Last week at this time the streets were buzzing with Wildcat fever. From the moment I stepped out of my house and began the commute to work, I saw students past and present donning their Villanova blue.
It was a sunny, blue sky day with just enough chill in the air to keep you cool and comfortable. A perfect day for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship parade. The Villanova Wildcats brought energy and inspiration to Center City last Friday. Philadelphia has been awaiting sports heroes for much too long; our hopes are regularly dashed, but we keep on hoping!
Photo by Tim Keough, taken from the 16th floor of 1515 Market Street: Massive crowds gathered at the end of the parade route at City Hall.
This Villanova Wildcats team helps us believe that we, as a City, can always have hope, with our patience now rewarded with a championship. That’s why the Villanova Wildcats Basketball Team is more than deserving of our Melior People of the Moment honor. Thanks to them, we all had a reason to celebrate. Whether you went to or are currently going to Villanova or are just thrilled about any Philadelphia sports team, it was a great moment to be a Philadelphian.
Editor’s Note: Our featured image was taken by parade attendee and our resident March Madness fan, Melior President Linda McAleer.
We recently spoke to the board of trustees of a university client about some of the trends and challenges impacting the education industry. We talked about some of the marketing insights we’ve developed recently through our work with university clients and partners, and gave our observations of what’s been happening in the market.
Your competition has stepped up its marketing communications efforts…and those efforts can be seen in a variety of places.
In the Philadelphia region, we’ve certainly seen the trend move from a simmer to a low boil in terms of marketing and advertising, not just from local institutions, but from up and down the East Coast. In fact, our recent edition of the Philadelphia Business Journal arrived with a gift — a glossy 100+ page “magazine” from High Point University in North Carolina touting its graduates and the academic features of the university.
Universities are looking for multiple ways to get the word out to prospective students, and we’re seeing not just overall branding efforts changing, but targeted marketing of specific programs (it’s not just the MBA anymore) and towards specific markets – both geographic and demographic.
Higher education audiences are savvier than ever.
We’ve learned that prospective students want to see outcomes (not data because they don’t understand how to interpret it) — stories they can see themselves in, specific examples of their possible future.
Prospective students and their parents want to know that their college education will lead to a “good job” after graduation. It’s incumbent on colleges to show this in stories and in data.
Information about colleges is coming to prospects from many sources, both traditional and non-traditional… and social media is changing the face of information delivery.
Social media continues to grow (and dominate)… and it’s not just Facebook.
Smart college marketers are meeting students “where they live” – online via a range of social media sites. A social media marketing strategy that includes your web presence is just as critical as a strategy for producing your print materials. It’s time to find out what messages students want to hear about you on social media.
Mobile devices use to access college information continues to grow and includes video. Think about it: the trends of screen sizes of our mobile devices over the past few years are actually getting bigger – and that’s to accommodate video. One of our agency partners is convinced that within 5 years, everything on college websites will include video.
Branding is the buzzword dujour when higher ed professionals talk about marketing their institutions these days.
Remember that your “brand” is not your logo, the font or the color. And it’s not what you say about yourself. IT’S WHAT PEOPLE THINK AND SAY ABOUT YOU. Knowing what each of your target audiences (prospective students, faculty, key stakeholders) think and say about you now, will help you to craft future messages that are honest and truthful and attractive.
Brand differentiation is becoming more important – what makes the experience at your college distinctive and worth considering? If you sound like everyone else, why enroll at your institution over another?
“I don’t care what you think until I think that you care.”
I heard that quote and I can’t stop thinking about how perfectly this applies to health care, specifically to consumers’ thoughts and attitudes about the kind of health care they are seeking.
Over the years, The Melior Group has conducted thousands of focus groups with consumers about their decision-making and preferences for providers. The word “quality” gets used a lot. We hear some version of the statement “I want to go to a hospital/doctor/other provider that is known for delivering high quality care” in every single focus group.
