Marketing News: August 2018 by Molly Soat

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

AMA.ORG

AUGUST 2018

THE

HIGHER EDUCATION ISSUE

AUGUST 2018 NO.

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table of contents AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

4-8

SEEN ON AMA.ORG

10-15

ANSWERS IN ACTION • Snapshot • Core Concepts

20-23

EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS • Lawrence A. Crosby • Michael Krauss

46-50

CAREER ADVANCEMENT • Skills • On the Record

#OFFICEGOALS

26 36

 Stepping Down from the Pedestal

Four-year institutions like the University of Michigan appear unattainable in the eyes of many low-income families. But U of M is using targeted marketing to assure students that if they work hard, the school will take care of the rest.

 How to Win Friends and Influence Millions: The Rules of Influencer Marketing Influencer marketing is potent and ascendant, growing stronger each year. How can marketers work with influencers while avoiding the miscues, failures and controversies that have marred other brands?

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AMA .org

OR FIND US ON

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COVER PHOTO BY DARYL MARSHKE, COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

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LETTER FROM THE CEO

Higher Education Needs Higher Experience

he emergence of the CMO in higher education may signal to some that universities and colleges are finally getting in step with market-oriented customer centricity. That may be true, but being a late bloomer has its advantages, too. Higher education is under siege. Throughout history, there has been an ebb and flow of bundling and unbundling products and services. Some have tried to reinvent themselves by bundling, such as marketing services and advertising agencies. No space has been more disrupted by unbundling than higher education. I recently read of a Harvard student who claims to play hooky from his classes while he builds his professional skills through online courses from the Khan Academy. Even the most venerable institutions are offering unbundled products and services separate from their degree programs. The old mantra, “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will” has evolved to, “If you don’t unbundle yourself, someone else will.” The key to unbundling is the rebundling you are liberated to pursue—not just with your previously bundled elements, but with other organization’s unbundled assets through partnerships and alliances. That’s a pragmatic response. Still some ask if the fouryear degree program is headed for extinction. Not necessarily. Institutions of higher education can avoid becoming sentimental

artifacts by understanding what aspects of their offerings are most vulnerable to disruption by unbundled competitors. Drawing on a framework developed by Fidelis Education, the high-level benefits of an institution can be divided into four segments: knowledge acquisition, gaining employable skills, access to opportunities and personal transformation. Decide which of these are most susceptible to disruption by unbundled, digital substitutes and other threats. I think a bit differently than Fidelis when assessing risk points. The most obvious benefit of higher education that is at risk is knowledge acquisition. Unbundled options are overrunning less agile institutions with more accessible, lower-cost alternative delivery channels and platforms for knowledge attainment. The next benefit at risk would be gaining employable skills. In these two groups of benefits, your institution needs to fight fire with fire. Launch unbundled products and services as a first mover or fast follower. Be sure any fastfollower ideas are improvements on those of the first movers. On the latter two benefits (access to opportunities and personal transformation), the defense is sharp, relevant differentiation. Marketers can achieve this through experience design. Experience design is both your best defense and offense to differentiate your institution. It can play an integral role in

RUSS KLEIN CEO

making professional opportunities accessible through the credibility of your institutional brand and the many relationships formed during school and after graduation. Alumni networks and derivative affiliations can all be part of an intentional experience design that can fortify the conventional model of higher education against unbundled interlopers. Be sure to look for the next edition of Marketing News, which will be all about experience design. You’ll hear from several expert contributors, including yours truly and my patented mathematical representation of the 21st century brand. Brand = Experience Story

MARKETING NEWS | AUGUST 2018

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AUGUST 2018

VOL. 52 | NO. 7

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

Mary Garrett Chairperson of the AMA Board 2017-2018 Russ Klein, AMA Chief Executive Officer rklein@ama.org EDITORIAL STAFF

Phone (800) AMA-1150 • Fax (312) 542-9001 E-mail editor@ama.org Molly Soat, Editor in Chief msoat@ama.org Michelle Markelz, Managing Editor mmarkelz@ama.org Hal Conick, Staff Writer hconick@ama.org Sarah Steimer, Staff Writer ssteimer@ama.org Bill Murphy, Designer wmurphy@ama.org ADVERTISING STAFF

Fax (312) 922-3763 • E-mail ads@ama.org Sally Schmitz, Production Manager sschmitz@ama.org (312) 542-9038 Michael Gay, Account Executive mgay@yourmembership.com (727) 329-4421 Nicola Tate, Account Executive ntate@yourmembership.com (727) 329-4437 Jordan Berthiaume, Media Sales Representative jberthiaume@YourMembership.com (727) 497-6565 x3409 Marketing News (ISSN 0025-3790) is published monthly except June/July and November/December (pending) by the American Marketing Association, 130 E. Randolph St., 22nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60601. Circulation: (800) AMA-1150, (312) 542-9000 Tel: (800) AMA-1150, (312) 542-9000 POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: Marketing News, 130 E. Randolph St., 22nd Floor, Chicago, 60601-6320, USA. Periodical Postage paid at Chicago, Ill., and additional mailing offices. Canada Post Agreement Number 40030960. Opinions expressed are not necessarily endorsed by the AMA, its officers or staff. Marketing News welcomes expressions of all professional viewpoints on marketing and its related areas. These may be as letters to the editor, columns or articles. Letters should be brief and may be condensed by the editors. Please request a copy of the “Writers’ Guidelines” before submitting an article. Upon submission to the AMA, photographs and manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed, adequately stamped envelope.

Making Connections

arketing connects people. It allows them to find just the right product or service to fulfill their needs. Whether that be a college degree or the right pair of headphones, marketers are the only force standing between the right customer and the right product. Higher education can be largely out of reach for low-income Americans. But the University of Michigan is working to bridge that gap—and advance the diversity of perspectives and socioeconomics on its campuses. Go Blue Guarantee is a program that spreads the word about U of M’s robust financial-aid packages directly to those who need it most. U of M’s Kedra Ishop spoke to Sarah Steimer about how the university is breaking down financial aid step by step, so families can navigate the typically technical, confusing application process and take full advantage of aid. Marcom to the rescue. Longtime columnist Lawrence Crosby lays out an interesting, albeit controversial, thesis in this month’s column. Since student tuition finances the research coming out of business schools, those schools have a responsibility to provide relevant,

actionable research to the marketingpractitioner community. Much academic research, Crosby argues, is theoretical in nature, adding only to the echo chamber of academia. He urges business schools to recall their obligation to their students and the marketplace: to produce research that can inform and inspire best practice. How have you seen the relationship between academics and practitioners evolve? MOLLY SOAT Editor in Chief @MollySoat

CONTRIBUTORS

Annual subscription rates: Marketing News is a benefit of membership for professional members of the American Marketing Association. Annual professional membership dues in the AMA are $220. Annual subscription rates: $35 members, $145 nonmembers and $190 libraries, corporations and institutions. International rates vary by country. Nonmembers: Order online at amaorders.com, call 1-800-633-4931 or e-mail amasubs@ ebsco.com. Single copies $10 individual, $10 institutions; foreign add $5 per copy for air, printed matter. Payment must be in U.S. funds or the equivalent. Canadian residents add 13% GST (GST Registration #127478527). Advertisers and advertising agencies assume liability for all content (including text, representations and illustrations) of advertisements published, and also assume responsibility for any claims arising therefrom made against the publisher. The right is reserved to reject any advertisement. Copyright © 2018 by the American Marketing Association. All rights reserved. Without written permission from the AMA, any copying or reprinting (except by authors reprinting their own works) is prohibited. Requests for permission to reprint—such as copying for general distribution, advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works or resale—should be submitted in writing by mail or sent via e-mail to permissions@ama.org. Printed in the U.S.A.

ZACK BROOKE

ALICE OH

Zach Brooke is a former AMA staff writer turned freelance journalist. His work has been featured in Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, AV Club and VICE, among others. Follow him on Twitter @Zach_Brooke.

Alice Oh is a digital marketing specialist at MarketPro, Inc. She writes about transformation and trends that occur in digital marketing. She is intrigued by the rapid integration of technology in marketing and is always eager to learn about the latest developments. AUGUST 2018 | MARKETING NEWS

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The Best KPI to Measure the Value of Content Marketing

f you talk to enough marketers, you find that most of them believe content marketing is here to stay. Surveys confirm it, showing that most marketers have been putting more time and budget behind content marketing in the past few years. But most marketers have trouble measuring the value of the content they’re spending so much time, effort and budget on. The trouble is that the tool most of us use to measure content, Google Analytics, doesn’t have a clear content KPI. In mid-2016, my team at Smith & Jones, a health care marketing agency, was developing a lot of content for ourselves and our clients. The content took many forms, including blog posts and bigger publications like our annual trends report. We also created videos, webinars and advanced decision-making tools. Engagement with each content type was measured differently. Blogs were evaluated by average time on page. White papers and tools were measured by the number of times they were downloaded, and video engagement was measured by the number of people who watched. This approach was great at telling us which piece of creative in each content category worked best, but it didn’t tell us which types of content we should be spending our time on. In other words, it didn’t help us answer questions like, “Should we do more videos or more blogs?” or “Should we keep publishing white papers or switch to an e-book format?”

We needed a standard measurement for engagement, a yardstick that could measure all of our content, side by side, regardless of format. Through a series of experiments, we settled on a formula that could be easily implemented in Google Analytics. With about 15 minutes of setup, this formula gave us insightful reports. ( {{Pageviews}} / {{Unique Pageviews}} ) * ( {{Pageviews}} — ( ( {{Exits}} — {{Bounces}} ) + ( {{Bounces}} * 1.5 ) ) )

Each piece of content gets a granular score (all the way down to two decimal places). This level of detail allows us to measure every piece of content against every other one, as well as against the average for our whole website. If you’d like to use this formula, ask your web analytics team to create a calculated metric in Google Analytics. They’ll need to make sure they set the formatting type to “float.” Then paste the formula into the appropriate window. Once you have the formula installed, you should be able to generate reports that look backward. To put your new data to use, start asking questions like, “What do our top-performing pieces of content have in common?” and “How might we generate content that works as well as (or better than) our top performers?” Happy analyzing! —BRADEN RUSSOM

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SOURCE: THE REUTERS INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF JOURNALISM

Americans are Abandoning Social Media as a News Source

any media companies are shifting their models toward higher-quality content and greater emphasis on reader subscriptions, according to a new study from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The report, “Digital News Report 2018,” which includes data from almost 40 countries, found the trend toward distributed content by way of social media and aggregators has stopped and is even beginning to reverse. In the U.S. the use of social media for news is down 6% from 2017, mostly due to a decline in the discovery, posting and sharing of news on Facebook. Consumer trust in news remains low in most countries, which Reuters found to be related to high levels of polarization in the media and the perception of disproportionate political influence. Across all countries studied, the average level of trust in the news is relatively stable at 44%, and 51% of people trust the news media they consume most often. This is compared to 34% of respondents who say they trust news found via search and 23% who

say they trust news found on social media. Three-quarters of respondents say publishers have the greatest responsibility to solve the problem of fake and unreliable news, while 71% say platforms have the greatest responsibility; however, only 41% of Americans say the government should intervene to stop fake news.

Although reader revenue has increased, traditional media companies have seen these gains offset by drops in print and digital advertising. Reader payments are also closely linked to political belief— particularly among left-leaning readers — and are disproportionately paid by the young. Use of ad blockers is still rising, along with browser extensions that allow users to block specific advertisers. The use of blockers is up 4% in the U.S. since 2017.

