomms with our cabinet and other vice presidents so that we’re a sought-after colleague at the table. We’re also writing strategic communication plans for each unit in the university, as well as with student life and enrollment. This involves getting everyone together and putting together a plan with measures and a structure that we can look at over time, taking into account enrollment and advancement goals, including media placement and everything else. On a practical level, the dean’s not wasting time talking to us multiple times, and on a strategic level the work is integrated.
We’re also working to ladder sub-brands consistently as part of those strategic communication plans, up to the main university brand. Doing similar research to what we did for the university brand, so can put together statements and organized expressions within the main brand. This gives us shared talking points that make sense within the overall university brand. Sharing our research has allowed us to get needed buy-in.
Lastly, it’s important to remember that higher ed marketers work in a fundamentally educational enterprise. Our role is educators. If we’re going to plan, we have to go in and we have to engage in an education mode that’s useful and productive—persuading and sharing evidence—to be more effective. My team uses the word “colleague” and not “client”—we all have expertise to offer, let’s work together as colleagues to pursue our bigger goals.
