Marketing News: November/December 2016 by Molly Soat

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

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NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016

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VOL. 50 | NO. 10 Cover: Photograper: Colleen Durkin. Hair and makeup: Jenna Baltes. Wordrobe: Courtney Rust. Model: Megan Marie Lynch.

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

Valarie Zeithaml Chairperson of the AMA Board 2016-2017 Russ Klein, AMA Chief Executive Officer rklein@ama.org Andy Friedman, AMA Chief Content Officer afriedman@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 Zach Brooke, Staff Writer zbrooke@ama.org Hal Conick, Staff Writer hconick@ama.org Sarah Steimer, Staff Writer ssteimer@ama.org Vince Cerasani, Associate Art Director vcerasani@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 July/August and November/December 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. 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.org, 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.

38 30

FEATURES

DEPARTMENTS

MARKETING MANAGEMENT

38 Fumbling the Mascot

20 Price Strategy

A decade ago, the NCAA challenged collegiate athletic programs’ Native American symbols, imagery and nicknames. These schools have fought to rebrand in a way that endears both students and alumni.

46 Minding the Mindset List A collection of facts compiled by a trio of researchers at a small Midwestern liberal arts college, known as the Mindset List, has become a map toward the future of marketing.

52 Winning the Lottery An exploration of how immigrant marketers become American marketers through the H-1B visa.

the buzz

Seen on AMA.org

snapshot

Social Media

10 core concepts

Advertising Ethics

12 the middle market Business Services

16 scholarly insights

Customer Lifetime Value

18 seven sages

Global Markets

76 10 minutes with

Cofounders of Los York

87 ama careers Résumé Tips

91 ama community 4 Under 40

92 backpage

CMO of Barnes and Noble College

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24 Customer Relations

When brands break customers’ trust and exhibit malicious selfinterest, it’s the relationship between the customer and society that suffers, says Lawrence Crosby.

26 At C-level

Michael Krauss reviews Don Tapscott’s new book, Blockchain Revolution.

30 Consumer Engagement Marketers must take a less-is-more approach to win consumers’ attention, according to J. Walker Smith.

34 Insight by Experimentation

Gordon Wyner explains how behavioral economics can give marketers vital insights into purchase intent.

Reprints in quantity are available by contacting Kristy Snyder at Sheridan Reprints: (717) 632-3535.

Rice University’s Vikas Mittal weighs in on how to raise prices without scaring off customers.

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thebuzz LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Educate Yourself

e cover a lot of niche markets in Marketing News: pet pharmaceuticals, wind turbines and marijuana, to name a few. But perhaps one of the most nuanced niches we cover is the marketing of higher education institutions. Marketers must reach prospective students as well as discerning parents and alumni (in other words, donors). To best market to those prospective students, you have to have a good idea of what they’re thinking. Professors and researchers at Beloit College in Wisconsin saw an opportunity in 1998 to gain insight into the minds of incoming students when they created the Beloit College Mindset List—a compilation of cultural facts that allows professors to understand the frame of mind of incoming freshmen. Staff writer Zach Brooke traveled to Beloit College to discuss how the Mindset List went from a teaching tool to a marketing stalwart. “In some ways, the bonds of generational status and worldview transcend the most historically significant dividers such as language,

ethnicity and class. Once in a while, this looming uniformity will pop up in the Mindset List,” Brooke writes. Staff writer Sarah Steimer explores how colleges across the country have dealt with one of the most challenging higher-ed marketing curveballs: eliminating racist university mascots and essentially creating a new college brand identity from scratch. “When [a] community is stripped of its collective imagery, it presents the institution with the great challenge of rallying the troops under a new banner,” writes Steimer. “With the emotional connection that so many students form with their school, changing the mascot is akin to Disney dropping Mickey Mouse. That is, if Mickey were also offensive to an entire people and culture.” Sometimes the challenge is not enrolling students, but keeping them. Staff writer Hal Conick spoke with international marketing students who have fought to keep working in the U.S. after their college ends. To do so, they need the luck of the draw. “Coinflip odds to stay stateside [come] via the H-1B, a non-immigrant visa that allows foreigners to work in the

U.S. for three years,” Conick explains. “It’s not easy to be an international marketer attempting to secure a U.S. visa, which is ‘won’ via a lottery.” It begs the question: What good are top U.S. marketing schools when we don’t get to keep the marketers?

MOLLY SOAT Editor in Chief @MollySoat

CONTRIBUTORS

COLLEEN DURKIN

RAND FISHKIN

MARY HINESLY

As a photographer, Durkin has a wide range of commercial and editorial clients from Nike to Nylon. Based in Chicago but deeply rooted in all things everywhere, her photography and luminous spirit can be experienced around the globe.

Fishkin is the cofounder of SEO consultancy Moz and content curation site Inbound.org, and was named one of Bloomberg Businessweek’s Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs.

Hinesly is a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, where her research focuses on business history and social media. She holds a Ph.D from the University of Grenoble, France.

MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016

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Kantar Retail Data Compares Walmart, Kohl’s, Target and Kmart Shoppers

recent Business Insider article pulled back the curtain on shoppers across four prominent retail chains. Using survey data from respected market research and retail insights business Kantar Retail, the article compared consumers of Walmart, Target, Kmart and Kohl’s. Here’s what they found, along with recent news about each company.

Walmart Have we hit peak Walmart? Reports from its annual Investment Community Meeting held in October suggest that we might have, at least in one sense, while the next chapter in the company’s history is only starting to unfold. The retail giant announced a 5% reduction in capital expenditures in 2017 compared to this year, and plans to open fewer than 60 new stores throughout the country, including 35 Supercenters, 20 Neighborhood Markets and four Sam’s Clubs. It’s a big drop from the 130 stores opening this year (lower than its initial estimate of 135 to 155) and a bigger drop from the 230 stores opened two years ago. This is not to be taken as a sign of distress for Walmart. Instead, it’s a shift in strategy. According to Kantar Retail’s Laura Kennedy and Timothy Campbell, Walmart expects new growth to be driven by revenue gains at existing storefronts, as well burgeoning e-commerce operations. Its high-profile acquisition of Jet.com in August looks to be a crucial cog in a robust digital strategy moving forward. According to Walmart CEO Doug McMillion, “This company, over time, is going to look like more of an e-commerce company.”

According to Kantar Retail’s ShopperScape, the average Walmart customer is a 51-year-old female with an annual household income of $56,482. Interestingly, that number exceeds the U.S. median household income by $4,500, as measured by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2013, which goes against the perception of Walmart as a low-end discount chain. Eighteen percent of Walmart shoppers earn more than $100,000 per household annually. And Walmart shoppers, as a whole, actually earn more than Kmart shoppers.

Kohl’s Joining Walmart in the race to digitize is Kohl’s, which recently rolled out its own independent mobile payment platform, Kohl’s Pay. Unlike Walmart’s mobile payment system, however, Kohl’s Pay only allows users to make charges to its private

label credit card, Kohl’s Charge. There are more than 25 million active Kohl’s Charge cards in circulation, which are used by some of the company’s most fervent enthusiasts. Close to 60% of Kohl’s sales are made using the cards. Kohl’s also recently announced it had purchased a 937,000-square-foot facility in Plainfield, Indiana, which will become its fifth e-commerce distribution center. Per Kantar data, the Wisconsinbased department store chain boasts the wealthiest shoppers overall. The average Kohl’s shopper comes from a household earning $69,442 annually, just ahead of Target customers. Close to 30% of Kohl’s shoppers live in $100,000+ annual income households. All five chains are dominated by both white and female consumers, but none so much as Kohl’s, with a base that is 75% white and close to 80% female.

NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

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Target In contrast to Walmart and Kohl’s, Target is thinking small in terms of store size. The company will open 32 “flex-format” stores occupying less than 50,000 square feet each by the end of 2016 and plan for at least 16 more in 2017. The smaller stores allow Target to operate in condensed urban areas with high rent prices, where typical big-box stores are unfeasible. Along with size deviation, the stores will abandon cookie-cutter product offerings in favor of specialty inventories that are customized to the surrounding neighborhood. One example, cited by Bloomberg, is the chain’s new Tribeca store in New York City, which focuses on baby and kids merchandise in an effort to appeal to the family-dense surrounding population.

MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016

Urban centers are also heavily populated by one of Target’s key demographics: millennials. Target shoppers were found to be, on average, 46 years old, and pulling in close to $69,000 per household

every year. Target owes its younger average shopper to millennials, who shop at the chain in greater numbers than anywhere else measured by Business Insider. More than 30% of Target’s customers are millennials,

a number that exceeds closest competitor Kmart by roughly half a dozen percentage points. Target is also the category leader in the next youngest cohort, Generation X.

Kmart What Kmart shoppers look like is far from the biggest question surrounding the 177-year-old retailer. For months, if not longer, there have been rumblings that the brand was not long for this world. Sixty-eight stores have closed this year, and it recently announced 64 more closures were coming by 2017. “Big Three” credit rating agency Fitch Ratings identified Kmart’s parent company, Sears Holding Corporation, as being at a high risk of default in the next 12 to 24 months. Sears Holdings Corporation CEO Eddie Lampert tried to put some of the rumors to rest in a blog post published in October, where he offered an emphatic defense of Kmart. “I also wanted to comment on the frequent false and exaggerated claims surrounding our Kmart business,” wrote Lampert. “Recent

reports have suggested that Kmart will cease its operations. I can tell you that there are no plans and there have never been any plans to close the Kmart format. In fact, we’ve been working hard to make Kmart a more fun, engaging place to shop, powered by our integrated retail innovations and Shop Your Way. To report or suggest otherwise is irresponsible and is likely intended to do harm to our company to the benefit of those who seek to gain advantage from posting these inaccurate reports.” Still, the Kantar data for Kmart is notable in several respects. First, Kmart has the highest percentage of Hispanic and African-American shoppers (15% and 14% of all customers, respectively). Second, it’s tied with Walmart for the highest percentage of male shoppers (just under 25% of all customers), and second only to Target in the highest percentage of millennial shoppers. Most ominously, it also claims shoppers with the lowest household income of any chain measured in the article at $55,006. —ZACH BROOKE

NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

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Healthcare.gov Takes a Datadriven Approach to 2017 Open Enrollment Campaign

he Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released details about its outreach campaign strategy for the 2017 open enrollment period, which started Nov. 1, in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. Kevin Counihan, HealthCare.gov CEO, said in a press release on the upcoming campaign effort that the organization is running a data-driven program to better target eligible consumers, using best practices gleaned from the previous three years. The agency says improvements to mobile optimization will allow

MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016

consumers to click straight from their phone or tablet to complete the application, compare options,

determine if a doctor is in network or select a plan. The CMS is also planning to grow its e-mail outreach component, as HealthCare.gov’s e-mail list has grown by more than 30% since the start of last year’s open enrollment period. The agency expects this effort to reach young adults, considering this demographic is twice as likely to enroll in response to e-mail outreach, compared to older consumers. The CMS learned in 2015 that simply reminding people via e-mail about their eligibility for financial assistance boosted enrollment rates by 17%, compared to e-mails without this information. E-mails that informed returning consumers of increased costs in their current plan and suggesting they shop around to review their options increased active renewal rates by 279%. —SARAH STEIMER

NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

snapshot

SOCIAL MEDIA

Old Georgetown, New Stories Georgetown University struck social media gold by letting students become Snapchat storytellers BY HAL CONICK | STAFF WRITER

 hconick@ama.org Goal There’s something illusory about marketing materials given to prospective university students. Shiny pages featuring shiny smiles with shiny white teeth in the foreground, cloudless blue skies in the background and copy that promises fun times today and bright futures tomorrow. But is this actually what the college atmosphere is like? What, exactly, do students do all day? Prospective students want genuine answers to important questions about where to spend their college years. Action To answer these questions, Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown University launched Georgetown Stories, a first-person video series curated by Georgetown students. The campaign, which launched its third year at the end of September, altered the school’s entire social media strategy,

MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016

according to Laura Wilson, director of digital engagement and social media at Georgetown University. Beginning in 2014, the social media campaign followed 12 students, who filmed their experiences across the hilly campus. Videos were posted on popular platforms such as Facebook and Twitter using the hashtag #GeorgetownStories. Initially, the goal was to keep a connection with donors and alumni. However, there was a more lucrative group to target: incoming freshmen. This year, the campaign follows 16 Georgetown students from the mundane events of college life—studying at the library at 2 a.m., doing laundry and walking around campus—to fun, and sometimes once-in-a-lifetime, events— attending football games, on-campus concerts and events with U.S. Olympic gold-medal winners.

As quick-hitting videos on Snapchat and in-the-moment photos on Instagram gained cultural clout, the campaign shifted its goal toward attracting prospective students with “a first-person, raw perspective” ethos. This is done in the hopes of a Georgetown student sharing a story that allows a potential Georgetown Hoya to feel a connection to life on campus. Georgetown Stories’ transition to a younger audience occurred naturally, Wilson says, as high school and college students are heavy users of Snapchat, an app with a monthly active user base of 800 million. “All the evidence was that typical prospective undergrad students in the U.S., meaning high school-age students, were spending a ton of time on Snapchat,” Wilson says. “A lot of schools were not really leveraging it yet. We thought this was a good opportunity to do something different.” Approximately 23% of Snapchat’s user base, or 184 million, is composed of kids between the ages of 13 and 17, according to Statista. This is the demographic Georgetown Stories is targeting. However, the vast majority of Snapchat users, 37% (296 million), are between 18 and 24 years old, the age range of the Georgetown students telling the stories of life on campus. This, in a big way, has expanded the target audience and led

SOCIAL MEDIA

to much of the Georgetown community following the hashtag. Students were natural social storytellers for the school’s target audience, Wilson says, as the campaign was already “almost exactly the behavior people take on Snapchat.” In fact, shooting video and taking pictures in this way is likely how many millennials and members of Generation Z communicate in their free time. Snapchat users watch 10 billion videos per day, according to Bloomberg, with approximately a half-hour per day spent on average on the app by users, Business Insider reports. “That’s what they do anyway,” Wilson says, adding that they likely give Georgetown Stories videos a different lens for public consumption than they would with friends. “We just asked them to make sure they take an extra minute and capture something [at events], but 99% of the time it’s something the student is doing anyway. We want it to be authentic to the person.” Wilson’s team hunted for a Snapchat dashboard to help them gather data. They adopted Mish Guru, a tool that measures analytics, allows Snapchat stories to be scheduled and manages user-generated content on the app. In turn, Snapchat has become central to the Georgetown Stories campaign. Thomas Harding, co-founder of Mish Guru, says Snapchat can be a blessing and a curse for marketers. Snapchat stories bring gaudy engagement rates, sometimes north of 75%, but most marketers can’t measure or track followers. With analytics in place, he says Georgetown Stories learned which Snapchat stories followers enjoyed and which they skipped. By controlling which pieces of student-generated content go up as a story, Harding says the university gains the advantage of “being authentic, peer-endorsed and truly crowd-sourced.” “That’s especially important when communicating with audiences known to be distrustful of traditional advertising,” Harding says. “They might not trust an ad telling them something is good, but they’ll trust one of their

peers endorsing that same message.” While Snapchat is the engine that drives Georgetown Stories, it is not the sole focus. Georgetown’s social team and storytellers have spread content across Instagram posts, Pinterest pins, Spotify playlists and YouTube videos. On the world’s most popular social network, Facebook, Georgetown Stories has become a screening area for alumni, as well as parents of current and prospective students. Wilson says parents are very engaged and prominent in Facebook comments since 42% of Facebook users are now 40 and older, according to Statista. “The parents have a huge influence in deciding where their child goes to school,” Wilson says. “In many cases, they are either the sole funder of their experience or are paying for a good portion of their child’s education.