SOURCE: THE REUTERS INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF JOURNALISM

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SOURCE: THE REUTERS INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF JOURNALISM

The report also studied which brands have the public’s trust. Fox News and Breitbart have much higher levels of trust from right-leaning consumers, while left-leaning consumers place their trust more heavily with CNN and MSNBC. The popularity of podcasts is rising, the report found, as a result of improved content quality and easier distribution. Advertising and sponsorship

opportunities in podcasts are growing as well. According to Nic Newman, research associate for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, “This year has been a reminder that things that once seemed certain — the importance of Facebook and the online advertising model — can shift quickly.” —SARAH STEIMER

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SNAPSHOT

easy. Doing both at the same time was not so simple. “[We needed to] generate brand awareness with two product focuses with such a significant difference in who we’re researching, how we’re reaching them and what they need to know about Kinetrex Energy,” says MCC senior account executive Christina Phillips. Oh, and marketing needed to be built from scratch. “Until recently, we had no internal marketing people whatsoever,” says Mark Gallo, director of sales and marketing at Kinetrex. “MCC provides broad offerings and an all-inclusive ability to create digital marketing, video, radio ads and websites.”

Energy Extractor Engages With Niche Markets Kinetrex Energy enlisted the help of an agency to execute dual campaigns for two distinct properties BY ZACH BROOKE | STAFF WRITER

 zbrooke@ama.org Goal Good marketing is often simple. Many companies strive to reduce their essential business to a confident tagline, a Trojan horse carrying powerful emotional hooks. So it was no small task when Kinetrex Energy enlisted Dallas-area agency MCC to boost its profile as a provider of two technically complex products. Kinetrex wanted increased awareness of its overall brand, but to get there, it needed separate campaigns for two distinct energy lines. Natural gas energy, acquired by the company at the wellhead and piped to customers’ tanks and hookups, was one. The campaign was to be limited to the small radius around Kinetrex’s Indianapolis headquarters, where the company could offer the prices

needed to compete with rival suppliers. The second product reached further and was more futuristic: liquified natural gas (LNG), or natural gas that has cooled to minus 260 degrees and condensed into a liquid state. Unlike surface temperature natural gas, which requires a pipeline for transportation, LNG can be moved in tanker trucks. It can also power the trucks themselves, as well as many other automobiles. (UPS, for instance, uses LNG in all of its Class A vehicles). Given that LNG is more free-moving than its gaseous alternative and is cheaper and better for the environment, it should be poised to compete nationwide with alternative energy sources, such as propane and diesel, if marketed correctly. Promoting one fuel or the other was

Action MCC kicked off its plan to elevate the Kinetrex name with market research, starting with surveys of Kinetrex insiders on how they thought Kinetrex was perceived by outsiders. It continued with subsequent surveys of the public to gauge what they actually thought about Kinetrex, if they thought of it at all. Armed with the competing data sets, researchers measured the opinions against one another to locate gaps in understanding Kinetrex’s brand. Audience priorities were sussed out and highlighted alongside the perception gaps. Unsurprisingly, top prospects cared most about the price of the energy they used. This boded well for Kinetrex’s prospects in the transportation space, since LNG is about a dollar cheaper per gallon than diesel fuel. But when reliability also emerged as a main point of importance, the team knew they found something they could use to push LNG as a differentiator, particularly within the agricultural sector. Farmers accustomed to propane-powered farms are often hit with unpredictable price fluctuations and periods of scarcity —two pain points that don’t come with LNG. The ability to heat a farm is critical for livestock producers, Phillips says. If the animals can’t survive the cold, farmers lose their income. The findings became the thematic

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anchor of a new digital campaign. MCC created banner ads that showed the Kinetrex logo beneath a snowy barnyard, with overlaid text flashing, “Kick the propane habit. Learn about the better option.” That call to action brought users to a webpage with more information on Kinetrex LNG. “We can’t tell everyone everything about LNG in a small animated GIF, so our goal was to throw down propane as the volatile option and help them learn about the other options by linking to a full webpage users could

COMPANY

Kinetrex Energy FOUNDED

2013 HEADQUARTERS

Indianapolis CAMPAIGN TIMELINE

Late 2016 to present CAMPAIGN RESULTS

9.1 million impressions, 0.17% average click-through rate and a 700% increase in active prospects AGENCY PARTNER

MCC

investigate,” Phillips says. Though banner personalization was low, owing to cost-conscious efforts, Phillips says MCC customized content somewhat for poultry, hog and grain prospects by using different visual imagery and marketing copy. More importantly, they employed geo-sensing in their digital ad placement, which allowed them to target the headquarters of the highest-value prospects. For the traditional natural gas product line, MCC crafted a multi-platform campaign that centered on Kinetrex’s connections to the Indianapolis market. Since Kinetrex didn’t plan to compete outside of a limited footprint around its headquarters, MCC played up the local connection, highlighting Kinetrex’s roots in the community and positioning it as a local business. But instead of placing competitors on blast with the LNG banner ads, ads for locally supplied natural gas instead showed the Kinetrex logo rising above the Indianapolis skyline before wiping away to text reading, “Time to save on natural gas. Kinetrex Energy, the local gas supplier for local businesses.” The digital ads were complemented by spots on local radio, as part of a concerted effort to build name recognition. Prospects feel more comfortable speaking with salespeople when they’ve heard of the business before, Gallo says. Results The dual campaigns performed admirably.

answers in action

Digital response for the localized traditional pipeline-delivered natural gas earned 6.7 million impressions, with an average engagement rate of 51.6% among Indianapolis’ population of 860,000. The LNG campaign, pitched to a more niche audience, generated nearly 2.4 million impressions and 94.4% engagement rate. Combined, the two campaigns averaged a click-through rate of 0.17% percent, or nearly twice the B-to-B average of 0.09%. The number of active prospects shot up by 700%. MCC’s work was recognized by the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the AMA, which named the agency its Marketer of the Year in the energy category. More importantly, the increased awareness helped usher in a windfall at Kinetrex. Since partnering with MCC, Gallo says Kinetrex has seen its revenue grow by 60% and its employee count grow by 75%. The company is racing to open a third gas-producing plant at the beginning of next year. Kinetrex CEO Aaron Johnson told the Indianapolis Business Journal he expects volume production to grow by 40% in 2018 before the new plant becomes operational. While much of the expansion is the result of Kinetrex being acquired by a Chicago hedge fund, Gallo believes the investment opportunities are due in part to how well Kinetrex marketing has performed. “There’s no question that marketing is part of that equation,” he says. m

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CORE CONCEPTS

Licensing Lowdown Colleges are turning to license partners to keep branding consistent, legal and on-trend BY SARAH STEIMER | STAFF WRITER

 ssteimer@ama.org

he Loyola University Ramblers’ march to the Final Four of the NCAA’s 2018 men’s basketball championship was a shock to many. Yet there they were, and fans in the Chicago area scrambled to buy maroon and gold merchandise to cheer on the team. Thanks to some quick action by the school’s licensing agency, vendors and retailers, those fans were able to stock up on Loyola apparel—some of which even featured the popular Sister Jean, chaplain for the men’s basketball team. “We basically had a mini office in Chicago,” recalls Ben Emmons, vice president of brand marketing at Learfield Licensing Partners. Emmons says his team rushed to provide in-store retail marketing, signage and bonus gifts with purchases. “The NCAA towel that you couldn’t buy at retail for the most part? We were getting those straight from the towel manufacturer and overnighting them. We couldn’t even stock them. The moment that Sister [Jean] gave her approval on using her image, we had a licensee in their truck driving from Minnesota with 10,000 shirts already being placed at a bookstore, Dick’s Sporting Goods and a bunch of other retailers.” A licensing partner isn’t only for those schools bracing for a Cinderella story. The partnership can keep marks consistent, merchandise current and legal headaches at bay. Why Find a Licensing Partner? Emmons can list many reasons why a school would seek out a licensing partner, chief among them the opportunity to work with experts in promotion and protection. “We have auditors, we have legal,

we’ve got a good team that comes with varied backgrounds in retail licensee development,” Emmons says. “Some were former licensees, some were former bookstore buyers. Plus, we have brand managers.” It’s not unusual for companies or individuals to hawk unlicensed merchandise, so many schools seek out a licensing agency to protect their brands. Unlicensed products result in lost dollars for universities, and unchecked marks can misrepresent schools. A licensing partner can help staunch the number of faux university T-shirts hitting streets or cyberspace. To counter online counterfeiting, Learfield uses third-party software to shut down online auction sites selling unlicensed products. “One area that every brand, both college and elsewhere, deals with is counterfeiting online,” Emmons says. “But also, we’re present at game-day enforcement. Depending on the situation, we’re [looking for] those people with the bags of T-shirts and working with local law enforcement.” Emmons notes that licensing various products in multiple categories ensures a university can protect classes when filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Having a licensing partner also places the school’s brand footprint in all the appropriate areas. Agencies can locate vendors where current or prospective students are located, whether it be local mom-and-pop bookstores blocks from a university or national retailers. A Badgers sweatshirt has an obvious home in a retail shop in Madison, Wisconsin, but it also has a less-obvious—and perhaps equally important presence—in a sporting goods store in Minnesota, a state where

2,630 University of Wisconsin-Madison undergrads hailed from in the spring 2018 semester. Branded products are one of the most iconic ways to market a school, as evidenced by the recognizable white on navy Yale University apparel (which inspired a similar “Kale” sweatshirt popularized by Beyoncé) or the University of California, Santa Cruz Fighting Banana Slugs shirt John Travolta wore in “Pulp Fiction.” A licensing partner can keep those visuals consistent, remaining true to the school’s mission and identity. “When Miami’s marks are displayed on merch and sold at retailers, we see this as basically a walking billboard for the university,” says Laura Driscoll, manager of trademarks and licensing at Miami University of Ohio. “It’s free publicity. With that said, we are very intentional when we’re licensing our marks because we want to make sure that … the products

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answers in action

The 2018 Hispanic Heritage line, launching in September. Photos courtesy of Learfield Licensing.

music stars on product partnerships, and other unique relationships have bloomed between colleges and brands like Victoria’s Secret PINK. Some schools have tapped their own student experts. Driscoll says Miami University’s fashion and design student organizations help the school create on-trend jewelry lines that were produced by some of its licensed vendors.

that our brand is being produced on align with the university’s brand.” Driscoll says the school’s licensing partner handles administrative tasks that include processing licensing applications and renewals and managing high-level relationships with retailers and vendors. Unexpected Perks A licensing partner can open up relationships with national and regional vendors to carry products that feature colleges’ marks, but it can also present some unusual opportunities for schools. Learfield partnered with sports cap company New Era, four Latino artists and six universities in Texas, New Mexico and California for the Hispanic Heritage collection. The art featured on the caps was influenced by street art that included hand-drawn letters and Mexican Day of the Dead iconography. The project is now entering its second year, during which

Learfield is expanding into additional apparel and partnering with new artists and 20 schools. “We strategically chose these artists not only for the Hispanic demographic but also for lifestyle,” Emmons says. “Not everyone wants to necessarily wear [traditional college apparel]. The student body is so diverse, we wanted to be sure we could design different types of product.” One of the greatest benefits of this nontraditional college apparel is how it’s appealed to a new audience— both students and retailers. Emmons says the caps were sold at traditional retailers (LIDS, Fanatics and on-campus bookstores), along with some local streetwear boutiques, where it opened a new avenue for marketing to a fan base the school otherwise might not have reached. Learfield has also worked with country