So what does “high quality healthcare” mean?
I’ve asked this question in more ways than I can count, searching, searching for clarity.
Because every time I would ask that question, I would get what I believed was a naïve answer – something like: “A quality doctor is someone who listens to me,” or, “ I want to go someplace where I can really talk to my doctor.”
After hearing some version of this for the umpteenth time, I told myself that if I could only ask the question right, then I would get a “better” answer, like “quality healthcare means there are good outcomes” or “quality means practicing evidence-based medicine.”
I told myself that the consumers who were focused on doctors’ communication skills and “bedside manner” were missing the point: to my mind, healthcare “quality” had nothing to do with interpersonal skills.
And then I heard that quote.
It was really an “ah ha” moment. Of course! As a patient, why would I value what a doctor was recommending to me – even if he/she was amazingly credentialed, the leading doctor in that field, educated at Harvard, yada yada – unless that doctor seemed to care enough about me to attempt to really get to the bottom of my particular problem, and my goals for treatment?
So what does caring in the medical setting mean? Does it mean…
Wearing a button that says “Ask me”? Making small talk in the examining room?
Claiming, in advertising, that each patient is more than a number?
I don’t think so. Rather, I think that my focus group participants have got it right: by listening — really listening, restating the information to make clear that they have heard what their patient is saying, and asking the right questions — medical providers convey caring. In so doing physicians are better able to diagnose the real problem, and to suggest a treatment approach that a patient will be more likely to comply with.
Now that sounds like high quality healthcare.
Elizabeth Cohen is Vice President of The Melior Group, and our lead consultant in our work in the health care sector.
Mr. Ey, after touting the growth, success and amazing benefits of electronic communication, offered that “person-to-person contact can be a great strategic advantage, particularly at a time when many of your competitors are relying strictly on electronic pitches. I know they are because that’s how the vast majority of people try to establish or maintain a business relationship with me.” He further complimented someone who actually called him on a telephone to introduce his company.
For so many of us, ‘business relationship’ is really about ‘relationship’… getting to know each other, thinking about the business issues we deal with, considering whether we can actually help one another in some way.
Being in the business of serving clients with market-based information and marketing research for over 30 years, I’ve been so excited about the advances in electronic communications and the ease and speed of delivery of necessary information. Email allows us to quickly advise clients, to ask and answer questions at all times of the day, to assure the highest level of responsiveness clients deserve.
I’ve been reading recently about ‘personalization’ and getting confused as to what it means. I read a review of a study that said that “marketers looking to deliver exceptional customer experience will increasingly turn to personalization as the key driver to maximize customer value… that customers expect that the brands will understand who they are, what their habits are, what they want, etc.” [A shout-out to Altus Agency, the Marketing Minute; referencing Pegasystems “Predicting Routes to Revenue”]
I was hoping that this meant that organizations and their leaders are actually getting to know their customers and providing solutions based on who they are, what they value, what they think about. But, I think I might have misunderstood the concept of personalization or maybe I’m a little jaundiced. How can brands understand us? Isn’t it the people working at/for “the brand” who have to understand their customers’ wants, needs, interests? Shouldn’t we be reaching out to and actually meeting these customers and learning more about them?
Electronic communication has given us at The Melior Group a significant and dynamic platform for introducing ideas, getting prospective and current clients to think about things that might matter, identifying trends and the implications of them for business. It has especially given me access to companies that I believe we can help with our services and those who may not be great fits (with both parties realizing this). I’ve also met thousands of people on LinkedIn and other social media who are doing amazing things.
But, what we’re missing is the emotional and physical nuances that make for a productive business relationship. How are people going to know we want to work for them and them us? Like Mr. Ey, I’m a believer in the handshake, look you in the eye, actually chat, maybe smile (but not necessary) – the “huge advantage” that human conversation and engagement can provide.