UNIVERSITY

Georgetown University HEADQUARTERS

Washington, D.C. FOUNDED

1789 2015 POOLED ENDOWMENT

$1.5 billion RESULTS

A 6.2% increase in early applications; 2,007% increase in engaged Instagram users in the campaign’s first year, 162% in the second year; 348% increase in engaged Facebook users in the first year, 105% increase in the second year; 164,752 total Snapchat views during the 2015-2016 academic year.

snapshot

It makes a huge difference to have parents engaged from the standpoint of prospective students.” A quick scroll through Facebook video comments will show many proud alumni (“My lovely Georgetown <3” and “Missing my second home”) and even prouder parents (“You are growing so much already!” and “Pretty sure my Hoya just touched the [Olympic gold] medal”). “They probably learn more about what their student is doing watching videos and things than they do from their child,” Wilson says, laughing as she recalls her own college-aged parental coyness. “The parent engagement is really important. That’s a really active demographic on Facebook.” Results The first two years of Georgetown Stories has paid huge dividends. The focused goal of targeting the incoming freshman class led to 7,027 students sending in early applications in 2015, a recordbreaking number for Georgetown. This is up from 6,840 in 2014 and 6,624 in 2013. This increase does not correlate entirely to the student-generated content of the campaign, of course, but Wilson says she believes much of the surge in applications can be tied to the increased engagement with prospective students. Perhaps the most telling success metrics from the campaign came after its first year on social media, as the school saw a 2,007% increase of engaged users on Instagram and a 348% increase of engaged users on Facebook. While the second year of social growth wasn’t quite as large, it was still sizable: Instagram saw a 162% increase in engaged users and Facebook saw a 105% increase in engaged users. So far, Wilson says the adoption of Mish Guru has paid off, as the analytic dashboard shows a total of 165,000 Snapchat story views during the 20152016 academic year. This means the tool and Snapchat will continue to play a big role in the campaign in coming years, Wilson says. “We stumbled upon some magic here, but the future of the project will only continue to evolve,” she says. m NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

coreconcepts

ADVERTISING ETHICS

Campaigning Against the Competition How and when to go after rivals in your marketing BY ZACH BROOKE | STAFF WRITER

 zbrooke@ama.org

t’s hard enough to convert consumers to your brand without worrying about competing marketers making similar claims. Though it would be great to have a marketplace all to yourself, the reality is free-market economics and anti-trust laws ensure that brands

MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016

will forever have to battle against other players in their space, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. A typical response to adversaries is outward silence, ignoring their existence in public while staking out advantageous positioning behind the scenes. Yet,

several case studies show that there are high-profile exceptions to this rule, in which advertisers have found success at the expense of their competitors. With that in mind, we reached out for some expert guidance on using marketing to define the competition. Any attack ad needs to be pitchperfect with the rest of a brand’s identity, experts say. Any messaging needs to fit within the nebulous parameters of authentic representation of brand identity. In other words, marketers need implicit permission from customers to throw shade. “Consumers are incredibly attached to brands. They take them very personally, and when a brand does something that they don’t believe a brand should

ADVERTISING ETHICS

do, it can create a surprising backlash,” says Paola Norambuena, chief content officer at brand consultancy Interbrand. “If you are not a brand that is naturally a challenger, or that people see as a challenger, it can feel quite inauthentic. It can do more damage than good because people aren’t expecting it, or may begin to associate negativity with your brand rather than anything positive.” Norambuena stresses that marketers need to “understand the stretch of their own brand”—the market-facing boundaries that consumers draw around products, services and organizations. “The minute you understand where that barrier is, you can figure out either a very smart way to push over it, or you understand that that’s your limit, and if you push any further you might actually lose sales as opposed to gaining preference,” she says. After sussing out that boundary, Norambuena says marketers then need to determine what about the category needs instruction. Is it becoming amorphous, with everyone saying the same things? Does your brand require clarification or differentiation in relation to your competitors? Only when you’re confident about what direction to proceed and how much “permission” you have to grow in that direction is it time to start mapping out a campaign sizing up the competition. Here, again, there are many hurdles to navigate. The first being: Do you name the brand you’re talking about? Many experts, Norambuena included, say, “No.” “There are really only a few brands that get away with that. Typically, when they do that, it has to be built either on a humorous approach to things, so that it isn’t alienating. Or it needs to fall back to blind taste tests where the product is speaking for itself. It isn’t just me saying, ‘I’m better.’ There’s real proof behind what I’m doing,” she says. “My personal preference, and it is an oldie but a goodie, is Apple versus PC. They never said Microsoft. It was always just a PC. Machine against machine. But the characters were individually loveable, so it became a cult.” Michael Migliozzi, creative director and managing partner at Los Angeles

advertising agency Forza Migliozzi, goes even further than Norambuena. He believes the era of direct callouts is largely over. “Coke versus Pepsi went on for decades. Pepsi was the one that tried to put itself in the same room with Coke, [as] an alternative to Coke. That came with a very big spend and was done during a very traditional time period,” Migliozzi says. “The only way the consumer was able to voice their opinion on it was at the store. Now they can voice their opinion on social media and you could end up with an army of folks screaming back at you on behalf of the brand that you’re attacking. The dynamics have changed. If you’re just sitting back in 1986, watching television, and it’s Coke versus Pepsi, you may not even talk about it to your friend. But now in 2016, you’ll go on your Facebook, your Instagram, your Twitter and say something about it.” In place of naming the brand you’re going after, Migliozzi says it’s common to instead call out an attitude, or emotion, clearly occupied by your competitor. “Let’s say, for example, you’re not going to see Nike turn around Reebok when they were adding bells and whistles to their sneakers,” he says. “They attack the fad.” Trend-shaming is one of the most popular forms of going after the competition. To combat changing tastes, many brands brainstorm campaigns that act as collective eye rolls against emerging preferences. Look no further than Budweiser’s advertising at this year’s Super Bowl for an example. The spot, which took several veiled shots at craft brews through intense actionlike sequences of brewery and party footage accompanied by a bass-blasting soundtrack. The commercial defiantly states what Budweiser is with visual cues and uses text to emphatically state what it’s not. According to the beer giant’s own marketing, it’s not a hobby, not small, not sipped, not imported, not a fruit cup, not following anyone else. Or, in other (unsaid) words, not a craft brewery. These ads can arouse strong feelings in consumers who feel slighted by evolving

coreconcepts

popular tastes they would prefer not to adopt. “You’re empowering them. They’re not falling behind on a trend by drinking Budweiser,” Migliozzi says. Other times it’s challenging the collective. Think, “Think Different.” “To quote a really classic one, it’s what Apple did in 1984,” Norambuena says. “It took on a nameless, faceless entity. Most people understood it was IBM, but they never called out IBM. They called out a problem that was affecting humanity rather than saying, it’s me against this brand. Then, if you’re challenging the collective, you’re naturally setting yourself apart.” One area where Migliozzi believes it might make sense to go after a competitor directly is in a mature market. When there is zero or low growth of new customers, your only option for expansion is poaching users away from competitors. This dynamic plays out often between cellphone carriers. The big names in the space have been attacking one another by name for years, comparing plan details in ads and showing purported coverage maps of the other operators. Recently, Sprint recruited Verizon’s former pitchman in a particularly petty broadside. “That seems to be a pie that’s been sliced up, so everyone is trying to grab another brand’s part of the pie, because it’s not growing,” Migliozzi says. “In that case, that brawl is going to continually take place. And that does make some sense because it is ever-changing in terms of their coverage, features and pricing.” Whatever the strategy, the goal needs to be the same as a straightforward pitch: turning consumers toward your brand at the expense of the rest of the category. Arguing against the competitors can be an effective mechanism for facilitating that movement, but only if the criticisms are something that consumers will actually care about. “The mentality here with a leading brand, or a brand looking to be a leader, is not acknowledging your competitors, it’s acknowledging your consumers’ needs and wants,” Migliozzi says. “If you can answer that better, that’s all you need to speak to.” m NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

themiddlemarket

BUSINESS SERVICES

The Appeals of Middle Market Legal Firms Thanks to savvy marketing practices, middle market legal firms have seen some of the greatest growth numbers since 2011 as clients look beyond mega-firms BY SARAH STEIMER | STAFF WRITER

 ssteimer@ama.org

he growth of middle market companies in the U.S. has outpaced the national average with an 87% increase in the number of firms, 100% increase in revenue and 103% increase in employment since 2011. A report from American Express and Dun & Bradstreet titled “Middle Market Power Index: A Detailed Look at Top Industries” found the growth in the number of middle market legal services companies increased 284% between 2011 and 2016. Middle market legal firms have also led in employment (+471%) and revenue (+432%). The report suggests that the majority of middle market enterprises are found in manufacturing (18%), wholesale trade (17%) and business services (11%). These three sectors also include several industry subcategories that are generating a particularly large amount of growth. According to the report, younger middle market firms are more likely than those that have been in business for 50 years or more to be in business services; however, these older firms make up 25% of middle market legal services companies, compared to 2% of firms that have been in business for less than 10 years. The Catalysts of Growth The report is the sixth by American Express and D&B, and the second to focus on the time period after companies had a few years to digest the postrecession economy. Nalanda Matia, lead economist of econometrics solutions at Dun & Bradstreet, suggests the regulatory climate of this period may be one of the reasons legal firms have seen such growth.

MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016

She says that many companies, particularly banks and lenders, are still adjusting to new regulatory expectations post-recession. The result has been a greater need for legal services. “There are so many regulations just in the financial sector,” Matia says. She also suggests the post-recession upward trend in mergers and acquisitions has boosted the need for legal advice for a variety of companies. While Matia points to the regulatory climate and M&A in the past five years as the reason for middle market legal services growth, Jay Jessup, CEO of Elite Lawyer Management, a public relations and legal talent marketing agency, offers two other possibilities. Jessup says his clients’ compliance practices and regulatory-related billings have shown only moderate growth during the 2011-2016 period, and that increase is in response to growing companies rather than more regulations. Instead, he suggests the growth in middle market legal firms in terms of number, revenue and employment can be traced to post-recession companies that have had to find new efficiencies and be smarter about their costs, along with an increased pace of U.S. business, particularly entrepreneurial companies. To his first point, Jessup says legal services that post-recession companies consume and pay for have been a visible piece of their efforts to be more efficient. “Legal work that has historically been handed to the mega firms—for reasons no longer relevant—has instead been assigned to the most efficient legal service

providers, in many cases the middle market law firms,” he says. Jessup explains that middle market legal firms don’t have the bloat that comes with mega-firms, such as legions of high-billing associates and enormous overhead. He says middle market firms’ boutique-style practice groups are leaner and, thus, often more agile than their big-firm counterparts. “Midsize law firm leaders spotted and marketed to the need for efficiency and cost-savings while the big firms were still busy trying to survive in their old models in many cases,” he says. To Jessup’s second point, he suggests anyone can look to increased construction and new technologies to see the growing pace of business in the U.S. The executives of these economydrivers, he says, do not need the brand value of the mega law firms, but instead require the cost-effective work done by great lawyers. “Midsize law firms, either regional or sector-specific or both, fit the bill,” Jessup says. “And the entrepreneurial company’s growth drives the revenue and employment numbers you see in the report. Growing companies consume more and broader legal services. “If you track the economic recovery, following the initial Armageddon, you’ll see the midsize law firm growth follow very closely.” The Age of Growing Middle Market Legal Firms Matia says the regulatory climate also may be cause for legal firms that are older—those in business for 50 years or longer—to make up a greater portion of a sector. The companies in need of legal advice in relation to regulatory issues are turning toward these older legal firms. “It’s because they have more experience than the smaller ones,” Matia says. “I think even if we analyzed the smaller legal businesses, I would suspect that they are also having a little less or a similar kind of growth because of the regulatory scene in the U.S. right now.” Matia says middle market legal firms have been in the market for a while, and many of them have familiarized

NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

themiddlemarket

BUSINESS SERVICES

themselves with regulations and rules that came prior to 2008. “That’s why they are so much betterequipped than smaller businesses to cater to the needs of the financial institutions,” she suggests. Although Jessup disagrees with the regulatory climate being a key driver in middle market legal services growth, he does agree that legacy firms have a big advantage in their markets. “When big consumers of legal services make their selections, many of the factors they previously used to justify using mega firms still come into play,” he says. “Firm longevity of 50 years justifies the move from a large law firm to a regional or sector-specific firm.” In the time line of the most recent Middle Market Power Index, Jessup says there has been a lot of M&A activity among mid-sized law firms. He says older firms are most often the players in this

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landscape, and he says he wonders if the report’s numbers are a bit skewed by the M&A activity. In other words, if a law firm nabs 50 new lawyers from another firm and it shows powerful growth, particularly as they come with books of business, does this distort the growth findings of the report? “At least on our client roster, with substantial representation from newer firms, we have seen some high trajectory and, in some cases, explosive growth during this time line,” he says. Jessup says small to midsize entrepreneurial firms are good at scaling. Younger firms tend to be more entrepreneurial and more inclined to use creativity in growth strategies, he says. Jessup provided a few marketing tips for middle market legal firms: • Showcase some personalities: “Americans hire a person or small group of people, not a law firm,” Jessup

says. “The firm and its reputation get you on the short list, but it’s a single lawyer, two at the most, who are going to win the business.” He recommends branding and promoting individual practice leaders. Turning 10 such professionals into national thought leaders may mean losing one or two, but the others will feel respected and trusted, he says. • Embrace content marketing: Done right, that is. Jessup says content marketing can help bolster the thought leaders’ status and make the firm’s practice the logical go-to provider. • Brand individual practices nationally, rather than regionally: Jessup explains that middle market law firms are often regionally based, but it’s actually easier to build a national brand, especially if the company is branding the practice group, rather than the firm. m

NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

scholarlyinsights

CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE

Heroic Marketing

•

How marketing creates enduring firm value—and how to prove it BY LANCE A. BETTENCOURT | CONTRIBUTOR

 lance@liftphd.com

he purpose of business is to create value for the firm by creating value for customers. Customer value is essential to a firm’s success, and creates a situation in which marketing can be the hero that takes the company from so-so to exceptional. Research shows that marketing actions that increase customer lifetime value (CLV) have a dramatic positive impact on corporate stock performance. For example, when a firm selectively targets customers for aquisition who match the profile of existing high-CLV customers, it increases the overall value of its customer base and this leads to above-market stock performance. Similarly, a firm that offers incentives to get current customers to buy other products that the company offers will have a more favorable bottom-line impact when these incentives are directed at high-CLV customers. A forthcoming Journal of Marketing paper by professors V. Kumar and Werner Reinartz of Georgia State University and University of Cologne, respectively, provides an exceptional framework to guide a firm in using CLV to enhance firm value. It’s a framework for heroic marketing. At the heart of the framework is a focus on measuring CLV and running predictive models to understand the drivers of CLV. This is done in order to develop and implement marketing strategies to maximize CLV at the individual or segment-level, which allows the firm to realize greater market value. The analytics at the heart of the framework are not for the faint of heart. If modeling options such as multinomial logit, Markov chains, quantile regression, probit and Monte Carlo simulation induce mild anxiety in you, then rest assured, they do for others as

MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016

well. But as a marketing executive, they need not be your focus. As an executive, the important points to appreciate are these: First, it is possible to model the predictors of CLV in a way that can guide a variety of marketing actions. Second, this approach to marketing decision-making leads to a more optimal resource allocation that translates into better return on investment. Third, there are very capable researchers who can create these models and use them to guide your firm’s decision-making. These researchers do not have to be employed by your organization. There are many professors who are eager to work with companies. (This papers offer a “who’s who” of capable academic researchers in this field.) Rather than getting wrapped up in the modeling possibilities, I’d rather call attention to some of the questions that these sophisticated analyses can answer. Customer Acquisition Primary marketing spending goes toward acquiring new customers. A firm can increase its marketing ROI when it knows which customers to target and with which messages and offerings. If it can know the likely CLV of targeted customers, it can evaluate how much it should invest in acquiring a given customer. Some questions that acquisition research can address include: • How many new customers can we acquire in this campaign? • How many orders will each of our newly acquired customers place? • How do the marketing variables, such as shipping fee, word-of-mouth referral and promotion depth, influence prospects’ response behaviors? • How long will the newly acquired customers stay with our companies?

How much profit or value will this acquisition campaign bring to our companies? Customer Retention Although new customer acquisition is critical to long-term success, companies often get greater value from an extra dollar spent on customer retention. Of course, this is ultimately an empirical question. For every dollar spent on customer retention, it is important to know which customers should be the focus of spending, how much should be spent to retain a given customer and how to balance spending on acquisition versus retention. Here are some questions that retention research can address:

CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE

• What will firms have to do to retain a customer? • When should we intervene and save the customers from churning? • How much do we spend on churn prevention with respect to a particular customer? • Given the resource constraints, how much should be spent on acquisition efforts versus retention efforts to maximize long-term profitability? Customer Win-Back No matter how excellent the company, some customers choose to leave. While some may simply view this as the end of the customer lifecycle, proactive companies seek to win these customers

back. But because all customers are not equally valuable or equally responsive to potential win-back offers, firms should selectively apply resources to winning back lost customers. Some questions that customer win-back research can address include: • Should the firm intervene with customer churn? • If so, how should the firm approach the customer to win them back? • What elements would help firms in reacquiring lost customers?

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making decisions that have a quantifiable impact on value creation for customers and the firm. To achieve this, marketers should seek to make decisions based on an understanding of the drivers of the forward-looking metric of customer lifetime value. m LANCE A. BETTENCOURT is a cofounder and managing partner of LIFT PhD, a service that matches corporate decision-makers with the expertise of business school professors. He is a distinguished marketing fellow at the

In this era of Big Data and sophisticated analytics, marketing should be the hero of value creation. That is, marketing should be at the forefront of

Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University, and author of Service Innovation: How to Go from Customer Needs to Breakthrough Services. NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

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GLOBAL MARKETS

SEVEN EXPERTS WEIGH IN ON THE AMA’S

Seven Big Problems Problem Six: Competing in Dynamic Global Markets

Randy Guard

EVP and CMO at SAS For most companies, businesses that offer similar products or services are no longer the only competition. To maintain customer loyalty in a crowded marketplace, it is important to forge relevant partnerships with other companies in your space. An auto manufacturer can no longer be solely concerned with other car brands; now, it must be aware of the rapidly growing popularity of ride sharing, for example. When partnering with new market participants, data is the common thread in how companies interact, and smart analysis of this data is the key to success.

Richard Labot

Global Director of Network Operations at Geometry Global In the global professional services sector, creating teams of partners in a new market efficiently fills talent and capability gaps that would normally take time and investment to fill when going it alone. Like any ecosystem, balance is key to success and those involved have to be aligned to a common goal. There need to be clear responsibilities, rules of engagement and a financial model that encourages participation and collaboration of all parties. Previous experience working together, familiarity with the inter-company process and like-minded corporate cultures round out a best-in-class ecosystem.

MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016

Ravi Prashad

SVP of Strategy at GALE Partners Shaping the future isn’t easy—it requires ambition, humility, and expertise. Objectively understanding the risk-reward equation will help winning firms place the right bets. Global experts living in the future are invaluable if they tailor their expertise to the individual firm. Too often, so-called experts trot out popular trends without an objective understanding of what might work for a specific client. Winning firms partner with global experts who apply innovation, understand their unique business and build marketing solutions that emphasize operational capabilities.

Kurt Hawks

SVP of Cross Device and Video at Conversant To better predict competitive shifts in our marketplaces (or create them), companies must be laser-focused on the behaviors, needs and preferences of the end consumers within those marketplaces. As such, companies must strike strategic partnerships that best enable them to gain a single view of their consumers, seamlessly identify consumers across all devices and channels and measure the incremental effectiveness of marketing programs in real time. True consumer insight results in the ability to anticipate the future needs of consumers and create competitive shifts rather than react to them.

GLOBAL MARKETS

Rand Fishkin

Cofounder of Moz Transformation, like any major upheaval, is going to be a serious struggle for organizations that don’t embrace learning and evolution. The type of competition companies faced in the past is different from the competition and disruption they now face due to technology. Companies in sectors such as transportation, media and retail have been learning harsh lessons throughout the past decade. Meanwhile, plenty of incumbents in areas such as health care, finance and energy are feeling invincible, but I suspect they will have the same tough comeuppance in the decades ahead. Digital media moves fast. In just the past 10 years, we’ve seen the rise of multiple platforms that touch millions (Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn) or billions (Google, Facebook, Whatsapp). That requires digital marketing teams to move fast, too.

Mary Hinesly

Professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business We can see that digital technology is changing how businesses are run and expand globally. Globalizing your company requires a different approach to thinking about how value is created. There are many companies that require a digital audit to learn what is currently being used and how it is being used in their organization to nurture globalization. Mobilizing and inspiring employees through a cooperative culture will streamline digital technology roll outs and help your company to globalize more quickly.

Christopher Vollmer

Principal at PwC In leader organizations, senior management has a compelling point of view about what the future looks like and how they must transform to win in it. Brand purpose is injected into the key moments valued most by users. Content, products and services are available where users can easily find them. Digital is integrated with the physical. Their organizations know how to team, partner and work across traditional silos. Tough calls are made regularly on legacy businesses, talent and infrastructure to invest for growth and drive the company forward. Leaders recognize that digital is more than a clever reallocation of marketing spend. They see digital transformation as an opportunity to win in a world where every brand interaction is just one step from purchase.