Getting Started Having a licensing partner can be beneficial whether a college is rebranding or simply trying to organize and promote its marks. “Make sure you’re working with partners that align with the university’s brand, and don’t go at it alone,” Driscoll says. She recommends taking advantage of on-campus resources and knowledge, as her school did with its fashion and design departments, to gain better insights on customers. She emphasizes the importance of a solid administrative foundation. Once partnerships are in place and branded products are available, it’s time to place them in front of the audience in marketing materials. “We hadn’t ever integrated licensed merchandise into the equation for some of our photoshoots,” Driscoll says. “Now we’re being much more intentional and making sure we’re highlighting Miami’s brand, versus whatever just shows up in the photos. We’re partnering with our retailers to ensure the brand is there.” Prior to reaching out to a potential licensing partner, Emmons says schools should spend time understanding their brand and their goals—and that means across all departments so the collegewide marks are cohesive. He also makes one simple request: “Have your colors consistent. We’ve had schools with five different shades of green.” m

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answers in action

CORE CONCEPTS

Lean, Mean, Agile Marketing Lean and agile principles, popular for decades in manufacturing, are now becoming popular in marketing. How can marketers use these principles to their advantage? BY HAL CONICK | STAFF WRITER

 hconick@ama.org

hen Ellie Mirman led a marketing team at HubSpot, she’d watch in awe as the company’s engineering team worked on new projects in short-but-methodical bursts. The team would use these monthlong bursts, called sprints, to create and test potentially valuable projects. At the end of each sprint, the team examined what was successful and what wasn’t— if something was successful, it was adopted; if it wasn’t, it was ditched. “We were working really close with them,” says Mirman, who served as HubSpot’s

director of marketing for the inbound funnel. “It rubbed off on us, and we decided to give it a shot.” Each month, Mirman’s team focused on a few sprints—the most important projects were tested first—and eschewed other new ideas until future months. After many sprints, Mirman had a better view of which marketing projects were wasteful, which were worthwhile and which needed changes. “Let’s look at this month: What worked, what didn’t and what can we cut?” Mirman says she’d ask her team after each month of sprints. Like

the engineering team, Mirman’s team adopted the programs that worked and ditched those that didn’t. Sprints are a common tool in agile and lean processes, two complementary practices popular for decades in manufacturing. Now, these processes are becoming popular across marketing departments: AgileSherpas’ State of Agile Marketing 2018 reports that 77% of marketing departments using agile practices adopted them in the past five years. Additionally, 44% of agile marketers say that they use a hybrid methodology, such as the lean-agile combination that Mirman implemented at HubSpot. (She’s now CMO of Crayon.co, a market and competitive intelligence company, and continues to integrate lean-agile processes into marketing practice.) Russ Lange, partner at marketing consultancy CMG Partners, defines lean as a methodology that continuously reduces waste and limits the amount of work in progress. Agile, on the other hand, improves effectiveness; Lange says that adopting agile processes means constantly looking for new tasks, experimenting with them and learning if they work. “Together, they can do wonderful things,” he says. His company, which assists larger organizations in adopting these processes, reports that 67% of companies using lean and agile marketing increase their profits and revenue. How can marketers—whether in small business, the middle market or a Fortune 500 company—use lean and agile principles to their advantage? Lange and Mirman explain the paths to success. Center on the Customer Each time Lange begins consulting with a marketing department, he’ll ask the team’s leader about the process the team uses. Most will say that they use a customercentric process, yet Lange often finds that marketing teams don’t consider the customer until the end of the process. Marketers who adopt lean and agile marketing must first ensure their process is customer-centric, he says, as customer

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CORE CONCEPTS

value and response are essential to lean and agile success. Lange recently worked with a company that, after years of using lean and agile processes in its manufacturing plants, wanted to extend the processes to its marketing team. When Lange examined the team, he found that its process was focused on potential business value and ease of business implementation; potential value to the customer was nowhere to be found. After adopting lean and agile principles, Lange says that the marketing team went from working on more than 20 projects based on business value to working on four initiatives based on value to the customer. Then, the company worked backward to figure out how the initiatives brought value to the company. By making its marketing process customer-centric, the department also forged a shared language with other teams, including sales, customer support and product development. This allowed the marketing team and larger organization to quickly find new value for customers. “They brought multiple business functions together with a unified language that wasn’t dependent on any one function but rather on one customer,” Lange says. Avoiding Marketing Overload Soon after Mirman adopted the hybrid agile-lean model at HubSpot, she says that the overwhelming feeling of having too much to do—a feeling familiar to 80% of marketers, according to a study from Workfront—largely disappeared. “You can’t do everything, right?” Mirman says. “You have to figure out what’s most important.” With a lean-agile process in place, Mirman could see everything her team was doing or planning to do. After each sprint, she saw what worked and didn’t work, what ideas her team had for the future and what the rest of the company was requesting of her team. With this overview of the department, Mirman could slot different projects into sprints throughout the year, more

easily regulating her team’s workflow. One month, her team might launch one big project and two small ones; another month, they may have time for two big launches and one small launch. “It really helps you manage expectations and then get results,” she says. Most marketers have ongoing projects that seem to collect more tasks until the projects balloon out of control. Few teams consider cutting back, but Mirman says that cutting out needless tasks is one of the benefits of lean and agile marketing. “Being able to say ‘no, not right now’ allows more projects to actually get done,” she says. “We’ve scaled back on projects that didn’t have that big of an impact. We’re looking for a higher hit rate on things that we do.” By controlling what her team undertakes each month, Mirman says that she avoids the common marketing mistake of making “big wild bets that you don’t learn from until a year later.” Instead, the team learns from their small tasks and adopts the most successful of them, she says, always asking themselves how they can improve in future sprints. Mirman keeps a backlog of ideas ready to test, she says, weighing each idea by its importance before slotting the best ideas into sprints. In a recent sprint at Crayon.co, an item on Mirman’s backlog proved successful. Her team noticed people browsing the company’s website were searching for competitive analysis templates, so Mirman wrote on her backlog to test these templates. The company had never created this kind of content before, but they scheduled it into a sprint. “And it did remarkably well,” she says. “It was a test we wanted to do for a long time, but we hadn’t found the time for it.” Since this test, Mirman says that they’ve created similarly popular templates. But a year later, the original competitive analysis template is still the company’s most popular piece of content. Failure and Honesty If marketers adopt lean and agile processes, then they will need to become comfortable with failure and honesty.

answers in action

Lange says that this may be the most difficult part for marketers, especially those who work at larger companies without what he calls a “startup mindset.” Those who work in larger companies tend to be uncomfortable with failure, selfassessment and the potential of looking bad in front of peers or bosses because of a stilted environment. But in a lean-agile environment, marketers must figure out how to experiment, fail and learn. “The mindset should be how to experiment in producing campaigns [to] reduce work and the amount of effort required to put something in the marketplace,” Lange says. In some cases, experiments may show that long-running projects have little value and can be cut. Lange consulted with a marketing department that was sending 52 e-mails to its clients each year. The department wanted to see if it needed to keep sending this many, so it reduced the number to 12 e-mails sent per year as part of a lean experiment. When revenue held steady over the testing period, the department again cut the number of e-mails to four per year. Revenue continued to hold steady; within a single experiment, the department cut 48 e-mails from its year without losing money. Marketers often don’t want to countenance that some of their processes aren’t necessary, but Lange says that facing the problems and experimenting with new solutions will mean quick— even if uncomfortable—improvement. “You’re a scientist looking to fail,” Lange says. Although Lange says that lean and agile principles have great potential in marketing, adopting them can be a difficult mindset change across a company. These processes will change how people work; successful changes of this kind are never assured. To attempt this kind of change takes fortitude, Lange says, but to be successful takes hard work. “Leadership has to be committed to taking advantage of the benefits and it has to be inspired by the top,” he says. “But the actual hard work is done by the people doing the work.” m

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executive insights

ACADEMIA

Who’s Benefitting from Academic Research? In a system that rewards researchers whose findings are published, but not necessarily practiced, who is served by ballooning tuition and studies of theory?

BY LAWRENCE A. CROSBY

 lawrence.a.crosby@gmail.com

he economic value of a college degree is widely recognized. Burleson Consulting estimates the net present value (NPV) of a bachelor’s degree in business administration, versus graduating from high school, to be $350,000. The NPV of an MBA is estimated to be $800,000. While those figures presumably account for the lost wages while attending school, the income gains are offset by the total costs of the advanced education. A bachelor’s degree from a state university costs approximately $100,000, according to The College Board, compared to the more than $200,000 tuition incurred by students at some private universities. The Financial Times estimates the average total cost of an MBA to be between $160,000 and $220,000. While the math suggests that both undergraduate and master’s degrees show a positive ROI, the educational investment is largely up front, which often leads to large student loans that students may not pay off until middle age. And it’s only going to get worse with tuition and fees rising at a rate of about 3% per year while financial aid has failed to keep up. With declining government support, business schools are increasingly dependent on tuition and fees for income. Their largest expense is faculty salaries. According to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the starting salary for a “doctorally qualified”

business school faculty member often exceeds $100,000 but can reach $150,000 to $175,000 depending on the school and

field (accounting and finance being the highest, with marketing in the middle). Research-oriented universities tend to pay more and require less teaching; that’s not to say faculty there have it easy, but what are they working on during nonteaching hours? The implication is that at most major business schools a large portion of student tuition is subsidizing faculty research. Compared to the natural and social sciences, business school faculty are not usually expected to bring in research grants. That places even more of the research burden on tuition. Knowing that, a business school student or alumnus might reasonably ask, “What am I getting for the research portion of my tuition dollar and the sacrifice that it required?” A group of scholars from various

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ACADEMIA

business disciplines are asking that same question at the system level. The group, the Community for Responsible Research in Business and Management (cRRBM), includes leading marketing voices Mary Jo Bitner, the Edward M. Carson chair in service marketing at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, and David Reibstein, the William Stewart Woodside professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. This group’s position paper suggests students are not getting enough from their investment. It’s reasonable to expect that faculty research would inform lectures and textbooks or that professors’ research is helping define best practice around their subject matter and provide fact-based guidance for approaching real-world problems and opportunities. One might assume the audience for this knowledge are their students and the business community. In the spirit of conscious capitalism and responsible science, there might also be the expectation that some of their research contributes to a better world that is more economically prosperous, environmentally sustainable, fair and just in terms of gender equality and wealth distribution and free of unethical and deceptive practices. But are these expectations being met? For the most part, the cRRBM has its doubts, and those concerns are not business-discipline specific. The group takes issue with a dysfunctional ecosystem in which the currency is peer-reviewed journal articles which mainly serve to advance faculty members’ careers. In this system, “research impact” has a different meaning than a practitioner might think. It has mainly to do with the number of times an article is cited in other academic articles and journals, with only a tangential relationship to improving management practice or addressing social issues. Too often business research is published not because it is useful or actionable in practice, but simply because it is theoretically or methodologically interesting to other scholars. In the

executive insights

Too often business research is published not because it is useful or actionable in practice, but simply because it is theoretically or methodologically interesting to other scholars. judgment of the cRRBM, some of the factors contributing to crises of relevance and integrity in academic business research include: focus on academic audiences, overemphasis on theory, selection of esoteric topics, scientific writing style, inaccessibility to practitioners, bias toward exaggerated findings, bias toward positive findings as opposed to replications and null results and devaluation of interdisciplinary work. Marketing is not immune to these criticisms. Though it’s not true of every article published in the field, leading journals display these questionable characteristics in varying degrees. In its position paper, the cRRBM offers a set of sound principles for responsible research in business and suggests actions for various key stakeholder groups to take. On top of those good ideas, here are some additional thoughts: • To students: Push faculty to provide evidence of the veracity of their assertions in lectures and textbooks. By challenging conventional wisdom, you might stimulate research that is rigorous and actionable. • To parents of undergraduate students— especially those who are also alumni: As the paying customer, schedule periodic appointments with faculty, department heads and deans, and make clear your expectations as to what a business education should be delivering. Ask questions about the programs of research that faculty are conducting and why those topics are important. Share examples of problems you face in your own business that could be addressed through faculty research.