In a service business like we have – and even a product-focused business where prospective customers have to choose among many alternatives when purchasing – it is not enough to be able to connect. It is more about talking and engaging with customers, prospects, donors, colleagues, others with shared interests. I really believe that people today want to experience the “real you.” In that way, maybe we can actually “personalize” what we’re offering.
This takes me back to an ad I have long remembered… when I was talking to staff about why it’s not enough to rely on electronic communication… give a look and see how you feel about business relationships.
As the presidential election cycle heats up, pre-election polling – which is used to gauge candidates’ support and predict election outcomes – is under increased scrutiny. Publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, US News and World Report have written about recent “disasters”, that is, election outcomes which were not aligned with pre-election polling results.
If Polling is Flawed, How Accurate is Marketing Research?
All of this publicity about flawed polling has generated a degree of panic among some of our clients (and us!). The Melior Group works with all kinds of organizations that are interested in developing quantitative evidence – which some equate with a “poll” — to support decisions including introduction of a new product or service, development of a new marketing strategy, and myriad other information needs. While unexpected election results and the pursuant head-scratching about flawed polling generate headlines, it is the marketing researchers in the trenches who bear the brunt of our clients’ angst. They wonder about the accuracy of quantitative research, and question its role in their decision-making.
Cost-effective, Thoughtful, and Accurate Assessments
So what are marketing researchers to do when their client wants, say, to assess the impact of a marketing campaign through pre- and post-campaign research? In the old days, the knee-jerk approach might be a telephone survey to collect a statistically rigorous sample with a low margin of error – the better to see real “movement” in the data.
But in this new world of ours, we say to our client, “that statistically rigorous sample with the low margin of error is increasingly difficult — and expensive! — to collect.” Just showing them the costs is often enough to change the conversation to, “how can we assess the impact of the new marketing campaign in the most cost-effective, thoughtful, and accurate way possible?”
Meet People Where They Live
One approach is to focus on specific market segments, that is, to truly conduct Marketing Research. Instead of trying to get a representative sample of the whole universe via one polling method, i.e., telephone or online, we recognize that more success can be had by meeting people where they live. For millennials, creative uses of social media can be surprisingly fruitful for marketing research purposes. And for middle-class boomers, online surveys can be just the right approach.
Focusing on specific market segments, and tailoring data collection appropriately, has other benefits too. Just the very process of reconsidering the approach can propel us to be more thoughtful in our determination of what we truly want to learn. Is it more important to see small movements in percentage of awareness and advertising recall, or might our client gain additional benefit from a deeper understanding of attitudes, impressions and brand, within and in comparison to key segments? We would argue that the latter can often be of greater use.
So does that mean we think that pre-election polling is for dinosaurs? Not at all. For a presidential race, say, margins of error can mean the difference between giving up on a state, and doing a full court campaign press. But for marketing research purposes, reflecting on the true usefulness of measures that rely on statistically perfect samples may have unintended, and very positive, consequences.
Rooster Soup Company’s Twitter page asks this question, “What if you could help someone who really needed it, just by eating lunch?”
Rooster Soup Company is not just another restaurant opening in Center City.
It’s not just another place to add to your list of go-to lunch spots.
It’s not just another brick and mortar for Mike Solomonov and Steve Cook to add to their already stellar repertoire.
It’s a chance for every person who walks through the door and places an order to feel as though they are helping someone in need.
This month’s Melior People of the Moment are Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook. They are the esteemed chefs and restauranteurs behind some favorite Philadelphia spots: Zahav, Abe Fischer, Dizengoff, Federal Donuts, and Percy Street Barbecue. Rooster Soup Company is their newest venture, where the concept is to turn the unused parts of the whole chickens purchased by Federal Donuts to make chicken stock for a variety of soups to be sold at Rooster Soup Company, in addition to other menu items.
The benefits of this new restaurant are two-fold: perfectly good chicken parts will no longer go to waste and 100% of Rooster Soup Company’s net profits will go towards generating revenue for Philadelphia’s Broad Street Ministry, which provides vulnerable Philadelphians with meals and services such as a mailing address, access to free medical care, personal care items, and clothing.