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Globalizing your company requires a different approach to thinking about how value is created.

NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

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PRICE STRATEGY

Customer-based Strategies for Raising Prices Caught in a value-pricing trap, companies often struggle to raise prices. Broadening your approach can free you from the value-pricing trap, and provide more levers for price increases.

BY VIKAS MITTAL

 vmittal@rice.edu

any managers believe that the only way to get customers to pay more is to load their products and services with more and more features. This is the classic value trap—provide more benefits to extract higher prices. Another approach—cost-plus pricing—relies on providing customers with justifications for price increases; justifications such as increased labor costs, inflation and higher raw-material costs.

Price increases, done incorrectly, often result in customer dissatisfaction and brand switching. It’s no wonder raising prices is a stressful, contentious and unpleasant process. When harried, some firms avoid raising prices by taking “selfharming” measures, such as reducing head count, lowering product quality and reducing services. Such drastic actions may not always be necessary. Research on consumer reaction to pricing has identified several factors that can help firms to decrease customer price sensitivity. Reducing price sensitivity can enable firms to raise prices without negative side effects. Four Levers for Raising Prices

Time your increases wisely.

Several studies have examined customer price sensitivity relative to

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economic cycles. The main result of a major study in the U.K. was that longterm price sensitivity of customers tends to decrease during economic expansions. Customers are more pricesensitive during economic contractions. These results have also been documented in a meta-analysis, where researchers summarized results of 81 different

studies. While this may seem intuitive, firms often fail to take advantage of economic cycles to manage their pricing strategy. Firms may be more prone to give price cuts during recessionary periods to retain or gain customers, they should also recognize decreased long-term price sensitivity during expansion periods. Especially in cyclical industries, such as oil and gas, firms should implement price increases during economic expansions. During these times, firms may want to tilt their focus toward managing customer value through non-price mechanisms. Lowering prices to retain or gain share may only train customers to become more price-sensitive. The costs and benefits of such a strategy should be carefully evaluated.

Focus on customer satisfaction.

In a classic study based on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI), the research team examined five years of data from several firms to determine the association between overall customer satisfaction and customers’ willingness to tolerate a price increase. Results showed that an increase in overall customer satisfaction decreased price sensitivity: “A 1% increase in customer satisfaction should be associated with a 0.60% decrease in price sensitivity.” Interestingly, the study also found an effect of competitiveness, as measured by industry concentration. It found highly satisfied customers of companies operating in highly competitive markets are less likely to tolerate a price increase. Identify customers who are highly satisfied, because they should be relatively more receptive to a price increase. If you

Identify customers who are highly satisfied, because they should be relatively more receptive to a price increase. If you decide to increase prices, do it in a way that analyzes and accounts for potential competitor responses. If you are in a market with many competitors, proceed with caution.

NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

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PRICE STRATEGY

decide to increase prices, do it in a way that analyzes and accounts for potential competitor responses. If you are in a market with many competitors, proceed with caution.

Build brand equity through advertising.

We all understand the difference between advertising and promotion. Advertising is communication designed to build unique, positive and strong associations with a brand in the minds of your customers. Promotionsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; discounts and giveawaysâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;stimulate purchase behavior. A long-term study of grocery store buyers showed that advertising helped build brand equity, customer loyalty and repeat brand purchases. In contrast, promotions prodded customers to become progressively more price-sensitive, harming long-term profitability. This is also consistent with another result: Price sensitivity for generic brands is typically higher than national brands, presumably because the latter have higher brand equity than the former. Manage pricing strategy in conjunction with your advertising and promotion strategy. In many firms, especially B-to-B firms, pricing may be determined by the sales function while advertising is run by the communications group. Close cooperation between the two groups can be beneficial.

Tap into customersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; local identity.

A forthcoming paper in the Journal of Marketing showed that consumers with a stronger local identity are willing to pay more for products because of a sacrifice mindset. Once activated, a sacrifice mindset leads to lower price sensitivity, regardless of the origin of the products under consideration. As an example, management at a grocery store communicated with half its customers to activate their local identity. Then it raised prices for organic eggs, rice and milk. Results from this field experiment on actual purchase behavior showed that purchase quantities were less sensitive to

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price increases for the local identity group than for the global identity group. Firms can use simple communication materials to prime a local identity among their customer base to decrease their price sensitivity. Global companies can execute these strategies without resorting to the costly approach of localizing production or positioning the company as having local roots. Raising prices can be difficult. By linking price increases only to increased product performance, more features and higher value, firms may set themselves up for a vicious spiral of higher costs and higher prices. This can lead to feature fatigue, which can confuse and irritate

customers. Raising costs can also erode long-term competitiveness. Moreover, such an approach takes a very mechanistic and cognitive view of the customer. By expanding and linking their pricing tool kit to brand equity, customer satisfaction, customer identity and market factors, firms can view customers as complete human beings. These factors, when integrated into your pricing strategy, can build a longer-term approach to managing and mastering price increases. m VIKAS MITTAL, Ph.D., is a member of the faculty at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

marketingmanagement

CUSTOMER RELATIONS

The Cost of Customer Trust Violations How easily do customers forget? When transgressions against them are poorly remediated, the memory can be difficult to dismiss.

BY LAWRENCE A. CROSBY

 lawrence.a.crosby@gmail.com

wenty-six years ago, I co-authored a Journal of Marketing article that helped demonstrate the pivotal role of trust in maintaining the customer relationship. While there are many definitions of trust, we focused our attention on keeping promises, putting the customer’s interests and good, old-fashioned honesty first. Subsequent publications examined the caustic effects of opportunistic behavior on the part of the seller, i.e., taking advantage of the buyer’s vulnerability. At the level of the individual customer experience, the costs of trust violations and malicious self-interest by the seller are welldocumented in both B-to-C and B-to-B settings: diminished loyalty, fewer repeat purchases and unfavorable word-of-mouth. The costs of trust violations at the individual customer level pale in comparison to trust violations in the company-society relationship, but the two are related. While individual customers may be dissatisfied, that generally results in a slow erosion of reputation if the problems are systemic. However, when a company fails to live up to its end of the bargain, it falls off a reputational cliff and customer dissatisfaction quickly follows, regardless of the direct experience of individuals. Social responsibility is an evaluative criteria employed by many, if

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not most, customers. By failing to meet society’s expectations, all that hard work in building customer loyalty can quickly evaporate. The word “scandal” is often associated with trust violations in the companysociety relationship. Just recently, the now-former Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf found himself in the crosshairs of the Senate Banking Committee for failing to stop cross-selling practices that resulted in the opening of more than 2 million unauthorized customer accounts. He was chastised on national

TV by Sen. Elizabeth Warren for what she labelled a scam. Warren criticized Stumpf for fostering a high-pressure sales culture that spawned such behavior, all for the ostensible purpose of, according to Warren, driving up share price and lining the pockets of senior management. Stumpf apologized for betraying the customer’s trust, and subsequently resigned. But the committee seemed largely unmoved by the bank’s firing (over five years) of 5,300 lower-level employees in connection with the unauthorized accounts, or that it had already agreed to a $185 million settlement that includes rebating $2.6 million in fees to about 100,000 customers. Talk about vulnerability. It appears that most of the affected customers were unaware of being victims until notified by the bank, or when they found their credit scores plummeting due to late payments, overdraft fees or having unneeded credit lines or cards. Prior to that realization, those customers went blithely about their banking business, judging the customer experience largely on the basis of the quality of their interactions and routine transactions. Until the scandal broke, the satisfaction of Wells Fargo customers was very near the industry average based on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). In the wake of the financial collapse of 2007, society as a whole is very wary of bank behavior and is paying close attention to how these institutions are managed. Any whiff of unethical behavior, avarice or lack of internal controls sets off an alarm. This can quickly elevate social responsibility in the customer’s evaluation process and drive a wedge into an otherwise positive relationship. For banks, another cost of violating society’s trust is likely to be further regulation. While the Wells Fargo story is still playing out, history is replete with many other examples of companies who largely met customers’ experiential expectations but failed society’s expectations and paid a steep price. A recent case is Volkswagen and its so-called “emissionsgate,” which erupted in September 2015. The EPA accused the company of programming

CUSTOMER RELATIONS

emissions controls to pass government tests, while allowing the release of much higher emissions in actual driving. Up until that scandal broke, VW’s customer satisfaction was very near the national average for automobiles and light trucks (ASCI of 80 versus 79 for the industry). As the news of the cheating began to hit the press, the head of VW Group acknowledged that the company had “broken the trust of our customers and the public.” By just about every measure, the costs of that violation have been high for Volkswagen. The CEO and other executives lost their jobs and one engineer may go to jail. VW’s ACSI score for 2016 fell four points below the industry benchmark as otherwise happy owners learned how much pollution their cars were actually releasing (40 times legal limits). Not surprisingly, VW’s Temkin Trust score dropped from 61 in 2014 to 39 in 2016. The company’s U.S. sales were down 5% in 2015 and 7% in the first six months of 2016. In April 2016, the company took an $18.2 billion charge to cover the cost of the scandal and later agreed to settlements that could total as much as $15.3 billion. VW currently faces 1,400 investor lawsuits in German court worth $9.2 billion. Obviously, a number of factors can mitigate the magnitude and duration of the negative impacts of scandal on a company’s reputation, customer satisfaction and finances. For one, it’s a

big world. Global players can offset losses in one country (U.S.) by gains in others (e.g., China) where social expectations may not run as high. It also seems likely that scandals involving ethical transgressions or deliberate cover-ups may have more deleterious effects than carelessness or simple mismanagement. There is also the matter of attribution. Do customers and the public feel the problems were largely controllable or uncontrollable by the company? Take the case of the breach of Target’s customer databases in late 2013. Hackers were able to steal credit and debit card information for 40 million Target customers and personal information for as many as 110 million. Fortunately, according to Target, the breach resulted in low levels of actual fraud. It is certainly the expectation of the public that companies will do everything they can to protect the personal information of customers. But while the Target hack was one of the most notorious of its day, many other high-profile breaches since then may leave consumers wondering how preventable such breaches really are. Looking at the ACSI data, it is difficult to make the case that the satisfaction of Target customers was materially affected by the breach (although Target faces some other challenges that are affecting its recent scores). How the firm handles reputationdamaging events and disclosures should

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also be a mitigating factor, but many companies stumble badly in this regard. Did the company take immediate action when the problem was detected? Has it been up front and transparent as to what occurred and why? Did senior management take responsibility for what happened? Did their apologies sound sincere? Is there accountability at all levels for those who caused the problem or failed to prevent it? Are the remedial actions sufficient to prevent the problem from occurring again (e.g., improved management systems, addressing bad culture, etc.)? Has the company provided just compensation to those who were directly harmed, or has it tried to wiggle out of its duty? Customer trust is a fragile thing. It is easily lost and can be difficult to regain. People have short memories and are somewhat inclined to forgive, but don’t count on it. Clearly, the best antidote for a scandal is not to have one. That requires vigilance, involved management that asks a lot of questions, strong and well-understood organizational values and the unimpeded upward flow of information no matter how unflattering. m LAWRENCE A. CROSBY , Ph.D., is the retired dean of the Drucker School of Management and a regular AMA columnist since 2000. NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

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AT C-LEVEL

Blockchain Revolution The latest disruptive technology could change the way consumers interact with service providers and cut out middlemen across industries

BY MICHAEL KRAUSS

 michael.krauss@mkt-strat.com

he technology likely to have the greatest impact in the next few decades has arrived. It is not social media. It is not Big Data. It is not robotics. It is not even artificial intelligence,” says technology futurist Don Tapscott. “You’ll be surprised to learn that [the technology that will have the greatest disruption] is the underlying technology of digital currencies like Bitcoin. It is called the blockchain. “It is not the most sonorous word in the world,” continues Tapscott in a recent TED Talk. “But I believe this next generation of the internet holds vast promise for every business, for every society and for all of you.” As a marketer with an eye on innovation, technology and disruption, I’ve learned to pay attention to Tapscott. His books—including Paradigm Shift: The New Promise of Information Technology (1993), Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (1997) and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006)—have always given me a leg up on disruptive technology trends that will soon confront me as a marketer. Marketers need to be ahead of the next wave of technology, not behind it. If you are a financial services marketer, you need to know about blockchain technology in the same way marketers from hospitality and transportation companies needed to know about the so-called platform technologies that power Airbnb, Uber and Lyft before they went to market.

MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016

I picked up a copy of Tapscott’s book Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World and read it twice. To be honest, to understand it, I had to read it twice. Blockchain Revolution is not the easiest tome to comprehend, digest and internalize. It helps to both read his book and go to the web, download one of his TED Talks and do some online research. You’ll learn that Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, but there’s a difference between blockchain technology, the technology that

enables Bitcoin, and blockchain. Bitcoin is an application of blockchain technology. There are many other kinds of applications or solutions that can be developed relying on blockchain technology. You’ll learn that, “A blockchain is a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of records called blocks secured from tampering and revision. Each block contains a timestamp and a link to a previous block.” You’ll discover that in the future, this technology could enable individuals to securely conduct financial transactions without costly intermediaries such as banks or securities exchanges. If you’re trying to send money to a developing nation, you won’t need Western Union or an intermediary that takes a big commission. Blockchain might empower entertainers to distribute their content legally—peerto-peer, as Napster envisioned—earning royalties that they, not music companies, create. It might enable the creation of complex contracts that can be relied upon and cannot be contravened. Or, if you’re concerned about the provenance of raw materials—like avoiding blood diamonds from conflict zones in Africa or tainted wallboard from a poor producer in Asia—this technology could pave the way to authentication. The wildest thing you’ll learn from Tapscott’s book is that blockchain technology could even disrupt and put out of business the current aggregator platforms: Uber, Lyft and Airbnb. Right now, the backers of those companies earn fortunes, says Tapscott, but they are ultimately centralized databases and intermediaries, not truly distributed, democratic enablers.

“Blockchain will change the structure of our firms. It will alter the cost of transacting and doing business. And blockchain will lower the cost of establishing trust outside the boundaries of a firm. Trust between buyer and seller is the sine qua non—the indispensable and essential ingredient—of marketing in the digital age.”

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AT C-LEVEL

In time, Tapscott believes individual riders of taxis or renters of rooms could trade peer-to-peer using secure blockchain technology. Customers could avoid paying the aggregator, agent or intermediary their percentage because the technology will promote trust between individuals. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could hail an Uber electronically and the fare was lower and all the fees went to the driver? Tapscott believes this is coming.

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If you think these ideas are outlandish, do some research on Linus Torvalds, the Finnish software engineer who decided to upend the Microsoft Windows operating system by inventing Linux and creating a movement toward opensource solutions. What Tapscott predicts has happened before. Blockchain technology is complex and hard to fathom. In Blockchain Revolution, Tapscott explains the core ideas of blockchain were “defined by a

pseudonymous person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto,” following the financial crisis of 2008. Nakamoto (or a group of writers using that moniker) laid down the protocols for blockchain technology but have not been heard from since. You’ll read about how Nakamoto’s principles inspired an ecosystem of geeks to experiment and create new technology that just might alter our future society. You’ll discover the power of a globally shared ledger of data that can be accessed anywhere, at any time and never be erased. Once a transaction is entered in a blockchain, it can never be altered. Tapscott describes how blockchain technology might eliminate the so-called “double spend” problem, where fraudsters try to spend their money more than once online. Tapscott suggests blockchain technology might even reduce cybercrime and lower cyber risk. I interviewed Tapscott and asked him why blockchain technology might be important to marketers. He says, “This second generation of the internet is going to be a big deal for every function within the corporation. We’ve had the “internet of information” for a few decades and now we’re getting the “internet of value.” “Blockchain creates a whole new set of opportunities and challenges for marketing executives,” he writes. “Blockchain will change the structure of our firms. It will alter the cost of transacting and doing business. And blockchain will lower the cost of establishing trust outside the boundaries of a firm. Trust between buyer and seller is the sine qua non—the indispensable and essential ingredient—of marketing in the digital age.” In the past we’ve needed intermediary institutions such as banks, insurance agents, brokers, stock exchanges and title companies to assure trust. “We will have a new global technology platform where trust is achieved not by powerful institutions but by cryptography, collaboration and clever code,” he says. “And the implications are pretty staggering for every marketing executive.” m MICHAEL KRAUSS is president of Market Strategy Group based in Chicago.

NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

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CONSUMER ENGAGEMENT

Take Out the Costs Marketers must take a less-is-more approach if they wish to win consumers’ precious and ever-dwindling time and attention

BY J. WALKER SMITH

 jwalker.smith@thefuturescompany.com

arketers ask a lot. They expect consumers to pay attention to their messages and then come to them to transact business, which means that consumers spend more than money to shop and buy. Consumers also spend time and attention, also known as the “currency of engagement.” This is a real expense for consumers.

The central challenge facing brands is that consumers cannot spend as much currency engaging with marketing as they once did. It looks like marketing resistance, but it’s not. Rather, it’s an engagement cost of time and attention that consumers simply can’t afford anymore. Worries about consumer engagement have been heightened by the growth of ad-blocking apps. Ad-blocking apps may be recent, but the phenomenon of skipping ads is not. Harvard Business School professor Thales Teixeira compiled data from studies going back to the late 1980s and found that the percentage of TV ads people watch attentively has dropped steadily from almost 100% decades ago to less than 20% today. Whatever the medium, consumers are doing everything they can to spend as little of their currency of time and attention as possible on marketing. Resistance to marketing is often said to be a problem of trust. Consumers are more suspicious of marketers than ever, but what’s at work is more than skepticism—it’s a problem of capacity. What consumers are doing is what people do whenever they lack the wherewithal, which is to do less. It’s time- and

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attention-starved consumers trying to cut costs. The consequence is ever more blocking, skipping, avoiding, ignoring and clicking away. By and large, the response of marketers has been to push harder, especially with digital technologies and real-time data streams. Unfortunately, this means more of what consumers want less, so consumers are using their own digital technologies to move in the other direction. Kantar Media data show a 120% increase in the number of ads appearing

in all media since 2008. Yet over that same period, eMarketer data show only a 24.2% increase in the total amount of time people are spending with media. In other words, ads alone—not to mention promotions or events—are outracing consumers by nearly a factor of five. The costs of time and attention are rising because there is more marketing than ever. Whether measured by bulk or by merit, the costs of engagement are rising. At the same time, people have less time and attention to spend. Life is busier. People are pressured. There are many more things competing for the currency of engagement. Every marketer can point to an ad that has worked extremely well. There is no question that consumers engage, but that engagement is fewer and farther between. The key question, then, is how best to negotiate the balance consumers are trying to strike between entertainment and relevance. Marketers rarely think about the costs of engagement. Instead, marketers say to themselves, “If I can just make this ad more entertaining, absorbing, emotional, participatory, relevant, immersive or appropriate, then consumers will spend time and attention rather than blocking, skipping, avoiding, ignoring or clicking away.” For marketers, benefits are first and foremost. For consumers, though, costs come first. Marketers and consumers put top priority on different parts of the value equation. Marketers are trying to boost

Resistance to marketing is often said to be a problem of trust. Consumers are more suspicious of marketers than ever, but what’s at work is more than skepticism—it’s a problem of capacity. What consumers are doing is what people do whenever they lack the wherewithal, which is to do less. It’s time- and attention-starved consumers trying to cut costs. The consequence is ever more blocking, skipping, avoiding, ignoring and clicking away.