• To department heads and deans: Get over the idea that 15% to 20% faculty engagement in outside, paid consulting is bad—even among younger, untenured faculty. Considering that many faculty progress straight through their education into a teaching role with limited work experience, consulting is an excellent opportunity for them to confront real-world problems. These engagements often involve the collection and analysis of hard-to-come-by data and sometimes the opportunity to publish findings or conclusions with a client that straddles the worlds of academics and practitioners. It is unclear whether a shift in focus of academic research could help contain tuition and fee increases, but it could certainly improve the return on that investment. One outcome might be a rise in sponsorships, grants and endowments. This could occur if faculty, faced with the expectation of conducting relevant research, were more motivated to seek out data and financial support from corporations, nonprofits and professional associations. Likewise, those same entities might increasingly look to business schools as evidence providers for the pressing issues they face. While clear rules would need to be established around research objectivity and what can or can’t be published, those are solvable issues. m LAWRENCE A. CROSBY is the retired dean of the Drucker School of Management and the chief data scientist at the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society, a part of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University.

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executive insights

AT C-LEVEL

The Heath Brothers Teach Marketers How to ‘Break the Script’ BY MICHAEL KRAUSS

 michael.krauss@mkt-strat.com

ome moments matter more than others. In The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath

teach marketers how to capitalize on an unexpected peak moment for customer satisfaction.

Marketers talk a lot about Big Data and analytics—how artificial intelligence and automated systems may soon power and enable the front end of many of our customer-facing experiences. I’m a technology advocate and I believe in data, analysis and facts. I also believe marketers need to comprehend human behavior and psychology to strategically deploy digital tools such as AI. That’s why The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact is a must-read book for all marketers, and perhaps for all executives. The Heath brothers are no strangers to the best-seller list. Their prior books, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard and Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work are all provocative and well worth a marketer’s time. In The Power of Moments, the Heaths articulate why certain moments matter more than others and how marketers and business leaders— even public policy makers and leaders of nongovernmental organizations— can achieve greater effectiveness by understanding the psychology and strategic application of the power of moments. The opening tale is of two Houstonbased charter school founders, Chris Barbic and Donald Kamentz, who were sitting in a bar in October 2000, watching ESPN after a 14-hour day. The Heaths explain, “It was national signing day, the first day when graduating high school football players can sign a ‘binding letter of intent’ to attend a particular college. For football fans, it’s a big day.” “It blows my mind that we celebrate athletics in this way, but we don’t have anything that celebrates academics in the same way,” Kamentz said. Barbic and Kamentz thought: What if we created our own “signing day,” when our students announce where they will attend college?

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Over the next six years, their students—who hail from underserved communities, are economically disadvantaged and whose parents have not attended college—could get on a stage and announce to their friends and family where they were going to college. The event grew to more than 5,000 attendees and even attracted then-Education Secretary Arne Duncan. The signing day concept created a peak moment that was more than just memorable, it was motivating. It inspired younger students, who might have otherwise not chosen college, to work harder and drive toward the opportunity of being on stage. The Heaths describe the quirks of our mind and why “peak” moments and “ending” moments can be powerful. Their explanation of the “peak-end rule” explores why parents of young children might spend a day sweltering in the heat and long lines of Disney World: The thrill of riding Space Mountain (a peak moment) and the joy of seeing their children don Mickey Mouse ears at the end of the day (an end moment) can tip the overall balance of a day to the positive and keep customers coming back. The authors also tell of the Magic Castle Hotel, one of the top-rated hotels in Los Angeles that routinely beats out the Four Seasons and the Ritz Carlton on service quality. How is this possible when the pool and other physical amenities of the Magic Castle Hotel are less impressive than their rivals? “Let’s start with the cherry-red phone mounted to a wall near the pool. You pick it up and someone answers, ‘Hello, Popsicle hotline.’ You place your order, and minutes later, a staffer wearing white gloves delivers your cherry, orange or grape Popsicles to you at poolside. On a silver tray. For free,” they write. The Magic Castle Hotel has found a way to deliver a peak moment for anyone on vacation in Los Angeles, and it leads to outstanding satisfaction scores.

executive insights

The Heaths explain that defining moments are created by one or more of the following four elements: Elevation: Defining moments rise above the everyday routine. Insight: Defining moments rewire our understanding of ourselves or the world. Pride: Defining moments capture us at our best—moments of achievement or courage. Connection: Defining moments are

social (e.g., weddings, graduations, baptisms, vacations, work triumphs, bar and bat mitzvahs, speeches and sporting events). The Heaths remind us that there are times that matter. First days matter. Transitions matter. Milestones matter. And truly negative experiences, which the authors refer to as “pits,” matter. “Transitions should be marked, milestones commemorated, and pits filled,” they advise. Then there’s the concept the Heaths discuss called “breaking the script,” deviating from the expected experience. “Breaking the script is strategic surprise,” they write, and the Magic Castle Hotel broke the script with their Popsicle hotline. The question The Power of Moments raises is this: Can McDonald’s break the script and offer strategic surprises and create moments that matter? Can you, as a marketer, achieve this in your organization? With guidance from Chip and Dan Heath, you’ll be well along the way to achieving moments that yield success. For those of you looking for a powerful book that will guide you on digital technology, pick up Human + Machine: Reimaging Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson. After all, marketers need to understand digital technology and buyer psychology. m

“Breaking the script is strategic surprise,” they write. ... The question The Power of Moments raises is this: Can you, as a marketer, achieve this in your organization?

MICHAEL KRAUSS is president of Market Strategy Group based in Chicago.

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PA R T N E R C O N T E N T | P R O V I D E D B Y C O L L E G I S E D U C AT I O N

How Higher-Education Marketers Can Prepare for the Martech Revolution

BY CHRISTINE BIRKNER

artech and AI are increasingly becoming essential tools in every marketer’s arsenal, helping them reach prospects in new ways and more efficiently harness the power of data. Higher-education marketers can use martech to improve their campaigns and reach prospects with the right messages throughout the student life cycle, from application to graduation. Doug Olsen, vice president of analytics and product strategy at Collegis Education, has 15 years of experience bridging marketing, technology and analytics in the highereducation space. Throughout his career, he has leveraged more than 20 years of software engineering and digital marketing experience to create technology platforms that drive consumer engagement and revenue growth. Prior to joining Collegis, Olsen was vice president of data strategy and analytics at Capella University. We caught up with Olsen to discuss how martech will transform the industry, how higher-education marketers should adapt to these new technologies and the opportunities that martech and AI can help highereducation marketers uncover.

Martech can help higher-education marketers better target students and potential students with more personalized messages. How does the martech stack provide insight for marketers throughout the student life cycle and create data points for better communication at each phase?

Absolutely. All the tools exist today to make personalized message testing and delivery a reality. Google and Facebook have tools for targeting, testing and delivering messages through advertising media. Content management and conversion rate optimization tools can deliver personalized content and message testing on websites, and marketing automation tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Marketo can create and test user-specific e-mail journeys, all of which can create

insights for marketers in those areas. The problem for higher education, though, is that all of those tools operate on their own silos of data. Going back to school is a considered decision that takes time. A student going through the decision-making process interacts with a school at multiple points over the course of multiple months throughout their research, making those silos of data less effective. To truly target students with personalized and relevant messages in higher education, you need to connect those disparate systems and data silos and create a holistic view of your student across the life cycle.

Q A

And how do you do that?

Creating a holistic view is probably one of the most complicated things to do, because you’re essentially stitching data together across a number of systems. Here at Collegis, we have something called the Connected Core that connects the disparate systems across the student life cycle. Essentially, you want to take touch point interactions from the upper funnel and map them to the lead, student information and behaviors in the lower funnel, so you have all the information together in one place, which gives you the whole picture for each student.

Compared to other industries, higher education is typically a laggard when it comes to adopting new technology. What’s your advice for higher-education marketers in overcoming this?

Lagging adoption isn’t due to a lack of interest on the marketers’ part. I think when they bring ideas to their IT teams they come back feeling like large initiatives. To accelerate things, my advice would be to find an external partner that has martech experience in the education industry. Martech is a specialized skill set that hasn’t typically resided in higher-education IT. It requires knowledge and experience with advertising and marketing platforms that are designed to make adoption easier for far less effort than many internal IT teams would have thought. Finding someone that works in higher education is important, too. Given that it is a highly regulated industry with a more common set of student systems, having a partner that has worked through a variety of those regulation and system challenges can help you efficiently navigate issues you may encounter along the way.

Martech can help higher-education marketers maximize their resources and save time and money, but working with limited budgets

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PA R T N E R C O N T E N T | P R O V I D E D B Y C O L L E G I S E D U C AT I O N

and small staffs can make actually implementing the new technologies a challenge. How do you find the right balance?

Create focus and start small. I always keep in the forefront of my mind that it’s not about the technology itself but the outcomes we seek to drive with our marketing. As such, I believe in starting with the data. Whether you’re responsible for new enrollments or retention or something else, get the data in place to understand your performance and the drivers behind your key metrics. Doing that creates visibility to your opportunity areas. Once you know where you need to focus, start small. Test out your ideas to get a sense for the size of impact they may have to find out if they’re worth a larger investment.

What are some of the best ways you’ve seen martech being put into practice in higher education, and what can marketers learn from these scenarios?

Look-alike audience targeting is one of my favorites. There are a number of platforms that support look-alike audience buying. By feeding enrollment data back to platforms like Google and Facebook, you can have them target prospective students. It’s simple to implement and very effective. Paid search and display optimization is one of the most common ways I’ve

seen martech put into practice. It’s standard practice to place a pixel on an inquiry form thank-you page to indicate a conversion that advertising systems can optimize on. However, we have also leveraged more valuable milestone points further down the funnel, like application, to help the advertising platforms optimize to something more valuable. Display targeting optimization is one of the best ways I’ve seen martech being put into practice. We fed likelihood to enroll information back to the advertising platform in

real time when prospective students drove an inquiry. This helped to create an optimization feedback loop, so the platform was not only able to optimize to inquiry generation but also to the quality of the inquiry. Website optimization is another. Through our website analytics, we observed that there were three pages that generated the majority of our inquiries. In addition, we saw that if someone visited one of three specific pages, we’d have an average conversion rate of 4%. For people who visited two of the three pages, the rate went to 12%, and for those who visited all three, the rate jumped to 25%. Through website testing and content management personalization, we were able to dynamically add a secondary call to action to drive more views of those additional pages, increasing the number of people in the two- and threepage groups and driving up overall site conversion.

What advice do you have for higher-education marketers about not getting too swamped with all of the data opportunities that martech can provide? How can they use this data in the most effective, relevant and profitable ways?

This answer is going to be similar to an early answer I gave, but it’s incredibly important to marketing success: Focus. It’s critical to establish a strong data foundation and to have

visibility to key metrics across the student life cycle. With this visibility, you can get an understanding of where your next best opportunities are, then leverage the data and solutions that can positively impact those areas. There are always cool new data opportunities coming to market, so you should maintain awareness of those as they may solve a future problem, but don’t feel like you have to implement everything. This is also a great place to lean on your martech partner. They have likely seen many of these things implemented and can

help you understand if it’s right for your particular situation.

How is martech transforming higher education, overall, and how can higher-education marketers prepare themselves for the future and stay ahead of the curve as these technologies evolve?