Cook and Solomonov introduced their partnership with BSM through a Kickstarter campaign back in the summer of 2014 with the goal of raising $150,000 startup capital for Rooster Soup Company. They have since exceeded that amount. The most recent development in this campaign is the announcement of where Rooster Soup Company will live. According to the campaigns Kickstarter site, Rooster will call 1526 Sansom Street home.
In our view from Walnut Street, the hustle and bustle of Center City is palpable. We, The Melior Group, often find ourselves discussing the familiar faces we see every day or the new ones we have not. To say we feel connected to this city and its people would be an understatement. Combine that connection with our love for a new lunch spot and we’re sold. Because, it’s not what Rooster Soup Company is serving per se. It’s knowing you, the customer, is also serving someone else.
Taking a cue from Time Magazine’s just-announced Person of the Year, we’ve created the Melior Person of the Moment, a happy nod to individuals who influence our community and the region.
Our inaugural Melior Person of the Moment is none other than the Honorable Michael Nutter, Mayor of Philadelphia who ends his term in just a couple of short weeks.
Why is he our Melior Person of the Moment? Here are just some highlights of Mayor Nutter’s tenure in office:
Took the helm in 2008 during a national financial crisis that trickled down to the local government sector
Implemented Philly 311 to provide residents an easy to use system to obtain information on city services
Increased ethical transparency and accountability
Introduced several sustainability initiatives – Melior was fortunate to work with the Department of Sustainability on its EnergyWorks program
Improved visibility for Philadelphia and the region at a national and global level by encouraging large scale concerts and events to be held in the City (for example, Made in America, DNC 2016, the Pope Francis visit)
Throughout his tenure, we’ve also enjoyed the Mayor’s direct and realistic language to get his point across… often reflecting what the average reasonable person is thinking.
In 2008 when the Phillies won the World Series, Mayor Nutter spoke to the public about behavior. The night of the big win, the celebratory nature of the citizens of and visitors to the City got out of hand and he needed to take control in planning the parade through Center City, telling the public: “You can be joyous, but you can’t be a jackass.”
In our view from Walnut Street, one thing about his tenure was perfectly clear: his love for Philadelphia and its people. He has shown a deep respect for the community and business leaders. Thank you, Mayor Nutter, for shepherding Philadelphia through some tough economic times, providing a balance of realism and lightheartedness and being the champion that our City needed.
The good folks at ejewishphilanthropy have published a piece by Susan Levine, Melior’s community study expert. Our post talks about the usefulness of community demographic studies as a tool for future planning.
Melior’s approach to these kinds of studies is simple, yet powerful: “Understanding the character of the community – its needs, attitudes, and perceptions – in a way that leads to action, will better position communities to ensure their long term futures.”
Having an “educated workforce” now requires people to have post-secondary education and targeted skills training in order to be prepared to compete in the ever-growing global economy. And knowing that community colleges educate approximately four in ten of today’s college students, it’s impossible to overlook the potential that community colleges have in changing the face of higher education and also its contribution to the future workforce in the U.S.
Community Colleges Meet Distinctive Regional Needs
Community colleges provide an affordable opportunity for a wide range of prospective students–from those requiring remedial education, to those seeking specific skills to advance their careers, to older adults looking to satisfy long (or short) held interests, to prospective employees wanting tailored training to meet economic needs within their communities, to veterans requiring a range of supports.
With the state of higher education changing every day, it’s time for community colleges to carefully consider their many strengths and weaknesses, to be opportunistic and proactive in addressing challenges.