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marketingmanagement

CONSUMER ENGAGEMENT

The objective should not be increasing engagement, but increasing disengagement— facilitating less time and attention, not more. The strategic imperative must be one of taking costs out. That means reducing the currency required without imperiling the relationship between brands and consumers. benefits to increase net value. Consumers are trying to take out costs. Some marketing solutions have never gained much traction, like paying people to watch ads or securing private data in exchange for bettertargeted ads. The benefits of cash or security for greater engagement

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don’t offer enough benefits to offset the higher costs of engagement. Similarly, the much-hyped industrywide priority in the early 2000s around the concept of engagement was all about making marketing more entertaining and absorbing. It didn’t pan out as hoped because spending more “currency of

engagement” isn’t how consumers want to spend their time. The objective should not be increasing engagement, but increasing disengagement—facilitating less time and attention, not more. The strategic imperative must be one of taking costs out. That means reducing the currency required without imperiling the relationship between brands and consumers. It’s a new challenge, and not an easy one. But going forward, it is the key to ensuring a rewarding connection with consumers. m J. WALKER SMITH is executive chairman of The Futures Co., part of the Kantar Group of WPP, and co-author of four books, including Rocking the Ages. Follow him on Twitter @jwalkersmith.

marketingmanagement

INSIGHT BY EXPERIMENTATION

Behavioral Economics: A Marketing Capability The marketing application of behavioral economics can mean more accurate insights and more satisfied customers

BY GORDON WYNER



gordon@msi.org

ehavioral economics and marketing have had a natural connection for decades. Marketing has a heritage of understanding consumer decisionmaking behavior and its departures from purely rational choice. For example, brands are believed to “shift the demand curve” that relates price to volume. In recent years there has been increasing interest in behavioral economics applications in marketing that can improve business performance. While many elements of behavioral economics have great benefits for marketers, more attention is focusing on the development of capabilities to deliver the value to the organization. The potential to use insights from research to create change in future behavior is quite different from other research traditions that support strategy development based on insight about consumer needs, attitudes and preferences. Traditional approaches provide implications for action, but don’t specify how to realize change. Inducing change ought to appeal to management, which values action and is often skeptical of insights that don’t lead to action. Since financial justification and return on marketing investment are well-established requirements, the disciplined intervention approach fills an organizational need. If you test specific hypotheses that can be acted upon by the organization, and find evidence to

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support one of them, there is a strong case for achieving the stated goal. The Science From a practitioner perspective, behavioral economics is research to understand how consumers behave economically, in real time. In many instances the research uncovers hidden biases and the role of emotions in consumer judgements, like placing more value on losses rather than gains, or more value on products you own versus those you don’t. How price is communicated can influence choice over and above the influence of price itself.

Rather than responding consistently to all economic incentives offered by marketers, consumer response may vary by purchase and consumption occasions, among different competitive sets and for different reasons. Research on these issues generates insights about consumer behavior that may not be captured by other approaches, e.g., retrospective attitude and usage surveys. Relatively simple measures of actual behavior often generate insights that are associated with large effects on choice (changes of 25% or more are commonly reported in published studies). Much of the research in behavioral economics is conducted through experimentation, based on random assignment of consumers to test and control conditions. This is a crucial advantage compared to other methods such as surveys, qualitative interviews, behavioral analysis and modeling of individual consumers or aggregate time series. While other methods will always have the caveat that correlation alone doesn’t imply causation, the experiment can pinpoint causes. Experiments still have the added challenge of demonstrating that the controlled conditions under which they operate, in lab settings or in live market tests, can be generalized to broader market conditions; however, they also have the potential for correction over time and improvement if the learning from the tests is absorbed, organizationally, and new and better tests are conducted. Intervention Approach The intervention process itself is a promising area for further research

Much of the research in behavioral economics is conducted through experimentation, based on random assignment of consumers to test and control conditions. This is a crucial advantage compared to other methods. While other methods will always have the caveat that correlation alone doesn’t imply causation, the experiment can pinpoint causes.

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INSIGHT BY EXPERIMENTATION

test, as well as the pattern across all tests, so they can take appropriate action and improve successive waves of testing and learning.

and development. What are the likely side effects of a change, why do they happen and what steps can mitigate them? For example, why did J.C. Penney Co.’s pricing strategy, which was expected to confer numerous pricerelated benefits on customers, lead to losses? Perhaps the consumer derived some non-rational benefits from the complex and changing discounts that management decided to eliminate. Are there systematic ways to increase the extent to which planned outcomes are realized in market? For example, changes in pricing may tap into varying motivations for consumers. How can the communication of price changes best align with consumer motivations to improve effectiveness?

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Getting there Implementing the discipline of behavioral economics requires investment in certain skills. For example: 1. Understanding of the market and consumers well enough to be able to develop strategically important hypotheses to test. This can mean starting with a prediction about what would happen if an action was taken, rather than starting with an exploratory investigation. 2. Researching how to frame experiments that unambiguously test the hypotheses and control for nuisance factors that could obscure the results. 3. Ensuring that management decisionmakers learn from each individual

These skills are not new to marketing practice, but deploying them to achieve change is. Despite the successes and promise of behavioral economics, it’s unlikely to provide solutions to all the issues marketers confront: 1. The “side effects” or “unintended consequences” of taking predicted actions require ongoing monitoring. For example, testing may lead to a desired higher opt-in rate for a particular type of investment account. Choices of other accounts may decline. 2. Marketing tactics designed for specific product improvements reside within broader corporate goals, e.g. long-term brand portfolio development, customer experience management and customer lifetime value. How can companies link the specific actions that are suggested by experimental testing to a broader set of marketing strategy priorities? Multiple uncoordinated tactics do not make a coherent strategy. 3. Many findings of behavioral economics research relate to shortterm impacts. For investment decisions, companies need to set priorities on which improvements are likely to be the most sustainable. These issues are addressed to some degree with the tools of behavioral economics. Still, there’s a need for an integrated view of marketing effectiveness across all the levers that management uses. Behavioral economics has an important role in the marketing world of the future. It provides a potential competitive advantage to those who understand their markets well enough to know how to change them. m GORDON WYNER is the research director at the Marketing Science Institute.

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A decade ago, the NCAA challenged 18 collegiate athletic programsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Native American symbols, imagery and nicknames. These schools have fought to rebrand in a way that endears students and alumni to their hallowed halls and gameday gear. BY SARAH STEIMER

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he master brand of colleges and universities is often tightly intertwined with schools’ athletics programs. Students come together under the institution’s iconic colors and logos, magnetic mascots and fans’ chants that echo throughout the stadium. It’s a unifying experience, one that continues when alumni don their old college T-shirt and turn on Saturday football games. “Having a symbol that people can recognize on a sweatshirt is something that brings the community together,” says Michael Lewis, a professor of marketing at Emory University. “Football and basketball, in particular, represent the touch points for the whole community. Whether or not that’s how academia should be, that’s how academia is. That’s the incident that bonds people together.” When that community is stripped of its collective imagery, it presents the institution with the great challenge of rallying the troops under a new banner. With the emotional connection that so many students form with their school, changing the mascot is akin to Disney dropping Mickey Mouse. That is, if Mickey were also offensive to an entire culture. A decade has passed since 18 colleges and universities were given one of their hardest assignments from the National Collegiate Athletic Association: change your symbols or forfeit your rights to postseason competition. The announcement came in 2005, and the decision has been enforced since 2006. Schools that failed to change mascots, imagery and nicknames that were deemed “hostile or abusive” would be prohibited from hosting any NCAA championship competitions. The schools on the list had team nicknames that alluded to Native Americans, including those called the Indians, Braves, Redmen and Savages. “The NCAA objects to institutions using racial/ethnic/national origin references in their intercollegiate athletics programs,” the original announcement read. Native Americans have been vocal about their opposition as well, with the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) specifically calling out the use of native imagery for branding purposes. The NCAI launched a campaign in 1968 to address stereotypes of native people in popular culture, media and

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sports. The organization’s website points to 2013 research that suggests derogatory “Indian” sports mascots have serious psychological, social and cultural consequences for Native Americans, particularly native youth. The NCAI notes the progress that has been made to remove such wording and imagery, including the impact of the NCAA decision. More than 2,000 “Indian” references in sports have been eliminated during the past 35 years, while 1,000 still remain. No professional teams have established new mascots that use racial stereotypes in their names and imagery since 1963. Whether or not the school’s students, alumni or fans agreed with the NCAA’s decision or Native Americans’ position on the matter, colleges and universities were forced to rethink their branding. The past 10 years have been a lesson on what to do and what not to do; but perhaps most importantly, institutions have learned their collegiate sports’ image can make or break their communities.

Playing for the Win

The symbols and culture surrounding college athletics are priceless for the fans, athletes and students. That same brand is also worth a lot to the school and apparel makers. Billions, to be specific. The International Licensing Industry Merchandisers’ Association released a report in June 2015 that found collegiate brands generated retail sales of licensed merchandise totaling approximately $4.625 billion in 2014. The Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC), which represents almost 200 colleges, universities, conferences, bowls, the NCAA and the Heisman Trophy, says 65% of the retail marketplace for collegiate-licensed merchandise

College of William & Mary’s mascot, the Griffin, plays on the college’s British and American heritage.

is apparel. The CLC says it has paid its collegiate partners more than $1.5 billion in royalties since the organization’s 1981 inception. Placing college logos on apparel has been a main branding strategy for schools, but collegiate trademarks are now being used on office products, travel bags, automotive products and even fitness equipment, according to a report from Forbes. Over the history of college sports, this merchandise has managed to blend commodity with community. When a school is tasked with changing its brand identity, it’s moving away from a symbol that fills students’ and alumni’s memory banks— not to mention their closets. “You’ve got to start over,” says Emory University’s Lewis, who has researched the use of Native Indian nicknames and symbolism by sports teams. “It’s almost some form of marketing judo.” As far as the cost of rebranding, Lewis says it is negligible. It’s an expense a school will likely incur in the course of the operation as the brand goes through refresh cycles, making it a normal cost of doing business. There’s a trend among sports teams at various levels wherein the ability to be innovative with symbols, uniforms and designs is actually a huge positive, Lewis says. He can’t speak to short-term costs, but his own research shows absolutely zero long-term costs. In fact, he notes a small positive bump, likely the result of time simply moving forward. College sports have only become more lucrative over the years, Lewis says, which makes branding ever-important.

Bracing for Homecoming Crowds

There are two key audiences that a school’s brand needs to appeal to: prospective students and alumni, according to Kelly Ruoff, partner and chief creative officer at branding, marketing and digital agency Ologie. She says the team mascot and nickname play a critical role to the alumni, in particular, as so much of their affinity to the school brand is often through the so-called spirit brand, or the athletics portion of the brand. “You may have been wooed to attend the school by the master brand, but you often graduate with a stronger affinity to the spirit brand,” Ruoff says. “That’s the brand you carry forward. It’s why, when institutions change their mascot, there’s some uprising from the alumni. That’s the part of the brand that they align most to.”

Mascot Yearbook: Where Are They Now? In the years since the NCAA decision, some schools have tweaked their names and mascots, some changed entirely, and others received approval from local tribes to keep theirs.

Alumni approval matters to schools, Ruoff says, especially given the importance of donor dollars. She suggests the trick to getting alumni on board with an evolving brand—or to at least quell their concerns—is to introduce the new symbols and names carefully and involve the alumni community. Some of the most successful rebranding has surveyed and included alumni. Ruoff says this strategy provides the institution with the ability to say, “This came from you. You guys voted on what core traits influence our brand.” Alumni should not be the last to see the new branding, Ruoff says. The new name or imagery should be featured in the alumni magazine, she says, and alumni chapters should be alerted. Ologie has worked on teaser campaigns with colleges that have included social media components and postcards that worked as puzzle pieces to the final logo. “[A lot of] your alumni base is still connected to the institution through social media,” Ruoff says. “That’s a good platform to explore sharing that relationship.” The campaigns Ologie worked on with schools also included information on why the change was happening and how alumni could get products with the new imagery. “It’s so important to always explain the why, not just, ‘Ta-da! Here it is,’ ” Ruoff says. “You have to make sure that the school is accessible and hasn’t left that audience out.”

Alcorn State University Braves ➤ Kept name, changed mascot

Central Michigan University Chippewas ➤ Kept name with Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe approval, removed Native Americanrelated imagery

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Tony Poillucci, vice president, creative director and senior strategist at VisionPoint Marketing, a highereducation marketing agency, echoes Ruoff ’s suggestion. His own organization involves as many stakeholders as possible in the decision-making process. Talk to alumni early and often, Poillucci says, but don’t try to market to them or sell them on the idea that change will be easy. Getting more stakeholders involved may be difficult, expensive and could take a bit longer; however, it will also be more effective. The College of William & Mary was not on the NCAA’s list of offenders, but it chose to remove some of its Native American imagery that went along with its Tribe moniker to abide by the new regulations. The school removed feathers from its logo, but retained the nickname. Joel Pattison, director of strategy at mStoner, a higher-education marketing communications agency, worked in William & Mary’s creative services department in 2008 and 2009 and remembers a “pretty big” backlash from alumni when the NCAA announced the guidelines. “Many people felt like the institution should have fought harder against the NCAA. That was the first point of umbrage people had: ‘Why did you allow them to do this to us?’ ” Pattison says. “That was a period where there was a little bit of anarchy. That’s why the president [Taylor Reveley] decided fairly early on in his tenure that a new mascot was something we needed to get on the same page about as a community. This is something we need for the good of the college. We needed to help unify people.” The quest for a unifying image led to what Pattison calls a comprehensive mascot search campaign. He says more than 800 people representing 44 states and Washington, D.C., suggested a mascot idea through the university’s website, with about 50% of total participation coming from alumni. During the 30-day comment period for the five finalists, William & Mary’s website had 17,000 unique visits and more than 11,000 individuals provided feedback. Throughout the process, the school posted updates to its website. The school made it clear that the new mascot was not up to a vote, Pattison says, to avoid any outrageous new mascots (“Like a brick,” Pattison says of one suggested mascot. “Bricky the Brick.”). “We were careful to say, ‘We want your feedback, we want your thoughts, we want your comments, but we’re not setting up a poll,’” Pattison says. “We’re not setting up a voter situation, so we’re not stuck with something

Catawba College Indians ➤ Changed name to Catawba Indians (vs. just Indians) with approval from Catawba Indian Nation

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Midwestern State University Indians ➤ Changed to Mustangs

Marketers tend to believe that if they repeat something enough or make it look nice enough, people will come around to the new brand. That isn’t always the case. that doesn’t represent the institution and the way that the institution wants to be represented. … People just want to be heard, and they want the chance to feel like they contributed, and they care about their alma mater. They want to know that it’s a two-way street.” Rich Whipkey, principal at Waybetter Marketing, a higher-education enrollment management company, says schools in transition need to have an empathy component to the marketing of a new mascot, name or imagery. “You don’t want to be the Washington Redskins,” Whipkey says of the controversially named NFL team. “You have got be strong-willed about this. It’s going to create waves, but you’ve got to stick to it. You have to show some compassion and feel [alumni’s] pain to achieve where you want to go. Nobody likes change.” Whipkey says marketers tend to believe that if they repeat something enough or make it look nice enough, people will come around to the new brand, but he warns that this isn’t always the case. “There’s got to be an element to it where you just say, ‘Change is never easy. It’s not easy for us, but it doesn’t change who we are. It’s only going to change who we become,’ ” Whipkey says. Undergraduate college years are formative, Poillucci says, and a lot of warm and fuzzy memories are formed during Saturday football games, tailgating and taking photos with the school mascot. “[Schools] should expect disappointment and anger,” Poillucci says. “They should also empathize with it. It’s okay that people are hurt and angry and disappointed. That’s part of life. Respect it and let them know you understand. Let them express themselves and get it all out. Then let the healing begin.”

Indiana UniversityPennsylvania Indians ➤ Changed to Crimson Hawks

Bradley University Braves ➤ Kept nickname, changed mascot to a gargoyle named Kaboom!

Cobranding College and Culture Shaping the Rookie Season

Alumni may be the biggest challenge to rebranding, experts say, but prospective and current students could be a school’s greatest ally during the transition. A new brand’s formative years are key. The rookie brand should be prevalent around campus and on other platforms so the community can get familiar with it. After William & Mary considered its options and heard from the community, it introduced Griffin as its new mascot, a half-lion, half-eagle character that nods to the school’s British and U.S. history. The school hosted a launch event on campus for Griffin that was attended by a crowd of about 700, with even more able to watch via YouTube. Pattison says the #WMmascot hashtag trended on Twitter in Northern Virginia for 24 hours after the announcement. The school even used the new mascot to continue honing its master brand. Pattison says the school sometimes has a stodgy or uptight reputation, likely due to its royal British founding in 1693. The college chose to get in on some jokes about the Griffin, particularly the theory that the character’s bottom lion half makes him appear pantsless. In response, the school introduced its first-ever iPhone app: Dress the Griffin. “Things like the app that were a little bit whimsical showed that we’re not taking ourselves too seriously,” Pattison says. “We’re not getting uptight about the fact that you think our mascot has no pants on. That helped the brand.”