With the democratization and accessibility of machine learning, martech is on the cusp of transforming higher-education marketing in a very significant way. Machine learning is beginning to permeate many aspects of marketing, as it can leverage large amounts of data to make more accurate decisions and make them more quickly than a human marketer. We’re already seeing a steep change in results being shared outside of the education industry with Orangetheory and Harley-Davidson. After launching an AI platform, Orangetheory decreased its cost per lead by 60% while quadrupling media spend. Harley-Davidson of New York City used an AI platform company, Albert, in its customer targeting efforts, and saw a whopping 2,900% increase in leads per month. The company is now attributing 40% of its sales to AI. And both companies found new groups of people they were resonating with. Given these results, it’s not difficult to see that companies and institutions that don’t embrace the coming martech AI will struggle to deliver the same results and will ultimately lose out to their competitors. To be prepared for the future, it’s important for marketers to understand that the key to marketing AI success is data. Data is the fuel that powers the machine. Machine learning requires large amounts of clean and accurate data to work. The more you have, the better your results are likely to be. The challenge for marketers right now, in partnership with their IT departments, is to develop a data strategy that is able to create that robust data asset that connects the data elements of a student from the first marketing touch point through to graduation. Having a holistic and connected data set that can be deployed in machine learningdriven AI environments will bring big advantages. Those with the highest volume of quality data will be able to drive the machines to the most efficient and effective marketing they’ve ever seen, and are likely to uncover new opportunities they didn’t even know existed. AUGUST 2018 | MARKETING NEWS

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Stepping

Down from the Pedestal

Four-year institutions like the University of Michigan seem unattainable in the eyes of many low-income families. But U of M is using targeted marketing to assure students that if they work hard, the school will take care of the rest.

By Sarah Steimer PHOTOS COURTESY OF University of Michigan

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ollege doesn’t always seem accessible to everyone, particularly not for students from low-income families. School administrations can tout their financial aid packages, but that doesn’t mean word gets out to the families they would benefit most.

And even then, the language used in financial aid services can be confusing. Add to this the perception of higher education as elitist—a claim propped up by the many expenses it takes just to get accepted: tutors, test prep and application fees to name a few. A 2017 report by the Equality of Opportunity Project found the overall number of children from low-income families attending college increased rapidly in the 2000s, but the bulk of this increase occurred at two-year colleges and for-profit institutions. According to the report, the percentage of students at four-year and selective colleges from the poorest families saw no significant change. Working-class families can perceive enrollment at state schools like the University of Michigan as unattainable. The Equality of Opportunity Project found 16% of University of Michigan students come from families in the bottom 60% of earners, while 9% of students come from families in the top 1% of income distribution. Although the 2016 median household income in Michigan was $50,803, the median income of parents sending their children to U of M was $156,100. Acknowledging the perception of low-income inaccessibility, the University of Michigan launched an initiative called the Go Blue Guarantee, under which U of M will sponsor tuition for state residents with a family income of less than $65,000. Marketing News spoke with Kedra Ishop, vice provost for enrollment management at the university, about how the school is raising awareness of the program and changing the public’s view of the institution.

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PHOTO BY MARTIN VLOET

Q A

How did the University of Michigan get here—here being such a high percentage of students from high-income families and a shrinking population from low-earning families?

The price of higher education has changed a lot over the last couple decades, be it housing or the periphery cost associated with getting an education. In most cases, a typical student stays within 75 to 150 miles of where they’re from to go to school. Institutions that have a national or statewide profile tend to be where these kinds of [accessibility] issues are discussed. Some institutions attract students who can be mobile and who have a higher-ed background in their family. This notion of going away to school is not a concept that’s unfamiliar to those students; in fact, it’s something they’ve been striving toward their entire lives. All of those things have contributed to institutions like ours having a higher population of highincome students relative to lower-income students who might be making different choices for a lot of different reasons. There’s been a lot of work—by the College Board, institutions, community-based organizations—to change awareness and behavior, so talented students with the smarts to get into some of these schools that seem out of reach can pursue that. Likewise, [there are] schools changing their financial aid policies and the way they promote themselves to students to let them know that there are welcoming places for them. They have aid to help students financially and a desire to have economic diversity represented on their campus.

Q A

Not everyone has parents who are alumni. Has there been an effort to change the perception that there must be precedent in the family to go to U of M?

There’s been a lot of conversation in the last 15 years around diversity in college admissions. We focus a lot on racial and ethnic diversity, but diversity is larger than that. It’s also socio-economic diversity. It’s geographic diversity. It’s having first-generation students in your student body. Institutions are much more deliberate now about how they present themselves to those populations. We’ve come to be purposeful about making sure, for a state institution like Michigan, that we’re reaching out across the state and into the Upper Peninsula and telling those students, “If you do the hard work that it takes to be a high-achieving student, to be

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admissible, there’s a place for you here—and we’ll help with the cost.” The largest surge of college-going students that we had would have been back with the GI Bill. We had a very different population of students pursuing higher education [after WWII]. That created the first wave of second-generation students and started to build these alumni bases. In the last couple of decades or so, there’s a pursuit to make sure that we’re remembering that and going back to students that haven’t had that kind of access, haven’t sought that kind of opportunity and providing for them as well.

Q A

That’s a good transition into talking about the Go Blue Guarantee. How are you getting the word out about this program?

When I arrived at Michigan, President [Mark] Schlissel had been here a couple of months longer than I had, so he was relatively new to campus. He had gone around the state and had conversations to get to know Michigan and the University of Michigan and our influencers. One of the questions he asked was, “How can we simplify our messaging about financial aid?” The University of Michigan met full demonstrated need for families in the state of Michigan, so if you were a Michigander, and you had financial need, we would

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PHOTO BY BILL WOOD

meet it. There are only a few public institutions that have the resources to be able to do that, and yet the perception out there was that Michigan was too expensive. Certainly, if you look at a price tag of upwards of $28,000 for a state where the median income is around $65,000, it seems pretty out of reach. There’s a disconnect there. We also understand that financial aid is complex, and the language around financial aid is complex. You need to explain what “demonstrated need” means and what all of the forms are and why you need them. His [Schlissel’s] challenge was to inform in a language that was clear about our promise. He also wanted to make sure that we signal to students that cost is not a prohibitive

PHOTO BY RANDY MASCHAKA

The University met full demonstrated need for families in Michigan. There are only a few public institutions that have the resources to do that, and yet the perception was that Michigan was too expensive. AUGUST 2018 | MARKETING NEWS

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factor for families in the state of Michigan. If they think, “I can’t go to college anyway. I can’t afford it. Why would I take algebra in the eighth grade or spend that extra time reading?,” we wanted to influence those behaviors early on, so students could make choices that might prepare them for the University of Michigan. We wanted to make sure that our promise would be sustainable. We were approached by a faculty member [Sue Dynarski] who’s very active around the simplification of the [Free Application for Federal Student Aid]. She wanted to test a message to families right off the bat, giving them up-front information about cost, what we’re going to pay for and what’s free to them and put it in their hands early to see if that would change their behavior as it relates to applying to the institution. We worked with her and a team of researchers to test a marketing message. We did it as a research study, allowing us access to state-level data that would identify students that we could send these packages to. We reached out to students, their

PHOTO BY DARYL MARSHKE

families and their principals and counselors. The packet said that we had identified the student and would like to offer them the HAIL (High Achieving Involved Leader) Scholarship, which satisfies tuition at the university. Their application fee would be covered, the FAFSA is free to apply for financial aid and the fee for the profile—which is another financial aid document—would be covered as

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made sure that they were receiving the promise. This incoming class that will arrive with us in the fall will be the first incoming class to receive that promise.

Q A

And you have another program called Wolverine Pathways, correct?

We told them: Your job is to work hard. Get the best grades you can, be active and engaged. Let’s see if you can get admitted, and then we’ll take care of this other piece.

well. We told them: Your job is to work hard. Get the best grades you can, be active and engaged. Let’s see if you can get admitted, and then we’ll take care of this other piece. We had really good success in the first two years of the intervention with a marked increase in applications from the students that received the packet, relative to the students that didn’t receive the packet. In 2016, applications increased by 41% and in year two by 39%. That helped frame what became the Go Blue Guarantee. We spent more than a year on analysis to make sure we could set a standard dollar amount of aid that was sustainable over time. We didn’t want to put something out and have to change it. We were able to [cover tuition costs for students] at that median income level because we think that sends a powerful signal to the state. It is not a promise of admission, but it does take some of the sting away from students. We announced the guarantee about this time last year. We first took care of all of the current students on campus that qualified for the Go Blue Guarantee and

A team of folks from the university recognized that there was a disconnect between preparedness for the University of Michigan and the population that we had in our applicant pool. When we have students coming from differently resourced backgrounds, it’s difficult for all students to achieve at the same level. Our admissions process looks at students in context, so we don’t compare a student in a school that doesn’t have [advanced placement] classes and expect them to have AP classes on their transcript. That doesn’t make sense. Sometimes students need supplemental work to be successful here, even if they are the strongest student coming from their particular environment. The program starts in the seventh grade. It’s a rigorous commitment that’s meant to change the pipeline of students and increase the number of students from diverse backgrounds who are ready to apply to institutions like ours when they finally get to high school. [Editor’s note: Of the 89 high school seniors in the WP program, approximately 41 will be matriculating to University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and 27 to University of Michigan-Dearborn this fall.]

Let’s say you get these students prepared, and they’re accepted. Does the school see any remaining barriers for students to feel welcome in Ann Arbor? I’ve only passed through the town, and it seemed like night and day compared to the surrounding areas.

Night and day, you’re exactly right. I came from a really small town in Southeast Texas before I attended the University of Texas at Austin, and I had a gazillion and one episodes of culture shock going to this large, gilded flagship institution. Ann Arbor is very much in that same vein. It’s a wealthy campus, a wealthy community relative to the state at large. It looks and feels different. One of the things we’ve been very careful of as we ran the HAIL study that led us to the Go Blue Guarantee is to be thoughtful about some of these issues. When our first group of students came in, we ran focus groups and did research projects to ask them these questions: Tell us what was right and wrong about

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PHOTO BY MARTIN VLOET

the process. How are you feeling? Where are you disconnected? One student was walking on State Street, went into a store, saw a Canada Goose jacket and commented that it was $800. Her comment in this focus group was, “That’s more than my mom makes in a month.” It’s a coat, and they’re everywhere! It’s so different. We don’t want to be guilty of just changing the numbers on the front end, bringing more students in and changing our percentages. We also want to be very thoughtful about serving the students once they get here and developing communities for them. Some of them were very vocal with us the first year about where we were good at that and where we weren’t. We listened to them and created programming to make sure that we were supportive of them. One of those was the SuccessConnects program that’s meant to close the gaps. [We’re] measuring their retention rates: Are they moving through the university at the same pace as other students? Early data says that they are.

There are always gaps with students, but it’s not as significant as it could be, so we’re pleased that we’re making progress in that way.

Q A

A lot of these programs we’ve discussed are still new, but what have you learned so far?

From a marketing perspective, we’re trying to keep a lot of data on those things we can measure. In the spaces where we’ve used digital marketing, we’re watching the returns: Who’s looking at it? Who’s clicking through it? Who’s not? What are parents seeing? What are students looking at? We also reached out to parts of the state with specific traditional marketing pieces, ads and community bulletins to try to figure out the right way to get in. I came from a small town, and it really resonates with me that small communities tend to get their information from local news. We addressed some of the bigger digital media

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PHOTO BY DARYL MARSHKE

platforms, but we also have to think about the local advocate. [Local news outlets] might be willing to do a story for us. We’ve been thinking about our media presence more strategically. It can’t all just come from Ann Arbor because that alone will carry a [political association]. There has to be buy-in, and we have to make sure that people believe what we say, what we’re doing and how we can help them. The marketing will continue to change, and we’ll respond to what works. Applications are up at the university, but they’re also up in lower-income populations, and that’s what we’re looking for: Are the behaviors changing? Are they familiar with the Go Blue Guarantee? That whole notion of making sure this was sustainable for us resonates through a lot of our decisions. We’re in this for the long haul. It’s not going to change tomorrow, and we’re not going to claim success tomorrow. Even if we see [application] increases this year, this is a long-haul change in culture and behavior. m

We’ve been thinking about our media presence more strategically. It can’t all just come from Ann Arbor because that alone will carry a [political association].

