August 2008 Lawlor Focus

The Five W's and One H of Forward Thinking

In the coming weeks, as the final census of new and returning students is taken, chief enrollment officers and their staffs (and indeed, entire college communities, as the recognition increases that the challenge of recruiting and retaining students requires everyone’s efforts) will have a small window of opportunity to look back at all that the past year has brought and take its lessons into account moving forward. The foundation for your adjustments will derive from your own institutional data, but here are some of the emerging macro trends in higher education marketing for you to consider as you plan for the future.

Who: By some accounts, today’s rising high school sophomores are not even part of Generation Y nor the Echo Boomers—nevermind “the Millennials,” which is beginning to sound ancient! A timeline that recently appeared in USA Today shows that the Millennial generation peaked in numbers with those born in 1990. While sources differ on which birth year constitutes the start of Generation Z (estimates range from the early 1990s to 2001), its members could be your primary target market within the next five years. But don’t forget about the older demographic of “non-traditional-age” students, either—see “The New Face of Higher Education” (.pdf) in our Spring 2008 issue of The Lawlor Review for an analysis of their impact, along with the latest data on transfer students from the National Center for Education Statistics.

What: With regard to the content of your messages, the timeless advice still applies: stay authentic, communicate your distinctiveness, highlight benefits instead of features, etc. But the key factor to keep in mind as you move forward is that personalizing and targeting your messages according to the exact information needs of the recipient (which is already important now) will become essential. Expect behavioral targeting to gain prominence.

Where: By now you might know by heart the WICHE data that shows the population projections for high school graduates by state. It’s time to move from gaining awareness of these geographic trends to developing solid action plans that take advantage of them. This might include considerations as drastic as changing the office model from campus-based admission counselors to off-campus-based regional recruiters.

When: It’s said that today’s young people have been conditioned by technology to expect instant gratification (see “Dealing With the Digital Divide”). Colleges and universities have always been highly strategic about determining when to push information to the people in their target markets in order for it to arrive at a time that is advantageous for the recipients. But their expectation of immediacy also requires making it easy for your target audience to find what they’re seeking the moment they have a question—that is, allowing them to pull information anytime they want it. (This is especially true of prospects who are part of the “stealth marketplace,” those who are investigating your institution without your knowledge.)

Why: The convergence of two forces—one economic and the other governmental—is making it clear that the most important “why” question that colleges and universities will be asked by prospective students and their families is, “Why should we pay this much for a college education?” The nation’s current economic woes, coupled with federal efforts toward requiring greater accountability from institutions in assessing their educational outcomes, mean that colleges and universities will have to constantly reinforce their value proposition. For instance, a Christian Science Monitor columnist reported this week that even the upper-middle class is feeling economic pain, and Inside Higher Education quoted the author of a new report, “How America Pays for College,” who says data indicated middle-income Americans are already “stretching,” choosing colleges and universities they can barely afford.

How: Delivering well-timed and targeted messages will require communicating with prospective students where they already are. And that means utilizing social media platforms. Even though college and university marketers are still wary of creating a “creepy treehouse” situation when they enter a social networking space that students consider their private playground, innovations like the Schools program being designed for Facebook will soon remove that reluctance.

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Defining and assessing value have become the nexus of today’s higher education marketplace. As we have already noted, the desire to gain a college education is being tempered by the reality of economic circumstances. That is, the willingness to spend or invest is being cautiously framed by one’s ability to pay for that investment. The year ahead will demand that colleges constantly communicate immediate and sustained value and worth. A few suggestions:

• Know your identity. The comfort of individual fit influences perceived value. Successful colleges devote efforts to determining their collective sense of self and then using institutional identity to communicate the appropriate value proposition.
• Focus on authenticity. Celebrate who you are, and tell it like it is. Imitation is sameness, and sameness is a commodity—and commodities have limited perceived value.
• Get to the point. Whether it’s an elevator pitch, escalator pitch or Twitpitch (140 characters), simplicity is valued, especially when your overall message can be targeted to the individual needs of each student and family. And yes, a picture is worth a thousand words.
• Generate buzz. Talk is cheap, but positive word of mouth is priceless. Don’t forget about your current students, because retention does more than help increase net revenues; it helps establish institutional value in the marketplace.
• Repeat, repeat, repeat. Institutional value becomes more persuasive when the same value proposition is repeated consistently. Redundancy leads to message alignment, alignment leads to institutional credibility, credibility leads to marketplace equity, and equity leads to a higher perceived sense of worth and value.

In the news

A Wall Street Journal online feature in the Careers section, called “The Declining Value of Your College Degree,” notes: “For decades, the typical college graduate’s wage rose well above inflation. But no longer. In the economic expansion that began in 2001 and now appears to be ending, the inflation-adjusted wages of the majority of U.S. workers didn’t grow, even among those who went to college.” Yet a new study suggests “there is no reason to believe that in the long run the [wage] gains associated with [graduating from] college will disappear.”

Did you know?

eMarketer says, “Mobile is at a point where online was 10 years ago.” That means we can expect spending on mobile advertising (such as text messages to cell phone users, for example) to skyrocket during the next year, according to their projections.