Blocking the Kick

Some schools, despite their work to move forward, continue to wrestle with a major hurdle from their old logos: copyright issues. The University of North Dakota continues to sell products with its old Fighting Sioux logo. Under UND’s settlement with the NCAA, the school has to maintain the copyright over the old imagery. “Our lawyers tell us that the only way to do that is to make some commercial use of the logo,” says UND’s Johnson. “It’s a bit of a Catch-22. We’re not supposed to use it, but we have to use it to retain ownership.” The school most recently released what it calls the Dacotah Legacy Collection, which uses the Fighting Sioux logo and name. Johnson says the school has worked to modify and limit the number of items available in the line. The Associated Press reports that some products from the Legacy Collection sold out within hours of being released in early 2016. Prior to releasing the new logo, former Interim UND President Ed Schafer told the AP that people were holding on to the old one because there was no alternative.

University of LouisianaMonroe Indians ➤ Changed to Warhawks

Some schools, such as the University of Utah and Florida State University, have had cobranding success by working with a local tribe. FSU received a waiver from the NCAA because the school had the approval of the local Seminole Tribe of Florida to use its name and certain imagery. The school offers courses on Native American history, and the sports teams’ logo and uniforms were altered upon consultation with the tribe. It is, however, worth noting that the far more populous Seminole Nation of Oklahoma officially resolved in October 2013 that it “condemns the use of all American Indian sports-team mascots in the public school system, by college- and university-level and by professional sports teams.” Central Michigan University also won a waiver from the NCAA, which allowed it to keep its Chippewas nickname. The school has worked with the local Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe to make its brand more appropriate and less appropriated. CMU teams now sport a flying C, having dropped the arrows and feathers of previous imagery. The cobranding efforts between the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe and the school are vast, but they all focus on the school’s master brand: education. Erik Rodriguez, public relations director for the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, says the tribe reaches out to students through presentations and other educational events. The brochures or programs for the school’s athletics show respectful ways of face painting that wouldn’t be considered derogatory or offensive to Native Americans. The Saginaw Chippewa tribe even advertises its local cultural center, which is only a 10-minute drive from the school. Not only is the CMU community invited to learn more about the tribe, but opposing teams and their fans learn about the culture as well. The school has had challenges with unofficial apparel; however, it’s come from other teams’ fans. Rodriguez and Heather Smith, director of communications at CMU, note an incident that occurred about a year ago when an offensive T-shirt surfaced online. CMU students called out the shirt on social media and alerted the university, which then reached out to the rival school to rectify the issue. “There have been issues like that where they’re really taking the lead to make sure that inadvertent or advertent racism is not part of what the student experience is all about,” Rodriguez says of CMU. Whipkey applauded CMU and its work with the Saginaw Chippewa tribe, in particular for its ability to unite and educate. “Central Michigan seems like a winner,” Whipkey says. “You’re going to have minimal disruptions with the alumni base, and you’re actually going to become more inclusive. Having the tribe come in and talk to students, educate students—that’s fantastic.”

University of Utah Utes ➤ Changed mascot to Swoop, a red-tailed hawk, in 1996 and continues to use Utes nickname with approval from the Ute Tribal Council

McMurry University Indians ➤ Changed to War Hawks

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Retired University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign mascot Chief Illiniwek.

Even when the school or its licensed distributors aren’t releasing merchandise with old imagery themselves, some unlicensed manufacturers have done so. Martin says retailers near Arkansas State have been known to release merchandise with the former logo, and it’s not unusual for alumni from any school to wear their old apparel at games. Ruoff says there will always be huge variations on the spirit brand and plenty of unlicensed merchandise that takes extreme liberties with the brands. She says schools need to think in terms of density: There should be more of the new brand than the old. “The new brand has to be out there in the majority of the channels to really signify a shift,” Ruoff says. “The school needs to say, ‘This is the mark, this is the mascot going forward.’ The best thing would be saturation—how much of the new mascot is out there, versus the old one. It has to be significantly heavier.” While UND continues to juggle its old merchandise with new, it’s also trying to work the new imagery into its hockey arena. NCAA representatives have toured the facility, Johnson says, and understand that certain changes will take some time, while other changes may never occur. For instance, Fighting Sioux insignia carpeting won’t be

Carthage College Redmen ➤ Changed to Red Men

University of Illinois-Champaign Illini ➤ Kept nickname, removed mascot and imagery. No new mascot has been chosen.

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changed out until it wears down. There are also logos embedded into the building’s marble that the NCAA isn’t expecting the arena to remove and replace. “We’ll continue to look at how we can infiltrate it,” Johnson says. “Unfortunately, it would take significant dollars to just make wholesale changes, given the budget reality.”

Fumbling the Pass

One collegiate athletic team in particular, of Big Ten Conference affiliation, has run into roadblocks in its branding transition. The University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign removed Chief Illiniwek as its mascot in 2007 and has yet to find a replacement. Jay Rosenstein, a professor in the department of media and cinema studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana– Champaign, says there is a hope that a new mascot would reduce the attachment of fans and others to the ousted chief. Interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson announced plans in May to appoint a steering committee to choose a new mascot, with the hopes that it would help build school spirit and loyalty. The effort never moved forward and a new chancellor was named this fall. Unlike other schools, University of Illinois didn’t have to drop its nickname—because the Illini Tribe doesn’t actually exist. It was a nickname for the Illinois Confederacy, which was, as Rosenstein explains, a loose grouping of tribes that once lived in the Illinois region.

Arkansas State University Indians ➤ Changed to Red Wolves

Southeastern Oklahoma State University Savages ➤ Changed to Savage Storm

“I call it the ESPN ‘SportsCenter’ test. Are you going to come up with a mascot that’s going to be mocked on ‘SportsCenter’ or embraced on ‘SportsCenter?’ ” Rosenstein posits that the school hasn’t done a better job at handling the shift out of fear—specifically fear of upsetting and offending alumni who loved Chief Illiniwek and all of the school’s traditions that went along with him. “From a marketing point of view, I would say what Illinois has done has been a complete disaster,” Rosenstein says. “You have this former symbol that you no longer can really market, and you haven’t replaced it with anything. That created a big marketing and promotional hole. One of the reasons why the former chancellor was pushing to bring in a new mascot was so you could have something that you could market. She looked at the ways in which other universities market their mascot and they get all sorts of value by doing that.” Poillucci says he empathizes with the leaders and other stakeholders at institutions that are stuck somewhere between brands, considering the sensitivity and politics of the subject. “The schools who have still not addressed the issue—the ones still loafing in the middle—risk being perceived as indecisive and weak; neither of which are attributes you want to associate with your brand, never mind your athletics program,” Poillucci says. There are numerous implications to not rebranding. Whipkey warns that if fans and others aren’t given something new, they’ll just cling to the past, which could actually be worse than stumbling during a new Mississippi College Choctaws ➤ Kept with approval from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, retired their mascot

rollout. “If you fumble a new rollout, at least you’re making progress,” Whipkey argues. “You might have done it in a haphazard way, but to do nothing means you haven’t even moved from the starting block yet. Is a lack of a strategy a strategy? I don’t think so.” Reinventing the brand is an enormous opportunity for a school and its athletic organization, but it can be easily wasted. Ruoff says an institution must move past an inappropriate mascot or nickname, but it shouldn’t be at the risk of something generic that the community can’t build support and spirit behind. She jokes that birds are often the default mascot for schools. “We see it as such a missed opportunity,” Ruoff says. “It’s tough to build pride and affinity, particularly among alums who are used to this old mascot, when you’ve got an almost generic one.” Ruoff and others say shifting to a mascot, nickname or other imagery that has a localized or historical bent, as William & Mary did, is a great option. Lewis says he used to give an assignment to his students to choose any college or university and give it a new nickname. One of the best he saw was the University of Illinois Rail-Splitters. The name brought together the relevance of famed Illinois resident Abraham Lincoln being a rail-splitter, along with it being a term used in electrical engineering, an expertise for which the school is known. Lewis says it’s a creative option, rather than defaulting to yet another Wildcats or Lions. He cautions against choosing a nickname or logo that would be easy to ridicule. “I call it the ESPN ‘SportsCenter’ test,” Lewis says. “Are you going to come up with a mascot that’s going to be mocked on ‘SportsCenter’ or embraced on ‘SportsCenter?’ ” Ruoff says school athletic brands could also look outside of the mascot to drum up team spirit. She points to The Ohio State University, where she argues the O-H-I-O chant is just as popular as the athletics mascot, Brutus the Buckeye. “If the school doesn’t have those elements, you can build them authentically over time, and you can try lots of different ones to see what sticks, instead of it being forced,” Ruoff says. “It doesn’t have to be so mascot-centric. It can be based on the experience or based on another historical element that isn’t controversial that can be brought to life. See if that sticks. “It’s so critical to put stuff out there, see what people gravitate toward and then promote that heavily.” A school looking to rebrand needs the community cheering it on. m

Newberry College Indians ➤ Changed to Wolves

Florida State University Seminoles ➤ Kept with approval from Florida Seminole Tribe.

University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux ➤ Changed to Fighting Hawks

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Each year, brand exececutives from all over the globe pore over a simple collection of facts complied by a trio of researchers at a small Midwestern liberal arts college. Their work, known as the Mindset List, has been incorporated into sales presentations and customer relations policies. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a map for marketers, which can capture the precise moment the recent past becomes the distant past, and suggest a path toward the future. By Zach Brooke

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oughly two decades ago, Cadillac bowed to changing market preferences and unveiled a full-size luxury SUV called the Escalade, while a French-born IranianAmerican working in California launched a digital swap meet website called eBay and HBO debuted a new sitcom that unabashedly explored the sex lives of four single women living in New York. It was also around this time that the college class of 2020 was born. 48

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The current crop of freshmen have grown up in a world where the aforementioned products, once hailed as revolutionary, are now considered part of the establishment, or even passé. Underclassmen might note the existence of these items in passing—relics of the period of mass folly when their parents were considered cool—but they are certainly not wowed by them. Five years from now, incoming freshmen might not even be aware they existed. Such is the raison d’être behind The Beloit College Mindset List, a 19-year look at the frame of mind possessed by America’s youth the moment they came of college age. The list is the brainchild of Ron Nief, director of public affairs emeritus at Beloit College, and Tom McBride, a retired professor of English. Two years ago they added sociology professor Charles Westerberg. The list is a compilation of historical events and chronological bookends occurring around the time college freshmen were born. First released in 1998, the list has been updated every year since and has captured the attention of professionals from all lines of work, marketers included. And though it purports to be an authoritative roadmap of modern youth identity, its intended target has always been adults. “The list was not initially designed to be targeted at the students it was talking about. It was for the professors, and that continues to be true,” Westerberg says. The genesis of the Mindset List came about with the rise of the world wide web. In those early days, Nief and McBride happened upon several chain e-mails disparaging Generation X over their ignorance of obsolete technology and long-ago cultural touch points. “We were seeing these lists constantly, and Tom and I started sharing them and laughing about them, and then we realized that this is all wrong, that this is

not what they don’t know. It’s what they have never experienced,” Nief says. The generational put-downs being circulated on the early web created a eureka moment for Nief and McBride. What if they compiled a list of events and cultural changes occurring right before the birth of incoming freshman in order to pinpoint the “Big Bang” of their worldview? By keeping track of where students entered America’s cultural time line, schools could prevent the so-called “hardening of the references” that were prone to tenured graybeards of academia. McBride had witnessed the generational erosion of collective recall unfold in his classrooms firsthand. “I first came to Beloit and taught Shakespeare during the Watergate scandal. The Watergate scandal had a certain Shakespearean grandeur to it. I thought it was just great, it was a great time to teach Shakespeare, but 20 … 25 years later I couldn’t use those references without explaining them, and even if I did explain them, they just didn’t have the resonance,” he says. “The past is a foreign country,” adds Nief.

ENTER BRANDMAN

The first Mindset List debuted in 1998, chronicling disarming factoids about the life experiences of incoming underclassmen slated to graduate in 2002. The first three entries were: 1. The people starting college this fall across the nation were born in 1980. 2. They have no meaningful recollection of the era of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and did not know he had ever been shot. 3. They were prepubescent when the Persian Gulf War was waged. For a nation still steeped in the cultural legacy of the 1980s and early ‘90s, which could vividly remember the mass media event accompanying its first incursion into Iraq, the list struck a chord. Here was evidence of a creeping irrelevance enveloping the freshness of the collective past, standing in sharp relief when contrasted against the hordes of freshmen matriculating through institutions of higher learning.

Since its inception, the list has included items about consumer trends, prominent brands and technological changes. Without necessarily meaning to, the Mindset List identified marketing as a major driver of culture over the past two decades. And it wasn’t only politics that comprised the list. Since its inception, the list has included items about consumer trends, prominent brands and technological changes. Without necessarily meaning to, the Mindset List identified marketing as a major driver of culture over the past two decades. “It very much indicates that brands have a tremendous hold on culture. If you look for examples of the leading American brands in 1964 or 1970, you would say, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, General Foods, General Electric, maybe IBM. What is it now? Amazon. Microsoft. Google. Walmart. Facebook,” says McBride. “You can trace what’s happening in our culture by looking at leading brands now, as opposed to leading brands then.” Almost immediately, the media took note of what Nief and McBride were doing. Soon, they were being flown to New York for sit-down interviews on the “Today Show.” Marketers were a mere half-step behind. Nief can recall the first time an adman contacted him, shortly after an initial round of press interviews. It was a marketer with MTV, and he wanted to use the Mindset List as part of his presentation to Ford. “It was the first serious phone call that [told me], ‘Something is clicking here, something has made an impact,’ ” Nief says. “He explained that they had been trying to sell MTV to Ford for quite

some time, and … that they had to get across that Ford had to advertise in a different way to this MTV generation.” Today, the Mindset List is still capturing young people’s attitudes toward automobiles, noting that, while the Escalade, a status symbol SUV, has been around throughout the entirety of their lifespans, freshmen just aren’t that into it, or any other type of car. “This is a big marketing issue. [Millennials] are not an ownership generation. They’re not interested in owning things,” says McBride. “They’re interested in having experiences and using things. They’re into sharing things. One of the things that studies are showing is that millennials will save to go on a trip. Once upon a time you saved to buy a used Pontiac or a used Oldsmobile. They’re not saving for that,” he says, noting that many millennials live in urban areas where a car isn’t necessary. Another request came from Neiman Marcus. Former CEO and chairman of the board, Stanley Marcus, then in his 90s, reached out to Nief and McBride personally. “He indicated that he saw great value in the list for the training program for new sales personnel in his stores. He wanted permission to distribute the list to all his employees to remind them that if they wanted to reach a new generation of consumers, they needed to be cognizant of change,” Nief says.

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Since then, they’ve learned it’s not only MTV and Neiman Marcus that care about young adults. The trio has kept an active calendar of speaking engagements, delivering presentations about the Mindset List to audiences that range from the NCAA to NASA to hedge fund managers.

RISE OF THE MILLENNIALS

The freshmen Nief and McBride first reported on in 1998 fell into the tail end of Generation X and are now approaching 40. Since then, the Mindset List charted wave after wave of the subsequent generation: millennials. The quest to understand millennials has become a cause célèbre for marketers for close to a decade, and a quick look at the numbers reveals why. “There are about 70 million millennials right now, and if each one of them over their lifetimes spends a million dollars commercially, that’s $70 trillion. That’s a lot of money,” McBride says. It’s not just the size of the millennial generation that has marketers

scrambling. The changing values and notions of success are shaking up traditional marketing models. “If you go back to the generation that, before millennials, was the most troublesome and generationally solid, that would have been the boomers,” says McBride, who is a boomer himself. “How did I interact with commercial life? I sat on the couch and waited for a TV commercial to hit me. … In terms of marketing, we were dogs. They came to us said, ‘Here, Fido. Bone!’ But these millennials, they’re cats. They come to you on the internet.” “When they’re ready,” adds Nief. While millennials are pickier about responding to brands, or at least the products they are attached to, the generation is far more engrossed in branding relationships than any who have come before. “Millennials live in a world of brands. Instagram, BuzzFeed, Facebook, Twitter,” says McBride. “I don’t think young people lived on General Motors. I don’t think young people lived on Sears. They bought

things from General Motors, they bought things from Sears, but General Motors and Sears were, relative to today, ancillary to their daily lifestyles. This is not true of the big high-tech companies and websites. … It’s the difference between buying a product and living on a product.” The immersion is creating both heightened expectations and apathy from millennial consumers. “Many people understand that millennials really like authenticity. They don’t like phonies. But trying to figure out what is authentic is very hard,” he says.

THINGS FALL APART

As tempting as it is to paint all upcoming generations—millennials, especially—in large blocs with broad brush strokes, that doesn’t mesh with what demographers are seeing. In some ways, the bonds of generational status and worldview transcend the most historically significant dividers, such as language, ethnicity and class. Once in a while, this looming uniformity will pop up in

For as long as Nief, McBride and Westerberg have been putting together the Mindset List, they’ve included marketing-related milestones. Here are a few of the seachanges brought about by marketing campaigns over the years. CLASS OF 2002 • They have always known red M&Ms, and blue ones are not new. They don’t know there used to be beige ones. • They never heard the terms “Where’s the Beef?” or “I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel.” • They’ve never eaten McDonald’s in Styrofoam containers. • They can’t imagine what hard contact lenses are. • They have no idea when or why Jordache jeans were cool. • They have always had cable. CLASS OF 2006 • They have always been able to choose their long-distance carriers. • Cyberspace has always existed. • Barbie has always had a job. • George Foreman has always been a barbecue grill salesman.

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CLASS OF 2010 • Text messaging is their e-mail. • Reality shows have always been on television. • Green tea has always been marketed for health purposes. • Acura, Lexus and Infiniti have always been luxury cars of choice. • Television stations have never concluded the broadcast day with the national anthem. CLASS OF 2014 • American companies have always done business in Vietnam. • Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM drive. CLASS OF 2018 • Ads for prescription drugs, noting their disturbing side effects, have always flooded the airwaves. • Whether to embrace fat in their diet or spurn it has been a front-page debate all their lives. • Parents have always been able to rely on a ratings system to judge violence on TV. • They have probably never used Netscape as their web browser.