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HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE MILLIONS:

THE RULES OF

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INFLUENCER MARKETING

Influencer marketing is potent and ascendant, growing stronger each year. How can marketers work with influencers while avoiding the miscues, failures and controversies that have marred other brands? BY HAL CONICK

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UNDER THE SUNLIGHT OF SOCIAL MEDIA, few strategies have blossomed like influencer marketing. But when used errantly, few strategies have the same capability to quickly wilt a brand. Influencer marketing is built to win consumer trust, especially when compared with traditional online ads. Consumers are blind at best and irritated at worst by pre-roll, pop-up and banner ads. Influencer marketing is less intrusive and more flexible than traditional online ads; it can be small and quiet, big and booming or somewhere in between. An influencer can be a teenage girl posting about her favorite hamburger joint to make a few bucks, or it can be reality star Kim Kardashian posting about a clothing line to make $500,000. Whether teenager or celebrity, influencers create and post ad-supported content to their own accounts, bypassing ad blockers and potentially popping into millions of social media feeds. Followers can block or unfollow individual influencers, but there’s no ad blocker for influencers as there is for traditional ads. But marketers see influencers as more than just a means to bypass ad blockers: They see influencers as a chance to engage with a new generation of consumers, people who have always had the option to skip, ignore or completely avoid ads. It’s unsurprising, then, that influencer marketing has grown with such vigor. In 2017, influencer posts grew by 198%, according to a survey by Klear. Another survey, the Association of National Advertisers’ April 2018 report “How ANA Members Are Using Influencer Marketing,” predicts that marketers will spend $101 billion on influencer campaigns in 2020, up from $81 billion in 2016. Despite marketers spending more on influencer marketing, it’s “still the Wild West,” says Karen Koslow, co-founder and managing partner of health and wellness influencer agency Wellness Amplified. “Brands don’t understand how to use it, but they

have everybody knocking on their door about it,” Koslow says. “The question is: Are we being smart?” Many marketers aren’t being smart, according to Nathan Michael, a Chicago-based influencer who also founded creative firm Low Res Agency. He says that many marketers seem to forget the purpose of influencer marketing—engaging, honest and authentic communication with potential customers—as soon as they adopt it. But in a market saturated with disingenuous ads, Michael says that winning brands will drop the pretense of one-to-many advertising and adopt the many-to-many communication of influencer marketing. This, he says, will authentically connect brands to their biggest fans. “Good marketing comes with knowing how to create a good relationship,” Michael says. “The best marketers understand that the human experience is all about connection. If you’re not thinking about how you’re connecting with people, your brand is probably not going to have a very big fingerprint in the world.” Most marketers understand how important authenticity and relationships are in influencer marketing. The ANA reports that 58% of brands worked with fewer than 25 influencers over the past year, which shows marketers’ desire for better relationships with influencers, the report says. But as Koslow said, many corners of influencer marketing still seem lawless, devoid of the ethics, principles and creativity that compose great marketing campaigns. “The issue for influencer marketing is there’s not enough strategy or discipline, and there’s too much people-chasing,” Koslow says. Some brands have fostered authentic connections while others have chased people—and their gigantic audiences—too hard, producing useful examples of successes and failures in influencer marketing. Stories of both can guide marketers toward ethical, creative and authentic influencer campaigns.

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THE LEGAL NECESSITY OF TRANSPARENCY

In 2014, Warner Bros. paid several YouTube personalities to review the video game “Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor.” The campaign reached millions of people, but led to the Federal Trade Commission investigating Warner Bros. before accusing the company of paying for reviews. Payment wouldn’t have been a problem if the influencers were transparent with viewers about the transaction, but the FTC said viewers received no notice that the reviewers’ opinions were paid, not impartial. Warner Bros. asked the reviewers to discuss the game positively and not show “bugs or glitches that may exist” or any “negative sentiment,” according to the FTC’s complaint. It’s unclear how much money, if any, the FTC fined Warner Bros. (the FTC did not respond to requests for comment regarding this case), but the commission publicly demanded that Warner Bros.’ future influencer campaigns follow the FTC’s sponsored content rules. That is, Warner Bros. can’t misrepresent an influencer marketing campaign as independent reviews, and it must disclose any material connections—money, products or otherwise—between the company and its influencers. The FTC clarified the reason for these rules in an online endorsement guide: “On a personal blog,

THE SIZE OF THE INFLUENCER*

MICRO-INFLUENCERS

MID-LEVEL INFLUENCERS

MACRO-INFLUENCERS

50 TO 25,000 FOLLOWERS

25,001 TO 100,000 FOLLOWERS

MORE THAN 100,000 FOLLOWERS

*ACCORDING TO THE ANA’S INFLUENCER REPORT.

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a social networking page, or in similar media, the reader might not realize that the reviewer has a relationship with the company whose products are being recommended. Disclosure of that relationship helps readers decide how much weight to give the review.” Koslow says that even if companies only send influencers small products or coupons in exchange for social posts, influencers must tell viewers they were compensated. Influencers can tell viewers with a hashtag (#ad, #Partner and #Thanks[brand] are all popular), a lead-in like “Sponsored:” or any other way that clarifies their relationship to the company. For example, some video influencers mention their ties to the company within the video or its description, while many bloggers lead their post with an italicized acknowledgment that they have been paid by a company.

INFLUENCERS SHOULD ACTUALLY USE YOUR PRODUCTS

Transparency appeases the FTC, but Koslow says that it also builds trust with followers. Trust is essential; the best influencer marketing trades on it. If a company or an influencer betrays that trust, the campaign may harm the reputation of both. “There are a lot of people out there who don’t care what the product is,” Koslow says. “As long as the price is right they’re taking it. But as a follower, you have to see whether you think somebody is a total shill versus someone who needs to make money but is still believable.” Koslow says that her clients always use a product before posting about it. As health and wellness professionals, their credibility is at stake each time they post a recommendation. She believes this should be a rule across influencer marketing. A 2012 Microsoft Windows 8 ad campaign gives an object lesson as to why it’s a bad idea to flout this rule. The $1.5 billion ad blitz for Microsoft’s new flagship operating system paid for endorsements from celebrities such as Gwen Stefani, Jessica Alba and Oprah Winfrey. Perhaps this was a good idea, but a tweet from Winfrey came across as disingenuous. “Gotta say love that SURFACE! Have bought 12 already for Christmas gifts. #FavoriteThings,” Winfrey tweeted in November 2012. Her laudatory post was marred by a big reveal in the top-right side of the tweet: Winfrey had sent this tweet from the Twitter app for Apple’s iPad, Microsoft’s biggest competitor. This was the worst-case scenario for both Winfrey

and Microsoft; she looked like a shill, and Microsoft looked like it couldn’t pay people to use its new operating system. Scenarios like this are why brands need to work with genuine influencers who actually use their products. When Low Res Agency’s Michael started as an influencer, he stuck to working with Chicago brands that he already liked, such as local bars, coffee shops and eyewear stores. Now that Michael runs Low Res Agency, he calls “natural fit” the most important part of an influencer campaign. Natural fit is what brands must find in influencers to avoid Oprah-Microsoft moments and to create content that resonates with followers. “Most brands don’t know how to authentically [find influencers] because they don’t have a person in the marketing department who is discerning enough to look at whether it’s actually a good partnership,” Michael says. “To see if this person has the same values or carries themselves aesthetically in the same way as we do is important when we’re considering a new partnership. Otherwise, it’s going to cause confusion with your followers, and it’s just going to be noise.”

GIVE CONSUMERS REAL INFORMATION

Even genuine posts can be noisy and baneful if they skirt rules or misinform followers. Kim Kardashian is perhaps the world’s most popular influencer—as of June 2018, she had 200 million followers across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram—and when she recommends a product, many of her followers listen. During Kardashian’s 2015 pregnancy, she touted the benefits of a morning sickness drug produced by pharmaceutical company Duchesnay. Soon after her post, the Food and Drug Administration accused her and the company of not disclosing the drug’s risks and limitations to her followers, a violation of FDA rules. Within a month, the FDA forced Duchesnay and Kardashian to post what Kardashian tagged as a “#CorrectiveAd” on Instagram. “I guess you saw the attention my last #morningsickness post received,” her post said before launching into 300 words of apologetic bafflegab. “The FDA has told Duchesnay, Inc., that my last post about Diclegis (doxylamine succinate and pyridoxine HCl) was incomplete because it did not include any risk information or important limitations of use for Diclegis,” the post continued. “A link to this information accompanied the post, but this didn’t meet FDA requirements. So, I’m re-posting and sharing this important information about Diclegis.” The post went on to cite risks and limitations of

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the drug, but it was quickly pushed down in her feed by posts about an MTV awards show. Corrective ads and similar posts make followers leery, and that’s a big reason why influencer campaigns need more than a hard sell. If trust and authenticity are the goals of influencer marketing, companies must give their consumers something both authentic and valuable. Regions Bank, named most successful brand with online influencers by Engagement Labs in 2018, gives value to its followers by hosting community and online events featuring influencers, according to Melissa Musgrove, head of social media at Regions Bank. These events—called “Real Talk” in-person and “Twitter parties” online—go beyond money and banking and into discussing leadership, career growth and financial education. Musgrove says these events feature influencers with varying audience sizes, from micro- to macroinfluencers, allowing the bank to engage with a variety of its customers. Micro-influencers may engage followers more easily in Twitter parties, while expert influencers who have a mid-level or macrosized audience may fill the seats at Real Talk events. For example, Regions often works with former NBA player Antoine Walker, who infamously lost more than $100 million after retiring. Walker has spoken about his financial hardships at multiple Regions Real Talk events, including a 2014 event in front of the University of Alabama football team. Although Musgrove says metrics for Twitter parties are positive and easy to track, measuring the value of the in-person Real Talk events can be difficult. However, Musgrove says she’s received good qualitative data about the in-person events. “Apart from measuring the campaign, I think these activities have a halo effect on the brand,” Musgrove says. “A lot of that is reflected [over the] long term in metrics like brand favorability.”

AVOID GIMMICKS

When Snickers launched its successful U.S.-based “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” campaign in the U.K., the company paid British celebrities to tweet about subjects they weren’t known to care about. Snickers’ goal was to grab the attention of the celebrities’ followers before cheekily revealing that the unusual tweets were a ruse to sell Snickers. Katie Price, a model who tends to tweet about entertainment and fashion, posted messages such as “Large scale quantitative easing in 2012 could distort liquidity of govt bond market. #justsayin” and “Great news about China’s latest GDP figures!!” After four geopolitical posts, Price posted a photo

of herself posing with a Snickers candy bar, tagging it “#spon.” This campaign surprised her followers, though perhaps not the way she or Snickers had hoped. Hollywood Branded, an influencer and content marketing company, says many of Price’s followers wondered if her account had been hacked before she revealed the tweets were part of an ad campaign. The tweets led the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority to open its first investigation of an influencer marketing campaign. The ASA ruled in favor of Mars, the parent company of Snickers, but their findings didn’t change the confusion that Price’s followers felt. The biggest problem may not have been that Snickers duped Price’s followers, but that Price failed to create content her followers could engage with. Instead of engaging her followers, Snickers was satisfied with making them feel like fools. A better way for brands to appeal to an influencer’s audience is to give the influencer creative control. Low Res Agency’s Michael says his personal favorite influencer campaign was with Grey Goose, which flew him and other influencers to France and gave them tours of its distillery. To Michael, this felt more like working with a friend than an overbearing creative director. “They just asked us to enjoy the experience, but obviously when you treat someone to a great experience, you’re going to want them to share it,” Michael says. “It felt very authentic in the sense that they weren’t trying to sell or advertise anything. They were just like, hey, this is our story. This is how we do things. This is how we think. It felt more like a good friendship than trying to sell something to somebody.” When companies create insincere or dishonest campaigns, like such as the Snickers U.K. campaign, people feel dubious. People know disingenuous piffle when they see it, and Michael says they’re more sensitive to it than ever before. “Advertising doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but when it becomes gimmicky, people can read that,” he says. Instead of being gimmicky, Michael suggests that brands use influencer marketing to tell authentic stories and collaborate with people who want to create content for a brand.