Challenges for Today and Tomorrow
While there are many opportunities, today’s community colleges also face a series of challenges, among them are some within and some that are outside of their control:
Decreasing enrollment;
Prospective students’ (often) lack of preparation for the rigors of higher education – and the attendant reputation of community colleges becoming “High School – Part 2”;
Diminished funding by state and local governments;
Increasing tuition rates;
Fewer students completing their college education (for a range of reasons that aren’t merely cost-driven);
Increased competition from for-profit educational institutions (including technical and trade institutions) making promises that are difficult to keep;
A concern that some community college presidents are approaching retirement age, with a smallish pool of replacements in the wings.
The Eight Characteristics
In our experience with community colleges, those that have the greatest likelihood to succeed are the ones that have:
a tangible and thoughtful mission, geared to meet the needs of today’s students, employers, and communities;
been flexible in responding to economic and employer needs with training programs that are both skills-based and workplace-sensitive (e.g., teaching teamwork, communications, technological solutions);
responded to the demographic composition of its community in all ways possible;
a realistic and flexible tuition structure (if/where possible) to appeal to a range of prospective students;
worked with its region’s employers to address the employment needs unique to them;
collaborations with secondary schools and with other colleges/universities in the area to make the experience as positive and as seamless as possible;
community connections, which lead to mutual support of the needs and interests of residents – particularly in areas where a community college is the primary source of higher education;
a proactive approach to in gathering market-based information in order to support strategic planning and drive decisions about brand, marketing direction and target markets, programs and courses that hold the greatest potential and those that no longer fit future directions and needs, new and important target market segments, and general guidance for optimizing the college experience for current (and prospective) students.
For years, The Melior Group has been supplying in-depth and quantitative information and working with institutions in the higher education sector to develop marketing and business strategies for enrollment management, responsive programs and courses, and targeted marketing direction.
This is an update to our previous blog post published two years ago.
In the last few years, one of the biggest trends among communications and marketing professionals has been to predict the pace of rapid growth in college and university marketing. University Business published an article many years ago highlighting the importance for college marketers to measure the success of their future marketing campaigns. Certainly, college marketers have taken heed of that advice. In recent years, The Melior Group has seen higher education market research become one of the fastest growing segments of our business.
What’s the Challenge?
While many of the core tenants of higher education marketing remain intact, universities are tasked with meeting today’s challenges; demographic trends, budget shortfalls, and student financial aid cutbacks have resulted in enrollment declines. It is predicted that these trends will continue.
So What’s A College to Do?
Successful higher education marketers are learning how to step up their marketing initiatives, recognizing that competition for students is on the rise. We’re encountering many more universities looking to refresh their brand identity and get a better handle on the strengths that will attract students to their institutions.
With universities looking for information to support their strategic marketing initiatives, perhaps it’s time to take another look at common practices to measure success of marketing initiatives.
Sometimes THE Standard Isn’t the Only Standard
Traditionally, top-of-mind awareness has been considered THE standard measure of understanding where various colleges rank in the minds of prospective students and parents.
We have learned that traditional measures don’t sufficiently tell the whole story… and it barely amounts to a chapter. There’s so much more to evaluating perceptions of prospective students… such as also including key stakeholders and influencers on college selection. To successfully influence prospects, key community and business leaders, prospective employers of its graduates, we suggest that other measures be included in any evaluation, such as
Likelihood to visit
Interest in applying
Likelihood to recommend
Quality of graduates (ready for the workforce)
Web/social media activities (both the positive and negative)
Alumni giving/engagement
Engagement with the community
Successful universities actively look for creative, outside of the box solutions for designing academic programs to appeal to students, demographic outreach and financial options that will bolster their value to more prospective student families and increase enrollment.
Smart marketers are stepping up their marketing strategies by looking at the information that truly matters and are beginning to understand the mix of factors that are important to the specific prospect populations who value what they offer.
For over 30 years, The Melior Group has been supplying in-depth information and working with university clients to help them to think strategically about their marketing efforts. To learn more about our work with colleges and universities, visit our Educationpage or please contact Elizabeth Foley at [email protected] / 215-545-0054 x111 or Linda McAleer at [email protected] / 215-545-0054 x104.