In some ways, the bonds of generational status and worldview transcend the most historically significant dividers, such as language, ethnicity and class. the Mindset List. In 2010, the list noted that few freshmen knew how to write in cursive, which elicited media requests from around the globe. “One afternoon I did back-to-back interviews with Cape Town and Hong Kong,” Nief says. “They thought the disappearance of the ability to write in cursive was a local development there, and they were surprised to find out this is true in Beloit, Wisconsin, as well as in China and South Africa.” But in many ways, millennials aren’t only different from preceding generations; they are estranged from one another, too. This year’s list notes that for every year the class of 2020 has been alive, more than a million Hispanics have been added to the U.S. population. The same navel-gazing that’s going on at the national level about America’s evolving cultural heritage and shared points of identity is playing out every year in Beloit as the list is assembled. “There’s an extent to which the Mindset List, in the name of trying to have a wide outreach, might be a little too general and a little too ethnically vanilla, if you will. That’s certainly one limitation,” says McBride. An indirect acknowledgment of the distance between the list and many readers’ realities shows up in the form of Mindset List variations. In the past, the authors have helped put together specific Mindset Lists for African-Americans, Mumbaikars, New Zealanders and Jamaicans. These culturally curated versions, reminiscent of city- or college campus-based editions of Monopoly, suggest the greatest touch points in

many populations exist outside the predominant culture. “If you’re going to market to this particular demographic cohort, you might have to learn stuff that is very unique to them, and make references that are quite unique to them. There are probably a lot of parallel cultures around this country. For all of the internet connections we have, we are, in many ways, in these different cultural and demographic channels,” McBride says. “This is a nation that now lacks that kind of central cultural authority. Everything is up for grabs in terms of multiculturalism, diversity, identity politics and so forth and so on. … I don’t think we should be surprised that e pluribus unum doesn’t work the way it used to.” Another radical departure in common cultural focal points comes from the loss of shared experience of media or entertainment. Nief, McBride and Westerberg have identified this year’s freshmen as the first class of students to grow up without appointment infotainment—the need to be in front of a screen at a specific time in order to watch a specific program. As they write in their guide for the class of 2020 list, “Thus millennials may be the first generation that does not have to show up on time.”

HATERS GONNA HATE

So much stock has been placed in the list over the years (and its seemingly random collection of vaguely relevant minutiae) that it’s generated its share of pushback from detractors. Satirical news site The Onion has created mock versions of the Mindset List for years, which the team wears, without irony, as a badge of honor.

A more scathing critique of the list emerged via WordPress, on the website beloitmindlessness.com. The central argument of the authors, two anonymous writers claiming to be college professors, is summed up under a tab called Why the Beloit Mindset List Must Be Destroyed. “In fact, the List is a poorly written compendium of trivia, stereotypes and lazy generalizations, insulting to both students and their professors, and based on nothing more than the uninformed speculation of its authors. It inspires lazy, inaccurate journalism and is an embarrassment to academia,” the authors write. Attempts to contact the authors of the site for this story were met with requests for anonymity, which were not granted. Nief, McBride and Westerberg respond to this line of thinking by saying the list was never intended to be anything beyond a conversation starter. The significance of societal change and the impact of lost touch points was something they were pointing out, not divining grand meaning from. “Everyone is trying to figure out or orient themselves around the list, and given the breadth of speaking engagements and interest groups, anyone who is conscious of these generational shifts has a take on the lists, whether for good or for ill. But that’s the evolution: understanding this starting point and how it’s morphed over time,” says Mindset List newcomer Westerberg. “People are going to react to it differently, and one of the things that I enjoy watching is when someone says, ‘I really like this item,’ and someone says, ‘Why? That one seems stupid to me.’ Then what we hope happens is happening because they’ve taken the bait.” How will the tectonic cultural shifts and accelerating fragmentation of American culture affect brands’ ability to target and connect with the next generation of consumers? By their own admission, the authors of the Mindset List don’t know. They’re just asking questions. It’s up to marketers to answer them. At least with the Mindset List, they will have a map. m

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HOW T IMMIGRAN MARKETERS BECOME AMERICAN MARKETERS NICK O C L A H Y B

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W W WOOORRRRRRYYY SSSEEETTT IIINNN FFFOOORRR PPPOOOLLLIIINNNAAA HHHAAARRRYYYAAACCCHHHAAA... She had two marketing degrees from Ukraine—a bachelor’s and a master’s—a marketing certificate from UCLA and a marketing job in America that she loved, but lawyers told her there was a 50-50 chance she’d be forced to leave the U.S. “I got really sad because I liked the job, and I wanted to stay here,” she says. Haryacha’s coin-flip odds to stay stateside came because of the H-1B, a non-immigrant visa that allows foreigners to work in the U.S. for three years. Her attorney, Fiona Brook, received an expansive request for evidence from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that asked why Haryacha’s role as a marketing product manager should be considered a “specialty occupation” that requires “technical or theoretical expertise,” all H-1B requirements. Haryacha’s heart sunk; “It was really bad,” she says, figuring the request meant her chance of staying had dropped. It’s not easy to be an international marketer attempting to secure a U.S. visa, which is “won” via a lottery. Each January, Brook starts working with clients to file their applications, a time-consuming process that can cost between $4,000 and $5,000. By April, they’re filed; applicants’ fates are not determined until June or July. “You don’t know where you stand,” Brook says. “You don’t know if you need to give up your apartment, your car, your

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friends, your accounts. If you didn’t make the quota, you have to make alternative plans, either to change your visa or … a lot of clients will just study further, just extend their student visa.” In the end, Haryacha was lucky. She was one of 85,000 who won the H-1B lottery (65,000 of whom were bachelor’s degree holders or those with equal work experience, and 20,000 of whom had a master’s degree or doctorate) and works as a senior product marketing manager at My.com. However, with the number of H-1B applications on the rise, odds for future marketers to win may be shrinking. In 2014, 172,500 applications were submitted to USCIS; in 2015, it was 233,000, and in 2016, 236,000 applications. All told, there’s a one-in-three chance at success for foreign marketers who want to chase the American Dream.

WIN SOME, LOSE SOME

TJ Lim was lucky, too; he won his visa while working as a senior analyst of marketing analytics at Fidelity Investments. Lim arrived from the Philippines after being accepted to Yale University, then earned his master’s in marketing analytics at Bentley University before going to the Wharton School of Business for his MBA. Lim’s Wharton classmate Shin-Yi Lim (no relation) wasn’t as fortunate. She came to the U.S. from Malaysia and received a bachelor’s degree in biological chemistry from the University of Chicago and an MBA from Wharton, where she specialized in marketing and operations management. After accepting a job from Microsoft in 2013, Shin-Yi Lim applied for the 2014 H-1B lottery. After months of nervously waiting for good news, she was not selected in the lottery. Shin-Yi sighed when asked about the process, betraying her frustration and uncertainty felt during the process. “For a country that’s run on merits, it’s hard to process and comprehend that it all comes down to a lottery, a blind lottery, and it doesn’t matter how many years you’ve been here,” she says. “I spent seven years of my adult life in the U.S. … I waited all the way up to the end of May before my lawyer said, ‘Yep, almost definitely you aren’t getting the visa.’”

She shifted to “Plan B,” moving to Canada to work at Microsoft’s Vancouver office, but found the country’s visa process would take too long. On to “Plan C”: Microsoft’s Singapore office, where she stayed for 15 months before winning a spot in the following year’s H-1B lottery and moving to Seattle. She considers herself lucky to have a job, especially at a large U.S. company, but remains frustrated by the lottery. The Importance of H-1B in Modern Marketing The H-1B is America’s “secret weapon,” said theoretical physicist and futurist Michio Kaku at a 2011 SAP event. “Without the H-1B, the scientific establishment of this country would collapse. Forget about Google, forget about Silicon Valley, there would be no Silicon Valley without the H-1B. And you know what the H-1B is? It’s the genius visa,” he said. “The United States is a magnet sucking up all the brains of the world, but now the brains are going back. They’re going back to China. They’re going back to India and people are saying, ‘Oh my god, there’s a Silicon Valley in India now! There’s a Silicon Valley in China now.’ DUH! Where did it come from? It came from the United States.” Marketing’s scientific and technological growth has been undeniable in recent years. As tech grows, data scientists and techies are drawn to the industry by its lucrative uses of Big Data and its desire for innovation. A Venture Beat report found the average company will increase its marketing analytics budget by 73% in the next three years, an expansion that is closer to 100% for big B-to-C companies.

HHH---111BBB’’’SSSH HIHSITISOSTRTYOORRYY The H-1B visa program began as part of the Immigration Act of 1990 (IMMACT). Congress initially set the number of available visas to 65,000, but that number expanded to 195,000 in 2001, according to VisaNow, before shrinking back down to 65,000 in 2004 by order of former President George W. Bush’s administration. Many people believed H-1B took jobs away from U.S. workers. Bush also signed the L-1 Visa and H-1B Visa Reform Act of 2004 into law, which is a salary standard set by industry expectations to quell those intent on hiring foreign workers at a lower rate. An additional 20,000 visas are available for those who graduated with a doctorate or master’s degree from a U.S. university. Most end up going to STEM fields—science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Globalization has also become a focus in marketing as international companies evangelize their brands across the world. Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, wrote on Forbes.com that when companies visit college campuses to meet with graduate and doctoral students, they often find that more than half the study body is foreign-born. While there are no marketing-specific statistics, top MBA programs for marketers boast high international numbers. Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, ranked as the No. 1 marketing graduate program by U.S. News and World Report, says more than 30% of its students are from outside of the country. Wharton at University of Pennsylvania, ranked No. 2 by the same report, boasts an alumni network across 153 countries and six continents. “Would it make sense for U.S. companies to ignore such a large pool of talent if they want to compete globally?” Anderson wrote. “It is a reasonable question, and most companies would say it would not make sense to ignore this talent pool.” Marketers know the follies of randomly carried-out or poorly planned campaigns. Pick an arbitrary campaign slogan, color scheme and target audience? Be prepared for terrible ROI. However, in the ultimate irony, the visa that allows students across measurable fields to work stateside is predicated on a randomized lottery. Degrees, work and knowledge only matter to a point; after applying for H-1B, randomness reigns supreme.

THE PROCESS FOR MARKETERS TO WIN AN H-1B VISA

Filing for an H-1B visa is difficult for well-qualified STEM professionals, and it’s no different for marketers. Haryacha’s application process was so frustrating that she wrote a lengthy LinkedIn article after she won the lottery to give other international marketers hope and advice on improving their chances. “Make sure your immigration lawyer has substantial experience with filing H-1B applications for marketing positions,” she wrote as a general tip. “It’s even better if he or she has a track record of success stories involving RFEs [requests for evidence] for complex marketing cases.” Brook, her attorney, has that desired track record, as she’s represented a multitude of marketers in H-1B cases. Brook “knows the pain” of the immigrant worker, as she came to the U.S. from South Africa years ago on an H-1B visa. Historically, marketers have a tough time obtaining an H-1B, Brook says. They often receive thick booklets requesting evidence for why marketing or public relations positions are “professional.” Brook says USCIS requests would ask, “Why do you need a degree?” or “Can’t someone who is really sharp and has years of experience do the same job duties?”

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“I haven’t seen that lately because the industry has evolved so much,” Brook says. “Digital and social media has made it very specialized. Immigration now sees that you really do need people in these kinds of professional positons.” H-1B visas require candidates to have a bachelor’s degree, or foreign equivalent degree, or equivalent work experience. This ends up being a “complicated formula,” Brook says, which makes the process especially tricky for marketers, who don’t necessarily need a specific marketing degree to get a specialized job in the field. After graduation, with a year of visa-free optional practical training between, young hopefuls file for the H-1B visa. Sometimes, they’re accepted. Two-thirds of the time, they’re rejected straightaway. “[I] go back to [clients] and say, ‘I’m sorry, it wasn’t accepted. It was a random lottery.’ Then they have to scramble,” she says. “Do they leave? Do they study more? Do they look at other options? I’ve had people change to tourist visas, I’ve had people get married. You really have to scramble to get yourself in status. People don’t want to break the law.” A lottery win means people are cleared for work for three years with a three-year extension available without having to re-enter another year’s lottery. Green card applications for permanent residency can be filed during the six years of the H-1B. If these applications are filed before the fifth year, Brook says the H-1B can continue to extend beyond six years. However, this can be a double-edged sword, as she’s

LLOOTTTTEERRYY LLAW AWSSUUIITTSS There have been at least two lawsuits filed against USCIS in the past year in an effort to better understand H-1B’s lottery. In the most recent case, filed in 2016, Tenrec, Inc. v. USCIS, Parrilli and Renison’s EntryLaw.com website says: “The purpose of the class action lawsuit is to allow those with rejected H-1B petitions the opportunity to re-submit petitions and receive a place in line ahead of those who file for the first time at a later date. This remedy would provide ‘priority’ for next fiscal year’s H-1B numbers to those who had filed for an H-1B this year, or in previous years, and were not selected in the random lottery.” Another lawsuit, filed by American Immigration Council and Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym, Ltd. in 2016, seeks more information about how the electronic selection process of the H-1B lottery process works and if all the lottery numbers are properly allocated.

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had clients on H-1B visas waiting for a green card for more than a decade due to backlogs from their home country, most commonly China or India. “It’s very frustrating,” Brook says. “They’re stuck in jobs. Obviously the expense and ability to travel and so many things are impacted. But it is a bridge and it will allow you to extend your H-1B if you filed it in time while you wait for your green card.” Marcelo Barros, international career expert and author of The International Advantage: Get Noticed. Get Hired!, says he’s seen more marketers win H-1Bs in recent years as companies focus on globalizing. This has led to a greater need for marketers who know the international market. “Marketing is all about analytics these days,” he says. “Analytics is statically driven; it’s math-based. A lot of international students will play very well in that space. They’re very strong in that. … I do feel the trends in marketing—analytics, globalization—completely favor international students.” How can international marketers take advantage? Typically, it starts when candidates find a job that aligns with their interests, he says, usually with a company that is expanding into new markets and knows an international marketer may have expertise that’s “worth sponsoring.” These jobs have become easier to find with the increase of corporations and worldwide marketing initiatives, Barros says. Even so, the rising ease in attaining marketing jobs gives an advantage to students only if they “fully exploit those opportunities,” Barros says. Some do, some do not. “The students who don’t succeed are often not maximizing the opportunities that are there for them,” he says. “Either because they’re not aware of [them], or they’re not being coached in the most effective way possible. Or they’re just simply unprepared to capitalize on what’s available. … This means a lot of networking and identification of high-growth companies that have a need or want for international expansion.”

PREPARING FOR LIFE AFTER UNIVERSITY

Many international workers start their training in U.S. universities. NAFSA: Association for International Educators found there were 974,926 international students stateside during the 2014-2015 school year, up from 886,052 in 20132014. To put that in perspective, there is a total of 20.5 million students attending universities in fall 2016, per the National Center for Educational Statistics. Angela Lee, chair of Kellogg’s marketing department, has a simple philosophy for preparing students for life after school: “We teach them, that’s how we prepare them.” This preparation needs to be based in reality, as international students must know about the uphill battle they face to stay in the U.S., Lee says.

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Some companies simply don’t want to take the risk of hiring a visa worker. If an American and a foreign marketer are in the running for a job, it will likely go to the American, Lee says. No company will admit this due to the possibility of discrimination, but cheaper transition costs matter; it’s a “huge investment” for companies to hire, train and apply for H-1B visas for foreign employees, she says. “Now, of course, if someone is clearly better and is an established team member of the company, then companies would be willing to go out of their way to help this candidate apply for the work permit or residency,” she says, adding that different companies have their own hiring practices. TJ Lim, who now works as director of client strategy at UBS, says Wharton was honest about what he’d be up against in the U.S. job market. The school gave him access to search engines to seek jobs that sponsor international students but warned him that there was a chance he could still lose the lottery, even if he did find a job. Shin-Yi Lim, now working as a campaign business manager at Microsoft, painted a different picture of Wharton’s preparation, saying it took a lot of online searching and speaking with other international students to try and “piece the puzzle together.” Brook says she’s sure “there’s a lot of chatter on campus,” as students she encounters learn the most about H-1B through word-of-mouth and designated student officers. As for interviewing, networking and other career services, Lee says Northwestern’s International Office has resources

that professors simply don’t. Barros agrees; most professors consider career help to be outside of their scope. Career offices are a better resource, but it is a rarity to see companies post job listings for international employees on a university website, he says, let alone forming a relationship with universities for this purpose. However, Kellogg does this by bringing recruiters to campus who are interested in and open to hiring international students in the U.S., according to Lee. Some may be a poor match, but it’s a vital tool in the uphill battle for legal status.

ECONOMY AND CONTROVERSY

One big worry—and many say the visa’s Achilles’ heel— is how many companies try to game the H-1B system. For example, some companies apply for multiple H-1B visas for the same employee under different subsidiary names, Brook says, which is not allowed under the visa’s rules. Those who are found out are disqualified, but many are successful. The New York Times reported that in 2014, more than a third of visas went to outsourcing firms that provide temporary workers for companies like Toys ‘R’ Us and Disney. These firms included Tata Consultancy Service, an IT consulting firm based in India, which won 5,650 visas (6.6% of total H-1Bs) in 2014, and Infosys, also an IT consulting firm based in India, which won 3,454 visas (4% of total H-1Bs). Both firms, which saw their shares of H-1B workers rise nearly 100% from 2005 to 2012, ranked toward the bottom in terms of wage distribution.

AAAALT LT LT LTEEEERRRRNNNNAT AT AT ATIIIIVVVVEEEE OOOOPPPPTTTTIIIIOOOONNNNSSSS TTTTOOOO HHHH----1111BBBB FFFFOOOORRRR IIIINNNNTTTTEEEERRRRNNNNAT AT AT ATIIIIOOOONNNNAAAALLLL M M M MAAAARRRRKKKKEEEETTTTEEEERRRRSSSS There are alternative visas (or options) for international marketers looking to stay stateside, Brook says. For example: • Non-immigrant NAFTA Professional, or TN, visa for citizens of Mexico and Canada • H1B1 visa for citizens of Singapore and Chili • E3 visa for Australian citizens • Specialty occupation H-1B visa for those with exceptional work experience • Certain positions are exempt from the quota, such as work at nonprofit organizations, research education facilities and university work • J-1 visa, or Exchange Visitor non-immigrant visa, can work for those accepted into work- or study-based exchange visitor programs. This visa, however, is much less permanent than the others; J-1 visa-holders would have to return to their home country for two years before finding a bridge to permanent residency. • O-1 Visa for “individuals with extraordinary ability or achievement,” which Brook says is for those who are distinguished in their field via presentations, awards, articles or innovation in research. This is a three-year visa for people with a U.S. job and who “already have a good career and have made their mark.”

MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN 40% AND 50% OF THE VISAS ARE GIVEN TO “OFFSHORE” WORK AT A CHEAPER RATE AS COMPANIES BRING H-1B WINNERS T O THE U.S., TRAIN THEM AND SEND THEM BACK TO THEIR HOME COUNTRY, MAINLY INDIA AND CHINA. Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), says the H-1B is not serving the country as it was intended and is in need of reform. Somewhere between 40% and 50% of the visas are given to “offshore” work at a cheaper rate, he says, as companies bring H-1B winners to the U.S., train them and send them back to their home country, mainly India and China. Companies may save in excess of $20 per hour, but he says they hurt the economy and legitimize the program’s negative reputation of stealing jobs from American workers. “It’s been gradually building over time; it’s been going on more than the past 10 years,” he says. “We first started writing about this problem back in 2006 and it was already a large problem back then.” Instead of continuing in this way, Eisenbrey says immigrant workers should have a sensible path toward permanent residency, the shady tactics of outsourcing companies should be quelled and companies should not be allowed to hire at substantially less than the prevailing wage for the area, industry and position. “If you’re a company looking for a software developer, and the prevailing wage in the area is $120,000 and you advertise for the job at $70,000, your chances of getting somebody not very good are very good,” he says. “You could make the case that ‘I tried to find someone and I couldn’t find them,’ then you bring someone in from overseas at $70,000. You’re undercutting the labor market, you’re denying people who put in a lot of education and have a lot of experience, and this is not a small matter. The chances of discriminating against older employees, women and racial minorities goes way up.”

Eisenbrey says if H-1B was working as intended—to fill a gap in the economy that cannot be found stateside—it would complement U.S. workers. This, in turn, would increase productivity and bolster the economy. “But if it’s really just bringing in somebody who is cheaper, then it’s not helping the economy,” he says. “It’s depressing wages and increasing unemployment here, and it really doesn’t have a benefit to anybody but the company that is getting the higher profit by virtue of using the cheaper worker.”

SHOULD RANDOMNESS STAND?

One commonality among most who discuss the H-1B process is a disdain for the lottery’s randomness: if a certain number pops up, citizenship is granted for the next three years. If it doesn’t, better luck next time. Brook believes this system works to keep some of the brightest, U.S.-educated minds out of the country. Brook suggests dropping the “random quota” as an improvement. “They need to make it all [based] off merit or increase the cap, and maybe they can increase the fee so they could make sure people are serious about applying and not having multiple applications. There’s a lot that can be done, but [it needs to] start with it not being a random number.” Shin-Yi Lim, who initially suffered bad lottery luck, agrees the luck-of-the-draw approach casts too wide a net and misses many talented individuals. The system does not weigh whether a worker has any familiarity with the U.S., she says, so visas are granted to many without stateside experience. “That happened to me, too; I was in Singapore when they put me in the lottery,” she says. “But at the same time, it’s the idea that the number [accepted] has not been revised and reviewed in more than a decade. It’s frustrating.” TJ Lim suggests a system based on supply and demand. Is there greater need for data scientists or marketers one year? Grant that group more H-1B visas. A need for biologists in another year? Allow them more visas. This, he says, would ensure both the quantity and quality of the immigrants entering the U.S. The world is different now, he says, more measured; changing times call for a changed system. “Right now, the reason why things are so oversubscribed is there are certain companies that apply like crazy the minute the process is open,” he says. “A, it’s not fair and B, it’s gaming the system, but it’s also very inefficient for the economy. Not all hope is lost for international marketers looking for work. Haryacha’s story isn’t an exception, Barros says: “There are a lot of stories like that. It depends on the student’s ability to capitalize on what’s out there.” However, Brook says the randomness must be addressed and “brought into line with modern times.” “They really need to start again with it because they’re keeping out really top people,” Brook says. m

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There are nearly 5,000 higher education institutions in the United States, and they are all trying to convince prospective students, and their parents, that they are the right choice. With the cost undergraduate and graduate degrees at an all-time high and increased competition from non-traditional and overseas universities, higher education marketing departments are more pressed than ever. Finding the right higher education marketing partner can mean the difference between success and failure. Whether you are looking for an agency to create and plan your next marketing campaign, a software company to manage your social media efforts, or a research company that specializes in the higher education market, AMA's Directory of Higher Education Marketing Providers is the perfect place to start your search.

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Directory of HigHer eDucation Marketing ProviDers

160over90 is a fullservice branding and creative services firm. While media channels vary, our process ensures that the creative is always engaging and the message is always grounded in strategy and fundamental truth. 160over90 believes in the power of storytelling, and understands how to create an authentic brand narrative.

160over90

160over90.com

Brian Communications is a full-service agency focused on the big ideas that grow our clients’ businesses. We are thinkers and artists using public relations, brand strategy and digital platforms to go beyond branding, give meaning to the stories they tell, and deliver real results that matter most.

Brian Communications briancom.com

Adobe is the global leader in digital marketing and digital media solutions. Adobe tools and services empower faculty, staff and students to create groundbreaking digital content, deploy it across media and devices, measure and optimize it over time, and achieve greater success. Through integrated software, resources, and affordable purchasing options, education institutions can provide their campus with the tools to optimize learning and elevate administration.

Adobe Adobe.com

Butler/Till is an independent media and communications agency that builds progressive marketing programs across digital, social, traditional, and experiential platforms. Our employee-owned agency specializes in higher education media support. With capitalized billings of $170 million and 110 diverse professionals and employee-owners, we are one of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States (Inc. 5000 2010-2016) and one of Ad Age’s Best Places to Work in Marketing & Media (2015). Offices: Rochester, NY and Morristown, NJ

Butler/Till adevito@butlertill.com http://www.butlertill.com

Austin & Williams develops ideas that inspire action. We’re a full-service, outcomes-driven agency that specializes in Higher Ed marketing. We do everything in-house, creating efficiencies of scale and turnkey operations, which ensures greater responsiveness and savings for our clients. We hold ourselves 100% responsible for our clients’ success, and the results speak for themselves. At Austin & Williams, we don’t just talk results, we live by them. Office: Hauppauge, New York

Austin & Williams lisa@austin-williams.com austin-williams.com

Capture Higher Ed is the world’s best at using big data and cutting-edge technology to attract, engage and recruit mission-fit students. Capture maximizes engagement at the most influential times, delivering a better ROI to its partners. Capture’s technology provides highly customizable, ondemand data, to easily measure outcomes in real time.

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Directory of HigHer eDucation Marketing ProviDers

Carnegie Communications has been at the forefront of integrated, responsedriven enrollment marketing and recruitment for over 30 years. Through customized, cuttingedge digital solutions and a multi-channel lead generation platform, Carnegie connects higher education institutions with the target audience they seek.

Carnegie Communications carnegiecomm.com

For 50 years, The Chronicle of Higher Education has independently and intelligently delivered higher-education news and information to the faculty and staff of our worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s colleges and universities. More than 215,000 dedicated professionals in higher education read our print edition, and our website reaches more than 1.9 million unique visitors.

The Chronicle of Higher Education chronicle.com 62 62

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CCA is the nation's leading full-service marketing communications and branding agency, specializing exclusively in higher education. From the Ivy League, to large public universities, to small private colleges, to specialty schools, CCA's more than 30 years of strategic and creative expertise has built some of the best brands in higher education today.

CCA

Chegg supports students from the moment they begin their college search to their first job. Through innovative and costeffective enrollment marketing services, Chegg partners start the conversation with their prospects faster, and on native sites and apps that students use most. By leveraging multi-channel, multitouch strategies, Chegg partners recruit smarter.

Chegg

ccanewyork.com

edu.chegg.com

Collegis Education utilizes an integrated enrollment growth system to help institutions achieve quick, measurable results and long-term sustainability. Through technologydriven, student-centric solutions spanning the entire student lifecycle, Collegis helps institutions more effectively attract, enroll and retain students. In Fall 2015, 75% of their higher education partners experienced double-digit enrollment growth.

Consolidus offers the higher education community an opportunity to streamline their promotional products purchasing. We provide a custom website for your institution that will reduce your costs while providing a selection of products specifically tailored to your needs. Explore custom solutions for all of your branded material needs at www.consolidus.com.

Collegis Education

Consolidus

collegiseducation.com

Consolidus.com

Directory of HigHer eDucation Marketing ProviDers

Converge Consulting is a digital agency for higher education with offices in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Denver, Colorado; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Converge uses whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new and next in inbound marketing, website design, content strategy, search engine optimization, digital advertising, and web analytics to positively impact student recruitment and alumni engagement for colleges and universities around the world.

Converge Consulting convergeconsulting.org

Digital Pulp is a digital marketing agency that loves higher learning. We build deep relationships with people by keeping it simple. Our strategy is shaped by a profound understanding of your difference and nature, and our creative marries content, structure, beauty and brand. Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s create together.

Digital Pulp digitalpulp.com

Dartlet is a leading perception management and reputation strategy firm based in the Pacific Northwest. We specialize in the science of organizational personality, creating transformative, research-driven communication strategies in higher education. Known for our highly innovative research methods and large group consensus-building, Dartlet delivers unmatched marketing strategy and intelligent creative.

Dartlet Dartlet.com

EMG is full-service marketing agency creating premier brands in higher education since 1997. Services include research, brand positioning, creative, and strategic brand counsel by nationally recognized experts. EMG developed Brand Sprokit, a cloud-based subscription software that is most costeffective and efficient in managing branded print publications across an entire organization.

Educational Marketing Group emgonline.com

Digital Deployment builds award-winning websites for higher education. Clients include the University of California, California State University, and many others across the country. Digital Deployment uses Drupal CMS with a special UI to make your website incredibly easy to update. Features full integration with Mogo, Hobsons, Salesforce, and others.

Digital Deployment Digitaldeployment.com

Eduvantis helps higher education institutions grow enrollments and improve marketing effectiveness by better aligning their program delivery, brand positioning, funnel management and customer engagement with well-defined target markets. In addition to working across higher education, we have deep experience working with business schools and other professional schools. Eduvantis Digital provides search engine marketing (SEO and PPC) and social media strategy. Our mission is to help your school gain a competitive advantage.

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Directory of HigHer eDucation Marketing ProviDers

Effective Student Marketing is a digital marketing agency and Google Partner that embraces transparency and results-oriented marketing. It integrates marketing strategies that use social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising, and content creation to help higher education institutions engage with students, graduates and prospects to achieve their student enrollment and retention goals.

Effective Student Marketing

Emma helps around 50,000 organizations worldwide get more from their email marketing. Through tailored editions of its platform for universities, businesses, franchises, and agencies, Emma offers enterpriselevel capabilities in an intuitive, enjoyable experience that helps marketing teams of all sizes do their best work. Visit myemma.com to learn more.

Emma

Effectivestudentmarketing.com

myemma.com

ExpertFile is the world’s first content marketing software that helps schools publish, promote and distribute their experts online through a searchable web network to drive connections with students, donors, journalists and conference organizers. Clients include University of Texas, UNC Chapel Hill, Wheaton College and Wake Forest University.

Fathom is a full-service digital marketing agency for transformation minded higher-education marketers. With experience in connecting institutional strategy and strategic marketing solutions, Fathom helps modern marketers to navigate change and calibrate admissions and marketing departments. Fathom is headquartered in Cleveland with offices in Columbus and Chicago.

ExpertFile

Fathom

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fathomdelivers.com

Epicosity is an ideas company specializing in higher education marketing by blending traditional services with a strong digital footprint. A global agency, we work with clients in 22 states and four countries. We help you tell your story through branding, digital strategy, public relations, web development, video production and more.

Epicosity epicosity.com

Funnelback is the search engine of choice for more than 75 of the world’s most respected highereducation institutions. Our rich history within the Higher Education sector means you can trust that we know what you’re up against and are here to help you with your challenges.

Funnelback funnelback.com/solutions/ university

Directory of HigHer eDucation Marketing ProviDers

The cost of tuition is rising, but that doesn’t mean your marketing budget has to. Furman Roth is a full-service higher education focused agency that’s been delivering meaningful results for colleges and universities for over 25 years. Our approach is to reach the entire audience that makes up a school’s community, including parents, donors, influencers and of course, students. We create breakthrough communications, continually analyzing and optimizing results to achieve lasting success for our clients. Offices: New York, NY and Englewood Cliffs, NJ

Furman Roth Advertising jake@furmanroth.com furmanroth.com

Looking for more students? With over 2,000 unique search parameters, the Graduate Management Admission Search Service (GMASS®) can help you increase diversity in your programs, create targeted marketing campaigns, reach candidates in specific regions, and much more. Learn how GMASS® can connect you with more than 500,000 qualified candidates interested in graduate management education.

Graduate Management Admission Council gmac.com/gmass

GGP creates unique experiences for our customer’s retail journey. With 118 malls in 39 states, our properties are filled with opportunities to enhance and promote your brand. From large format advertising, to onsite consumer events to local sponsorships, we help create custom, targeted campaigns at any of our shopping destinations.

Gizra builds smart websites for complex needs in higher education. As pioneers of the opensource Drupal-based OpenScholar CMS platform, we help universities create brand-compliant, feature-rich, websites with a single click. Contact us for a demo of the platform serving 7,000+ Harvard University sites.

General Growth Properties

Gizra Gizra.com

ggp.com

We keep your institution ahead of the curve in a constantly evolving digital landscape so you can find, connect and engage with more students.

Harvard University Division of Continuing Education extends Harvard to students at every stage of learning through a wide array of online and on-campus courses, part-time undergraduate and graduate degrees, graduate certificates, and intensive noncredit professional development programs.

Our certified specialists are committed to increasing your enrollments through a customized approach to digital marketing—powered by datadriven decisions. We look at your individual needs, digital footprint, current marketing efforts and top competitors to develop a unique, integrated strategy aligned to your ideal student’s behavior across search, social and email.

G/O Digital Marketing insights@ godigitalmarketing.com www.godigitalmarketing.com

Harvard Division of Continuing Education dce.harvard.edu

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Directory of HigHer eDucation Marketing ProviDers

Helix Education provides institutions a comprehensive suite of technology and services to power data-driven enrollment growth 8x faster than the industry average. The company’s three solutions — Outsourced Program Management, Enrollment Marketing and Retention Services — have successfully helped institutions find, enroll, retain and graduate posttraditional learners for more than 30 years.

Helix Education helixeducation.com

IBM Watson Analytics delivers a unified analytics experience on the cloud and helps you focus on the drivers that matter most in your business. By automating the steps of data access and refinement, predictive analysis, and visual storytelling, Watson Analytics immediately identifies and explains hidden patterns and relationships to accelerate your understanding of why things happened and what's likely to happen.

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High School Counselor E-mail Lists: The most comprehensive and thorough email lists available with unlimited yearly usage. Proprietary lists built and maintained by our own staff. You control the data! High School Counselor E-Directories: E-mailed quarterly directly to over 56,000 + High School Counselors with full page color ads available.

High School Counselor Marketing Highschoolcounselor marketing.com

idfive is an award-winning integrated advertising agency that solves seemingly impossible problems. Specializing in strategic marketing and web solutions for clients in higher education, not-forprofit and all whose mission is to do good, idfive brings an unparalleled level of expertise in cutting edge technologies and informed design to marketing strategies.

idfive idfive.com

HigherEdJobs features a comprehensive list of job listings, career advice, and other resources to help higher education professionals advance in their careers. More than 1.2 million college faculty and administrators visit HigherEdJobs each month and over 250,000 receive our weekly newsletter.

Higher Ed Jobs higheredjobs.com

inMotionNow solves project request, project management, content review, and reporting challenges for marketing and creative teams with its creative production management solution called inMotion. With inMotion, teams can automate administrative tasks that typically distract content creators from getting their content to market faster.

inMotionNow inmotionnow.com

Directory of HigHer eDucation Marketing ProviDers

Inside Higher Ed is the online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education. Inside Higher Ed draws 1.5 million readers each month, making it the ideal platform to reach a large and diverse audience of influential higher education professionals. Visit insidehighered.com today.

Inside Higher Ed

InsightBee by Evalueserve is the simple way to source high quality custom research and analytics from any device. From proactive alerts to tailored reports, our pay-as-you-go online platform delivers the intelligence you need every day – across all business functions and industries. We’re powered by mind+machine™, which means we combine human expertise with best-in-class technology to give you qualified intelligence, faster.

InsightBee

Insidehighered.com

Insightbee.com

JetSpring is a provider of Live Chat solutions specializing in the cultivation of prospective students for colleges and universities. Employing only U.S.-based Live Chat Agents with fouryear college degrees and providing the necessary software for each school, JetSpring resolves the challenges faced by both in-house and outsourced Live Chat programs.

KelmscottEDU is an award-winning higher education marketing services provider, offering strategy, analytics, accountability, and record setting results. With clients ranging from private liberal arts colleges to large public universities, we specialize in strategic student search while delivering state of the art dynamic solutions in pursuit of a single goal: your enrollment success.

JetSpring

KelmscottEDU

jetspring.com

kelmscottedu.com

Advancing the conversation on diversity and inclusion in higher education and beyond.

Insight Into Diversity Insightintodiversity.com

We are brand creators and visual storytellers—a senior team passionate about design. We work with institutions and companies to help them define, express, and orchestrate their brands across the marketing landscape.

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Directory of HigHer eDucation Marketing ProviDers

Liaison helps higher education institutions better identify, recruit, and enroll best-fit students. Schools rely on our admissions management and marketing automation solutions to reach prospective students, streamline administrative tasks, and create exceptional experiences for applicants. With 25 years of experience, we work with 5,000 programs on 800 campuses and process over one million applications annually.

Liaison Liaison.com

Market to who matters. As the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn is the most effective platform for higher education marketers to engage prospects, students, and alumni. Achieve your marketing goals by targeting a highquality audience of 450+ million members, in a professional context that fits your institution's brand and reputation.

LinkedIn business.linkedin.com/ marketing-solutions/ higher-education

Marketo provides the leading engagement marketing software and solutions designed to help marketers develop long-term relationships with customers – from acquisition to advocacy. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, Marketo serves as a strategic partner to large enterprise and fastgrowing small companies around the world and across a wide variety of industries.