NUMBERS AREN’T EVERYTHING

When Kendall Jenner handed a police officer a can of pop as a peace offering amid a protest in a 2017 Pepsi commercial, an almost-audible gasp of mockery and disbelief emanated from social media users. This was not what Pepsi had hoped for; the ad was calling for

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peace during a time of social and political anger in the U.S. Perhaps Pepsi had hoped the commercial’s peace offering would reverberate through Jenner’s nearly 100 million social media followers (and, of course, sell some pop). Instead, the Jenner-Pepsi ad drew snide responses, such as one from Bernice King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter, who tweeted, “If only Daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi.” It also drew calls to boycott Pepsi; New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow tweeted that he’d be boycotting Pepsi until the company apologized, tagging the brand and attaching a list of its subsidiaries. Blow’s call for a Pepsi boycott was retweeted more than 1,600 times. Pepsi quickly pulled the commercial from air and apologized to both consumers and Jenner, saying, “Clearly we missed the mark, and we apologize. We did not intend to make light of any serious issue.” This may have been an instance of what Koslow calls “people-chasing.” Although marketers may be attracted to a celebrity’s huge audience, such influencers won’t work for every campaign. Sometimes, smaller is better. For example, a recent survey by Markerly found that Instagram influencers with fewer than 1,000 followers have a like rate of 8%, while influencers with more than 10 million followers have a like rate of 1.6%. Macro-influencers will inevitably draw more eyes to a campaign, but marketers must ask if they will be the right eyes. Without targeting, marketers who aim for audience size are simply practicing a new-fangled version of spray-and-pray marketing. Brands often think influencers with a larger following “must be doing something right,” Michael says, but a large following doesn’t guarantee a good fit. “It just means that they have a big number stamped on their name,” he says. Koslow says marketers who work on influencer campaigns often stop thinking strategically when they see a big follower count, believing that more is automatically better. But statistics suggest there is value in micro-influencers. Stakla’s “2017 Consumer Content Report: Influence in the Digital Age” reports that 60% of consumers are influenced to make purchases by family and friends, while 23% say their purchases are influenced by celebrities. “If somebody has 1,000 followers, most of them are their friends,” Koslow says. “Marketers have to be smarter; they can’t just chase the new shiny penny. They have to ask the smart questions, so they can weed out the players that are just trying to sell something versus someone who can be a strategic partner.”

HOW MARKETERS MEASURE INFLUENCER IMPACT ENGAGEMENT: Engagement measures the number of users who engage with a post. It’s the most popular way to measure influencer impact, used by 84% of brands. IMPRESSIONS: Impressions, or the number of times a post appears on a user’s screen, are used as a measure of influencer success by 64% of marketers. INCREASE IN BRAND AWARENESS, BRAND SENTIMENT AND BRAND PERCEPTION: Marketers measure influencer impact through brand awareness on social media (44%), brand sentiment (41%) and brand perception (29%). WEBSITE VIEWS: About 30% of marketers measure the number of visitors that influencers drive to the company or campaign website. Website views are often measured by giving influencers unique URLs to post. Similarly, 29% of marketers measure influencers by how many visitors they refer. ENGAGEMENT VELOCITY: If users quickly engage with a post, it has high velocity; 28% of marketers measure their influencer campaigns by watching the engagement velocity of influencer posts. INCREASE IN PURCHASE INTENT AND SALES: Purchase intent (20%) and sales (19%) are two ways marketers measure influencer impact. When it comes to tracking influencer sales, 44% of marketers use unique URLs, 33% use tracking pixels and 23% use coupon codes. DON’T KNOW: Four percent of marketers say they have no idea how to measure influencer campaigns. ALL STATS FROM THE ANA’S SURVEY REPORT ON HOW ANA MEMBERS ARE USING INFLUENCER MARKETING

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AVOID SLOPPINESS, EMBRACE REALNESS

When the line of genuine communication between influencers and their followers breaks, embarrassing moments tend to follow. In one memorable gaffe, reality star Scott Disick accidentally posted a note meant for his eyes only from protein powder manufacturer BooTea Shake. Disick posted a photo to his Instagram feed with the caption: “Here you go, at 4pm est, write the below Caption: Keeping up with the summer workout routine with my morning @booteauk protein shake!” In the photo, an intense-eyed Disick posed with a jar of BooTea Shake’s protein powder. Instead of coming off as a ringing endorsement, the photo looked akin to a paid pose with a fan at a reality TV convention.

This kind of sloppy disingenuousness is unhelpful for the brand and the influencer. Brands would be better served by looking for genuine reactions from celebrity influencers or organic responses from their own followers to post on the brand’s social media accounts. Regions Bank uses the latter, Musgrove says, and followers respond positively. Using stories from followers gives brands creative control— something BooTea Shake clearly wanted or needed in Disick’s case—but also allows brands to tell positive stories by people who love them. Musgrove’s favorite example was when a customer commented on Regions’ Facebook account, writing that she and her husband had taken out a loan from Regions to adopt a child. She thanked the bank for playing a role in completing their family. “What an amazing and powerful thing to be able to have had a

STATE OF THE INFLUENCER INDUSTRY According to Influencer Marketing Hub:

There was a

325% increase in searches for “influencer marketing” from 2016 to 2017.

For every $1 spent on influencer marketing, companies get

$7.65 in earned media value,

on average.

About

two-thirds of marketers say they will increase their influencer budget in the next 12 months. 3.6 million sponsored influencer posts; by the end of 2018, it’s predicted that there 24.2 million influencer posts.

In 2015, there were will be

The majority of marketers

(84%) say influencer marketing is effective; 55% say influencer marketing

brings in better customers.

In 2016,

335 new influencer marketing platforms and agencies opened. In 2017, 420 new influencer-related

platforms and agencies opened.

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hand in,” Musgrove says. “Our customers might not necessarily be passionate about Regions, and they might not be passionate about a checking account or a savings account, but they’re incredibly passionate about the life that our products and services enable them to live. We really want to capitalize on that.” Musgrove says stories like this create positive memories for followers and encourage others to share their stories. After posting the couple’s adoption story, Musgrove says that she received multiple stories from Regions Bank followers across the country. “We try to tell their stories in bigger ways,” Musgrove says. “It’s a very organic influencer strategy and it requires listening and following up.”

FORM LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS WITH INFLUENCERS

You can’t please everyone on social media, but Musgrove says that you can radiate a pleasing image by building relationships with reliable influencers. As many of the above examples show, it’s easy for companies to have miscues and errors when they match with the wrong influencer. When Regions was planning to use influencer marketing in 2012, “horror stories” scared Musgrove and Regions, making them conservative in their approach to partnering with influencers. “Some brands came with good intentions but forged some … partnerships with influencers who became not so positive reflections on the brand,” Musgrove says. “That’s why we’ve been so passionate about finding influencers and aligning ourselves with people who we think have good stories to tell and … that we would want to represent our brand.” More brands are now taking a long-term approach to influencer marketing; 62% of brands compensate influencers as brand ambassadors or partners rather than one-time contractors, according to the ANA’s influencer report. Michael says that longterm relationships with influencers cultivate more creativity, better collaboration and increasing credibility for brands. “The partnerships that I’ve enjoyed the most are [with brands] who want to create something interesting together, where we’re like-minded,” he says. “I think that’s the biggest takeaway: Brands should try to find ways to work with people whom they want to create great work with. The goal should always be creating better work or better opportunities.” m

FINDING INFLUENCERS WORKING WITH AN AGENCY: An agency can serve as a matchmaker between brands and influencers. Agencies often work with brands on their objectives and have a roster of influencer clients to meet a campaign’s needs. The agency passes information, including the creative brief, between the brand and the influencer, ensuring both sides are happy and ensuring influencers are paid. The ANA’s survey on influencer marketing reports that 87% of marketers with influencer campaigns use an influencer-specific company. VETTING INFLUENCERS IN-HOUSE: This is likely the most time-intensive way to find influencers, as it requires a marketing or social media department dedicated to finding, reaching agreements with and paying influencers. However, some brands—such as L’Oréal and Sephora—run successful in-house influencer programs. The ANA’s survey reports that 29% of companies say their marketing team is the primary manager of the company’s influencer campaigns, followed by 21% who say that their social media and community management teams manage influencers. USING A PLATFORM: More influencer platforms pop up each year, but most perform the same basic function: Brands can search the platform’s database and reach out to influencers to vet them, discuss content and negotiate fees. The influencer platform serves a similar role to the agency, but likely leaves more creative work to be done by the brand.

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career advancement

SKILLS

The Skills Marketers Need to Thrive in the Era of AI BY ALICE OH

 alice@marketproinc.com

rtificial intelligence has been a trending topic for quite some time, and its use is on the rise in every industry. According to a report by Salesforce, 51% of marketing leaders state that they currently use AI in some way, with 27% planning to start using it in the next two years. As AI continues to grow, it will progressively impact how our society functions and transform the way we work. As with any transformative technology, AI has marketing professionals on their toes, leaving them to wonder about the fate of their jobs. Should you anticipate a massive disruption by AI threatening the security of your job? Marketers, have no fear: AI isn’t going to replace you or any of your colleagues just yet. AI is incredibly advanced, but it is not sophisticated enough to master human IQ and emotional intelligence. We haven’t yet experienced the full potential of AI, but as it comes to fruition, it will need the support of humans, and it will compel marketers to build their expertise. While AI may replace a few routine marketing functions, it will create new roles and transform the role of the modern marketing expert. Here’s how to embrace the future of marketing with AI and ramp up your skills to evolve alongside it. Embrace AI with Open Arms To develop skills suited to support AI, you must first understand its current and potential uses. AI can automate repetitive tasks and sort massive amounts of data. From analyzing which type of content resonates with a specific persona to curating the content all on its own, AI is incredibly proficient at providing deep insights into consumers and optimizing workflows. By automating redundant

work, AI gives humans the opportunity to craft sophisticated strategies and prioritize meaningful tasks. The best way to survive the AI shift is to embrace its strengths and how it complements your capabilities. By understanding the limitations and possibilities of AI, you can understand how it will change and enhance your work. Become Fluent in Analytics and Data AI makes marketing tasks more efficient by enhancing data-driven decisionmaking. Marketers are now better able to identify their target consumer and understand the consumer’s needs. AI is well-equipped to manage and sort data. It identifies insights, predicts patterns and highlights valuable relationships that humans may miss. However, the data AI delivers needs to be translated by a human. Marketers must understand analytics and interpret the outputs to drive meaningful connections and actions, which will allow them to understand consumer behavior and motivations. You Can’t Put a Price on Emotional Intelligence The continuous integration of AI into the customer-centric world changes how consumers interact with and purchase from brands. This type of technology drives customer demands and expectations higher, forcing marketers to deliver better experiences. AI provides social insights that allow you to deliver messages across various channels based on customer behavior. However, it falls short of the emotional capacity needed to genuinely connect with consumers. AI lacks the

competence to understand context along the customer journey. Different factors, such as location and culture, significantly impact customer journey and experience, most of which are only possible for humans to intimately understand. Human empathy and emotional intelligence (EQ) allow us to understand the consumer and tailor content for a highly personalized journey and experience better than AI can. A combination of sophisticated analytical skills and EQ empowers marketers to use AI to target their core customers in ways that weren’t possible just a few years ago. Unparalleled Creativity Cannot Be Simulated Consumers expect more than just a great

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SKILLS

product or service from a brand. They want to connect with the company, and they expect an incredible, seamless buying experience. This experience creates loyalty and repeat business. Nothing can connect to the emotions and feelings of a human better than another human. AI allows humans to focus on creative work and other tasks machines canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do. If you have a unique, creative mindset to complement sharp technical skills, your competence is unmatched by any transformative technology.

requires. Marketers who continuously learn, expand their skills and evolve alongside technology will always be able to survive. AI will always need human input to maximize its value. Marketers must learn many new technical skills to get ahead. Doing so will help you speak the language of AI and deliver more value as a marketer. The best marketers use innovative technologies to enhance their skills and results for their employers.

