Marketing Lessons From College Tours

My daughter and I are shopping for colleges. We just completed an illuminating west coast swing where we toured 7 schools in 4 days. And while this year will see the largest number of students chasing a fixed number of slots since the 70s, its fascinating to see how each school presents and positions itself.

Some seem to have learned and internalized the lessons of personalization, engagement and customer-focus. They anticipate and manipulate the process for sifting and comparing data from equivalent institutions and the process for sorting out the conflicting rational, emotional and financial needs that arise between college-age children and baby boomer parents. Others strike a take-it or leave-it posture. And still others get half-way there. Here's what I observed and learned along the way.   

Put Your Best Face Forward. Tour guides are archetypes. The kids who lead the tours are the face of the college. As you walk around, you assume that these kids are the people your kid will interact with and befriend. They are a primal indicator of what the school and its student body are like. Their ability to handle questions and tell you "what its really like" play a huge role in how prospective students perceive the college and project themselves into a future experience. In some cases their choice of words and turns of phrase, posture, outfit, eye contact and energy level provoke immediate and visceral responses. There were several hat she loved and I hated and visa versa.Most are cute, energetic and eminently presentable, though what they know and what they say count too.

Think carefully about who you put forward as your face and spokesperson. You are perceived as them. Rehearse and train them well. Teach them to understand their task through the eyes of their audience. Focus more on engaging the audience rather than spewing out the statistics about the biology labs or the art studios. Practice pacing, anticipate FAQs, understand how your prospects make decisions.

Prioritize and Target Themes.  Every school had a positioning and a shtick. One claimed to have the largest number of PhD candidates. Another had the biggest number of Fulbright Scholars. Another was the greenest place on earth. Yet not every school aligned the party line with the visiting party. In one surprising case, the emphasis on multi-dimensional environmentalism that included vegan offerings in the cafeterias,the low-volume flush toilets in the dorms and returning all the lawns to their natural desert habitat overwhelmed all the other more relevant selling points.

Consumers remember one or two things about every product they encounter. This shorthand is stored and becomes the point of comparison with like products. Marketers need  to start by deciding what take-away they want prospective customers to remember. Then they need to engineer how to frame and communicate that message. This requires a prioritization of messages and mapping messages to discrete constituent audiences. In the case of the green college, the green message probably plays very well to current students, alumni and prospective donors. But for us, prospective students looking for criteria to sort a school in or out of a consideration set, being green isn't a useful or relevant criterian.

Differentiate. Every college invests in campus facilities, good faculty, innovative curriculum and student life. Most kids and parents are trying to figure out how one is different from the other and/or better suited to the personality and interests of the prospective student. Most schools have an identifiable student psycho-demographic and most know who they generally compete with. But few pro-actively draw the comparisons for you. When one guide explained that 2/3rds of the campus were introverted nerdy kids, it was a clear differentiating and persuasive statement. It would also be interesting to test different messages to prospects with different levels of interest. Imagine if the schools really laid it on for early decision prospects and soft-soaped saftey school prospects.

Crafting a USP is the fundamental marketing task. Consideration and purchase is driven by differentiation. Draw the differences early, clearly and often. Customers want to understand what you have and what they will experience if they chose you. And they need to have a way to quickly and accurately remember you separately and distinctly from competitors who look and feel a lot like you.

Influence the Influencers. The kids express preferences and the parents shape the final decision. Both sets are affected emotionally and rationally by a full range of stimuli and responses during the shopping process. Colleges have to play to both audiences in a charged atmosphere where the consideration criteria are usually not the same for all participants. The push and pull of the shopping process ought to be well documented as are the variables that govern acceptance rates and the factors that prompt final decisions on where to attend.   

Marketers must understand the shopping process and the inflection points along the way and plan messages to address the obvious and not-so-obvious issues that are likely to arise from the perspective of both the end user and the people who will influence the initial and incremental purchases. Very few purchasing decisions are made in a vacuum. Frequently influencers can be your best ally and your best closer. Ignore them at your own risk.       

Comments

[ukelectricals]

I love the posts you put up, could you please include more pictures in your posts

[Andrew]

It's college.

What's the professor to student ratio? What's the average tenure of a professor? Does the curriculum work for your daughter? What's the average class size? What is the mix of students?

This is all that matters. Sorry to be a wet blanket, and I realize the choice has already been made, but education is so important to me, let's not make it a marketing topic (though all your points are valid.)