Lifelong Learning Is a Must toÂ Survive AI will decrease the amount of effort and time marketers spend on day-today tasks, but it can never replace the human touch successful marketing

at MarketPro, Inc. She writes about

ALICE OH is a digital marketing specialist

career advancement

If you have a unique, creative mindset to complement sharp technical skills, your competence is unmatched by any transformative technology.

transformation and trends that occur in digital marketing. She is intrigued by the rapid integration of technology in marketing and is always eager to learn about the latest developments.

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AMA Recruitment Classified Advertising Need to hire qualified, skilled marketing professionals? Looking for qualified marketing or business professors for your University? AMA’s Recruitment Classified Ads are the most cost effective way to reach your target audience!

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POSITIONS OPEN ACADEMIC FACULTY TENURE TRACK POSITION, TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY — The Department of Marketing in the Mays Business School, Texas A&M University, invites applications from candidates for two tenure-track positions. The positions are at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor, starting in Fall 2019. Applications will be considered from all areas of specialization in marketing, but candidates must possess an earned PhD at the time of appointment (or commencement of duties). The Associate Professor position is primarily for candidates with expertise in consumer behavior. All candidates are expected to be committed to teaching and research of the highest quality. In addition to publishing to leading journals, the successful candidates will be expected to teach undergraduate and graduate courses, participate in all aspects of

the department’s activities; and serve the profession. The Summer AMA conference in Boston, MA offers the opportunity for initial interviews and/or exploratory conversations. The Mays Business School and our department offer an excellent research environment, with a collegial culture, active senior faculty, productive junior faculty colleagues, access to key databases, a state-of-theart behavioral research lab, a teaching load of three courses per year, which continues after tenure for highly productive faculty, and relationships with worldclass research faculty in related disciplines. Housed within the Department of Marketing is the internationally recognized Center for Retailing Studies (CRS) that serves as a bridge between the academic and retailing communities; exciting opportunities exist for research with CRS member companies. The Department also is a major player in sales education and research through the Professional Selling Initiative (PSI), with 11 partner companies. PSI’s education and research mission is aligned closely with a broad range of scholars focusing on marketing strategy. For more information about Texas A&M University, the Mays Business School, and our department, please visit our website: http://www.mays.tamu.edu. Assistant Professor position: EXTERNAL APPLICANTS: If you currently are NOT a Texas A&M System employee please click below to go to our external career site to view our jobs. Go to External Career Site – https://tamus. wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/ TAMU_External Search for R-007887 or click Apply INTERNAL APPLICANTS: If you currently ARE a Texas A&M System employee. Go to Internal Career Site — https://jobs.tamu.edu/ internal-applicants/ Search for R-007887 or click Apply Associate Professor

position: EXTERNAL APPLICANTS: If you currently are NOT a Texas A&M System employee please click below to go to our external career site to view our jobs. Go to External Career Site — https://tamus. wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/ TAMU_External Search for R-007889 or click Apply INTERNAL APPLICANTS: If you currently ARE a Texas A&M System employee. Go to Internal Career Site — https://jobs.tamu.edu/ internal-applicants/ Search for R-007889 or click Apply Please include the following with your application: a cover letter and a C.V that includes: 1) research/publication record; 2) indicators of teaching activity/ effectiveness; 3) work and other experience. Texas A&M University is an Equal Opportunity/ Affirmative Action/Veterans/ Disability Employer committed to diversity. MARKETING MANAGEMENT ASSISTANT MARKETING MANAGER, OnStar GCCX Brand Integration, General Motors, Detroit, MI. Plan, identify & develop OnStar GCCX marketing, media & content strategies, analytics, & brand integration (incldg leads, sentiment & engagement) opportunities incldg OnStar service packages such as customized packages, offers & promotions, & printed & electronic brand content, for psgr vehicle brands & countries (U.S., Can, Mex, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, MiddleEast & Australia) to increase owner awareness, engagement, retention & loyalty to OnStar infotainment & vehicle brands. Improve alignment & relationships of OnStar infotainment services with Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC & Buick brand marketing dept goals &brand performance. Improve OnStar sales & marketing performance through brand integration. Prepare & issue monthly

operational reports on glide path actuals & forecasts of KPIs of OnStar Service Packages sales & churn. Support brand goals for sales, loyalty & customer satisfaction. Innovate ways to enhance the brand technology image. Create OnStar content to be relevant & create a delighted customer for OnStar & GM brands. Create & implement marketing initiatives across all media incldg email/direct mail, call center, digital, social, Public Relations, promotional & experiential. Master, Strategic Communications, Integrated Marketing Communications, or Marketing. 24 mos exp as Global or Regional Manager, Social Media Strategy and Operations, Social Media and Customer Relationship Management, Marketing, or related, planning, identifying & dvlpg vehicle & Call Center or infotainment Customer Experience marketing strategy & analytics for psgr vehicle brands &countries to increase owner awareness, engagement, retention & loyalty in vehicle brands. Mail resume to Ref#101-310, GM Global Mobility, 300 Renaissance Center, MC: 482-C32-C66, Detroit, MI 48265.

POSITIONS WANTED FREELANCERS AVAILABLE QUANTITATIVE & QUALITATIVE SERVICES: Combinations of primary and secondary research and BI designed to deliver actionable results including strategic planning. Research methodology, survey and interview design, in-depth interviews, online surveys, hybrid methodologies, max diff, conjoint, and other multivariate techniques, data processing and data entry. Focus on pharmaceuticals (HCP, patients), medical device & large government contractors. Available for on-site consulting. Please call 770.614.6334.

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ON THE RECORD

Marketing Higher Education Requires Continuous Education Ologie’s Bill Faust celebrates the purpose-driven nature of collegiate marketing BY SARAH STEIMER | STAFF WRITER

exclusively on higher education. They find their work with other industries helps strengthen their collegiate marketing. “Higher ed can be somewhat insular, so we make sure we are looking elsewhere for inspiration and in fact maintain a healthy percentage of our business with clients outside of higher ed for the same reason,” he says.

You didn’t always work in higher-education marketing. What drew you to the field?

 ssteimer@ama.org arketing News spoke with Bill Faust, senior partner and chief strategy officer at Ologie, who has watched a growing

career advancement

sense of urgency emerge in higher education as colleges continue to embrace branding and marketing. Faust and Ologie don’t work

In 2006, we were invited to work with a small liberal arts college after it saw some of our work. So we didn’t find higher ed, it found

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career advancement

ON THE RECORD

us. We really loved every aspect of the project, but what probably drew us in was the purpose-driven nature of the college. It was about more than recruiting kids to meet a class quota. It was about finding the students who would do best at that particular school and how the experience would transform their lives. It wasn’t transactional. It was purposeful. The work was full of nuance and layers and the college was willing to dive deep with us to craft their story. At that point, we fell in love with higher-ed marketing.

What differences did you notice between your previous jobs and working with colleges?

First would be the pace. Compared to retail, banking or even health care, higher ed moves much slower. It still frustrates us today, but we have learned to adjust, and it is changing. Over the past 10 years, higher ed has embraced branding and marketing more, and with that has come a greater sense of urgency. The second thing is the amount of consensus-building that is required. We see that as a good thing because people support what they help create. We always plan on more time to do research, listen, socialize ideas and build consensus over a broad group of stakeholders.

How do you keep yourself abreast of changes in higher education as they relate to your job?

We do the obvious things like read the trade press, attend conferences and webinars and follow thought leaders and pundits in higher ed. We learn a lot from our clients because no two schools are alike. They are all doing different things—not just in marketing, but in research, teaching and even student experience. We also invest time looking outside of higher ed at trends, new developments and technologies.

Your particular role focuses on research and strategy. How does that expertise help with the enrollment challenges that schools are facing today?

Research is critical to help answer key questions about an institution’s best fit students and how best to engage with them. Schools can no longer afford to cast a wide net and hope for the best. They need to be very targeted to find students who will be aligned to their story. Our strategy articulates the key messages of what a school offers, why it matters and then the right set of tactics for how to ultimately reach prospective students.

I can’t imagine it’s easy telling schools that have been around for more than 100 years that they need to make some changes. How do you present uncomfortable research findings to colleges that are emotionally attached to their brands?

Schools can no longer afford to cast a wide net and hope for the best. They need to be very targeted to find students who will be aligned to their story.

It’s not that hard, really, if you build a relationship that’s based on trust. Most of our clients understand that higher ed needs to change, to adapt and to do things differently. I think they are more open-minded than they used to be. But it does pay to make recommendations about change in the most objective way possible and back them up with solid research. We try to be strategic partners, rather than vendors. That means being unafraid to share the truth and realities of today’s education market.

Do you have any advice for marketers working in higher education?

Be patient. Be thoughtful. Work with schools, not for them. And take the long view: Higher ed isn’t going away, but it is changing, and you can either fight that change or be a positive influence on it. m

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advertisers’index

ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Quick source for contacting the suppliers in the August 2018 issue of Marketing News. 2018 AMA Symposium for the

AMA Foundation Awards ............................... pp. 16-19

Marketing of Higher

URL: http://ama.marketing/Scholarships18

Education / ConnectED . ......................................... p. 5 URL: h ttp://ama.marketing/highered2018 2018 AMA Nonprofit Marketing Conference / Thank You to Sponsors and Exhibitors ......................................... p. 7 URL: h ttp://ama.marketing/nonprofit18 Advanced School of Marketing Research . ...................................................... back cover

http://ama.marketing/CollegiateAwards18 Currently Open Calls for Nominations: URL: http://ama.marketing/HEMY18 http://ama.marketing/MarketingEducation18 http://ama.marketing/AndersonAward18 AMA Marketing Week ..................... inside back cover URL: http://ama.marketing/mw2018 AMA Marketing Week Live Conference ............................... inside front cover

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AMA Digital Marketing

AMA’s Marketing Resource

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#OfficeGoals A peek inside the marketers’ offices that make us drool

SIMILARWEB The offices of tech company SimilarWeb are spread out over two floors in the Azrieli Sarona Tower in the heart of Tel-Aviv, Israel, an area that combines historical preserved structures and modern skyscrapers. Studio Roy David designed the space to accommodate the large company while emphasizing the unification and collaboration of employees who were previously split among three nonconsecutive floors. “The design concept was a direct derivative of the company’s values: the search for a topological structure that exists in nature where a synchronous movement takes place between many objects without being able to identify what or who leads the movement,” says Roy David, architect and owner of RDS. Hangout areas are scattered throughout both floors and are easily recognized due to the acoustic elements hung from the ceiling that resemble a flock of birds. Elements such as the colorful wood and wool acoustic ceiling tiles emphasize the “swarm concept” in their composition. Design: Studio Roy David

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