MBuy combines everychannel media expertise and the best advertising technology in the industry – providing advertisers with superior media buying and planning services that engage the right audience. Clients trust MBuy to deliver high performance campaigns that meet their advertising and business objectives. Learn more about MBuy’s media solutions at www. MBuy.com

Marketo

MBuy

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MBuy.com

Lipman Hearne delivers branding, strategy, and communications that win minds. With 50 years of marketing experience, we’ve helped over 400 higher education institutions increase awareness and national rankings, enroll hundreds of thousands of additional students, and raise over $28 billion. We’re full service – providing strategy, planning, design, development, and implementation.

Lipman Hearne Lipmanhearne.com

More than 250 colleges use Merit's innovative software to scale storytelling efforts and deliver personal stories of student success to critical stakeholders like high schools, media, legislators, parents and more. Your marketing efforts are made more meaningful when Merit connects the unique story of every student with the people who care about their success.

Merit Meritpages.com

Directory of HigHer eDucation Marketing ProviDers

Modo Labs empowers ordinary people to create extraordinary campus apps. Design a striking, one-of-akind user experience with Modo's communication and engagement platform. It’s so simple you can create dedicated apps for different events, admissions, alumni, student groups and more. Make real time updates and instantly publish across all mobile channels with no app store resubmissions.

ModoLabs modolabs.com

mStoner, Inc. helps clients to tell their authentic stories by clarifying their unique brand value proposition, creating a content strategy to communicate the brand effectively, and implementing compelling and dynamic communications across the web, mobile, social media, print, and other channels. We focus on research, data, and results.

mStoner mstoner.com

Mogo Interactive is an innovative leader in digital marketing. We specialize in marketing Higher Ed brands across all digital media platforms where their audiences are researching, consuming, engaging, and transacting on display, social, video, mobile, and search. We plan, strategize, and deploy customized marketing plans utilizing the most advanced technology and we help our clients capture the power of the digital world and realize exceptional results.

Mogo Interactive

At Mongoose, we make it ridiculously easy for any staff member at your institution to text one-on-one with students — or send personalized mass texts — from a phone, tablet or computer. It’s no wonder Mongoose is higher education’s preferred texting provider.

Mongoose Research

mogointeractive.com

mongooseresearch.com

From 30,000-pagesite overhauls to small tweaks that drive big improvements in usability, NewCity will show you how to craft a phenomenal digital experience. You don't want a website that just looks pretty, and neither does NewCity. User experience research underscores everything we do, and we use that data to build a site that works harder for you.

To us, nothing is more worthy of marketing than the promise of human potential. We embrace an insightsdriven approach that gives your brand the inside track in the marketplace. It’s marketing for higher education with a higher purpose.

New City nwcty.com

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Directory of HigHer eDucation Marketing ProviDers

OHO Interactive is a Boston-based agency with 18 years of experience delivering award-winning strategy, design, and web development solutions in higher education. We work with our clients to "fix big website messes" through a contentfirst approach, active prospect tracking, and research-driven UX.

Ologie is a branding firm. We’re a team of strategic thinkers, creative problem solvers, and storytellers. Together, we’ve helped over 100 colleges and universities across the country define their purposes and tell their stories in powerful ways. We create brand experiences through all forms of media: print, digital, environmental, photographic, and video.

OHO Interactive

Ologie

oho.com

Make a connection. Drive action. Increase enrollment. Pandora has helped institutions across the country with their recruitment efforts by leveraging the passion point of music. With more than 81 monthly active listeners and a powerful attention-based media solution, Pandora connects you with the right student at the right time.

Pandora advertising.pandora.com 70 70

MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016

Ologie.com

PS&L is an enrollmentmarketing agency focused on the longterm enrollment health of our client institutions. Traditional undergraduates, adult degree completers or graduate students; our work helps you intercept prospects throughout the selection process. Services offered: Advertising, Brand Identity, Consulting, Market Research, Publication Design, Staff Development, Video & Web Services.

Paskill, Stapleton & Lord PSandL.com

OmniUpdate is the leading provider of content management solutions designed to streamline content administration and solve the digital marketing and communication challenges of higher education. Our user-friendly platform and award-winning technology and support empower our customers to be engaged in their communications, efficient in channel management, and extensible in development.

OmniUpdate Omniupdate.com

For nearly five decades, Peterson’s has offered products to support students and their families throughout the college experience. As a trusted partner to thousands of educational institutions, Peterson’s gives clients access to more than 6 million prospective undergraduate and graduate students serviced annually, helping schools drive student enrollment.

Peterson’s Petersons.com

Directory of HigHer eDucation Marketing ProviDers

Promotional products are an essential branding media that advance marketing campaigns. Promotional products break through the constant hum of advertising and give brands access to personal advertising space they canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t buy. For company/ career resources visit, http://ppai.us/1UHF6QX.

Promotional Products Association International (PPAI) www.promotional productswork.org

ProspectCloud helps develop comprehensive student personas, and executes against those personas by delivering a curated, highly focused audience of actual prospects for recruitment and marketing efforts. ProspectCloud concentrates on solutions for graduateand executive- level programs with a keen eye to recruiting from a dynamic, well-seasoned, and qualified workforce ecosystem.

Prospect Cloud Prospect-cloud.com

Primacy is an award-winning, independent digital agency that delivers powerful experiences connecting brands, people and moments. Primacy combines in-depth education expertise with cross-industry experience, unparalleled client service, and solutionoriented innovative technology. Primacy drives meaningful impact and measurable results around admissions, advancement and academic reputation outcomes. Services include strategy, design/UX, marketing, media planning/ buying, technology, video and mobile.

Reach high-achieving, aspiring graduate students at ProFellow, the largest online community of merit-based fellowship seekers in the U.S. Our audience of emerging leaders includes students and professionals seeking information about MA, MBA, JD, PhD, and related graduate programs, and competitive funding opportunities. We offer a suite of high ROI advertising solutions, including targeted email campaigns, newsletter sponsorships, native advertising and job listings.

Primacy

info@profellow.com https://www.profellow.com/

theprimacy.com

Quad/Graphics is your resource to make an impact on response rates. Through our full-integration of print, direct marketing solutions, and internet technologies we improve the effectiveness of our education customersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; programs. Audiences are energized with new and creative material, maximizing engagement and generating a higher return on investment.

Quad/Graphics QD.com

Office: San Francisco, CA

ProFellow

r2i is a national full-service marketing agency that integrates marketing cloud technology expertise with demand generation, customer experience management, and brand expression. We build and run data-driven campaigns that accelerate customer engagement and action. EDU clients include Boston College, Seattle University, University of Arizona, and University of Michigan.

r2integrated r2integrated.com/work NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

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Directory of HigHer eDucation Marketing ProviDers

Salesforce.org harnesses the power of Salesforce products to transform your higher education institution into a connected campus. Salesforce provides a unified view of constituents and the ability to connect in a whole new way. Salesforce is the world’s largest provider of customer relationship management (CRM) software. Learn more: www. salesforce.org.

Siteimprove is the only web governance software that helps you better manage and maintain your website through quality assurance, policy, accessibility, web analytics, SEO analysis, and performance response —all in one tool

Salesforce

Simpson Scarborough

salesforce.org

simpsonscarborough.com

Siteimprove.com

Society for Science & the Public is dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education. The Intel International Science and Engineering Festival -- a flagship program of the Society sponsored by Intel – brings together 1,700+ U.S. and international high school students along with parents, teachers, and mentors who influence their college and career decisions. Now you’re invited to the world’s biggest gathering of young STEM talent.

Sparkroom provides full-service, data-driven marketing and technology solutions designed to measure marketing effectiveness and enhance student recruitment efforts. The leader in higher education performance marketing, we provide fully transparent, data-driven strategies that attract the right audience to deliver high-quality student prospects that lead to better enrollment rates.

Simply, Smart College Visit connects higher education and students. Our specialized digital marketing firm serves the needs of higher education with search services, content creation, and social media consulting, while our website is the one-stop-shop for expert advice on admissions, scholarships, and travel.

Smart College Visit smartcollegevisit.com 72 72

In higher ed, creative ideas need to be inspirational and motivational — but also grounded in research and vetted by stakeholders. Our integrated approach to market research, strategy, and creative services brings together your people, vision, and values with our recognized knowledge and partnership to build strategies that endure.

MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016

The Society for Science & the Public societyforscience.org

Siteimprove

Sparkroom Sparkroom.com

Directory of HigHer eDucation Marketing ProviDers

We believe in the importance of higher education and the need for all of us to work smarter. We know, too, that the people who work in higher education simply cannot work any harder. The only real option, then, is to work smarter. Better ideas. Better execution. Better results. Let’s be smarter. Together.

StudentBridge Inc. is an award-winning creator of multimedia packages and virtual tours for institutions of higher education. Through thoughtful design, execution, process and packaging, prospective students experience an insider view of life on campus and engage in meaningful interactions in all areas of the student lifecycle. StudentBridge’s innovative recruitment and retention solutions help colleges and universities worldwide identify stealth visitors, engage more prospects, and convert "bestfit-students," ultimately shaping the talent pool.

Stamats

StudentBridge

Stamats.com

TERMINALFOUR is a digital marketing & web content management platform for higher education. We enable Universities & Colleges to drive student recruitment, retention, alumni fundraising & research promotion by maximizing the effectiveness of their digital & content strategies.

Studentbridge.com

TextAim is a cloudbased communications company that allows back and forth conversations with students by text. Since students prefer to use text instead of phones and email, TextAim allows schools to communicate to hundreds or thousands of students through a system as easy to use as email.

TERMINALFOUR

TextAim

Terminalfour.com

Textaim.com

Disrupter. Differentiator. Innovator. Having worked with more than 300 colleges and universities across the country, Synergy Imports is one of the nation’s leading suppliers of custom imprinted products and apparel to the collegiate market. Our direct-import capabilities enable us to help your institution stands out from its peers.

Synergy Imports synergyimports.com

UniversityPromosAnd Print.com, powered by Consolidus, is a dedicated promotional product site for higher education. We provide products that are specific to your needs as a higher education marketing professional. Check out our site today to see how we can help you meet your marketing goals easily and affordably.

Consolidus | University Promos & Print Universitypromosandprint.com

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Directory of HigHer eDucation Marketing ProviDers

Up&Up is a higher ed marketing agency that's committed to helping institutions exceed their goals through brand strategy, storytelling, and marketing. We believe connecting the right student to the right school not only provides a perfect college experience, it makes them fans for life.

U.S. News Academic Insights is the top peer benchmarking tool in Higher Education. Containing unpublished rankings and data, Academic Insights allows college, university and graduate school administrators the ability to create custom peer groups and compare their relative performance to that of others. Data can be visualized using data presentations or exported as reports.

Up&Up

US News Academic Insights Ai.usnews.com

upandup.agency

Waybetter Marketing is an innovative, datadriven enrollment management and marketing company. We have one mission: help colleges and universities enroll more students. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve done it at institutions of all shapes and sizes all over the country.

Waybetter Marketing Waybettermarketing.com 74 74

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VisionPoint Marketing is a marketing agency that helps colleges, universities and community colleges meet their admissions, branding, fundraising and communication goals. Our commitment to strategy, diverse understanding of all marketing disciplines and ability to build consensus across scores of stakeholders enables us to form deep, long standing client relationships.

VisionPoint Marketing visionpointmarketing.com

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MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016

CONTENT AS A SERVICE

knowledgebase

10 Minutes With

Dexton Deboree and Seth Epstein Cofounders of Los York BY ZACH BROOKE | STAFF WRITER

 zbrooke@ama.org

PHOTOS: LOS YORK

DEBOREE LEFT, EPSTIEN RIGHT

n its brief history, content agency Los York has only known success. Formed in 2014 by agency veterans Dexton “Dex” Deboree and Seth Epstein, Los York struck gold with its immersive game “The Last Shot” at the 2015 NBA All-Star Game. Using more than 10 million individual LED pixels on 889 panels laid across three walls and a floor, the project allowed users to reenact Michael Jordan’s career highlights by placing themselves in the shoes of “His Airness” himself. The campaign led to 19 creative awards over the next year, including Cannes Lions, D&ADs and Clios. Deboree and Epstein spoke with Marketing News about their creative process, “holy shit” moments and the challenges that come with setting sky-high expectations.

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knowledgebase

CONTENT AS A SERVICE

Your tagline is “We are a new kind of creative agency.” How so?

Epstein: The answer is simple and complex. The nature of advertising is changing, which requires a new kind of agency that has changed with the world. The traditional model, which is advertising, digital agency, social agency, makes 100% sense—it’s perfect as it is. What we see is that there’s another layer that was missing, and that layer is what we call the “content agency.” When we say “new kind of creative agency,” it’s referring to our perspective on the world related to how advertising has changed to mean much more. Deboree: Traditional advertising has been made up of thinkers, and they traditionally hire doers to make stuff. We are by our very nature, in our DNA, thinkers and doers, so we’ve collapsed a few disciplines and layers into one thing. That is part of what has changed, and is continuing to change in the advertising

MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016

landscape … this idea that the layers of fat have created this process that is too slow, too costly and too far away from the central creative that’s taking place. By creating an agency that is built with no layers that exist within it … we’ve completely removed that fat—that friction and distraction of communication—and that clear line

of creative. That’s really what we’ve been delivering to clients, and that’s what we have found to be working extraordinarily well.

Looking at your website, I was struck by the phrase, “culturedefining content.” What do you mean by that?

CONTENT AS A SERVICE

knowledgebase

Los York’s content solutions include traditional print-based artwork (left, below) as well as fully immersive gaming experiences (below left).

that it was in New York, and being that it was the 30th anniversary of the brand, there was a lot at stake, and there was a lot of anticipation and expectation around it, so just doing something that was kind of cool or kind of innovative wasn’t going to be enough. But it also had to achieve a very functional purpose, which at that point was trialing the 30 shoe. They partnered us up with AKQA, their digital agency at the time, to brainstorm together to come up with not only that “holy shit” idea, but also that idea that we could actually turn around and pull off.

Q Deboree: The best of advertising, or any piece of visual communication— whether it be a film, or a TV show or an ad—if it truly has an impact on a large amount of people, then it tends to shift culture. It can create trends in hairstyles and what people wear on their feet, it affects what people say and the activities that they partake in. If you really look at any ground-breaking advertisement, or any visual form of communication, the best of them have contributed to a shift in cultural behavior from that point

When you completed the campaign design and the setup, did you know you had something special going into All-Star Weekend?

forward. That’s what we’re interested in being a part of.

Can you give me the backstory behind conceptualizing the “Last Shot” campaign?

Epstein: [The Michael] Jordan [brand] was struggling with a number of the agencies that were on its roster. They were struggling to come up with something that truly worked and reached the peak that it was aiming for. Being

If you really look at any groundbreaking advertisement, or any visual form of communication, the best of them have contributed to a shift in cultural behavior from that point forward. That’s what we’re interested in being a part of.

Epstein: The moment that we knew we had something special was the first day, once all the screens [went] up and we did a first run. It was this moment where people were like, “Are you kidding me?” And that expression, which was so cool, carried over through the whole All-Star Weekend. Every time somebody would walk around the corner and would see it for the first time, they would get this big grin and they would be like, “No way!” We knew it was a fairly audacious task, but we … knew that it would historically be cool for people who are into Michael Jordan and understood the games. All the crowds were period-specific, so if a game was from the early ‘80s, we dressed the entire crowd in the early ‘80s. We propped the entire crowd to be periodaccurate for each of the plays that people could choose to relive. Deboree: All along the way we were constantly being forced to compromise because of time and money, and because technology hadn’t been built, and all of these hurdles that tried to derail experiential projects. We were just unwilling to compromise on any of those aspects, even if it hurt us financially or time-wise, because we knew that the moment that we started compromising on those details, it

NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

knowledgebase

CONTENT AS A SERVICE

would’ve undermined the experience and it never would’ve been what it was. There was a moment where they wanted to kill the period aspect because the cost of production was high, and wardrobe was a chunk of money. There were a dozen of those examples throughout the way, and we were clear and stayed true to, “Even if everyone involved gets pissed at us, we’re not moving off of our commitment to this thing.”

Is there pressure to one-up the “Last Shot”?

Epstein: There’s a little bit of that pressure to one-up it. We’ve chosen to look at it more as, “How do we look to one-up ourselves, not necessarily that specific experience?” which has more to do with how you really define content today versus how you do a more bad-ass experience. That’s showing up for us in a number of ways: in the way that we’re truly proving out the content strategy model in advertising, doing full campaigns from a content mindset that end up being blown out across all platforms from a central idea and getting into how brands can be even more involved and more integrated in pieces of entertainment. We’re working on a long-form documentary right now with a brand.

Los York has been named the first content agency of record for Motorola. Are there clear expectations of what they want, or are you largely defining the role for yourselves?

Epstein: We need to constantly adapt to the environment at hand, because we collaborate with their advertising agencies, social agency, digital agency, PR and internal departments. Inherently, [defining] what we do and what problem we solve is a bigger problem for all brands. Usually it starts [with] very specific projects, and then brands start to see that instead of going to six different vendors, none of which

MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016

Stick to that resonance point of what your brand is and what it stands for, and reach those people that are perfectly adept at connecting with it.

CONTENT AS A SERVICE

knowledgebase

Los York’s “Force of Nature” campaign for Nike centered around a “scenic run” in the heart of New York City.

understand the brand, [Los York] can do extraordinary work that’s aligned with the brand. It is new territory, it does require an adaptive approach, but the experience we’ve had with the Jordan brand allows us to come in and give them a lot of really valuable insight. Deboree: They called us up and said, “Everyone we asked said you were the guys I should talk to, so we want to talk to you.” They were essentially asking for a content agency, but they weren’t asking for a content agency. They gave us all these rules in terms of the [request for proposal], and we tossed that out the window and said, “Actually, we are the experts in this space. We know what you need. … We’re going to tell you how we’re going to give it back to you and

how we’re going to solve it because it’s not the way that you think it is.” We did that, and literally, there was no other consideration for them from that point forward. They realized that we did do things differently. We had a methodology behind it, and it was not what they were used to or what they knew they even needed to ask for. There’s a great deal of trust. Their job is to continue to explain and share their problem and their vision for where they want to take it, and it’s our job to come up with the right solution.

What do you think that content campaigns of tomorrow, or content campaigns today need to do to more consistently deliver those “holy shit” moments that you talk about?

Epstein: The founding premise of the approach is really to go, “Okay, the center of the universe used to be TV. What if the center of the universe wasn’t TV? What if we could deliver really amazing content or advertising or marketing?” That sets up a new way of thinking. That’s just one building block. Advertising and marketing have changed … and a big part of our DNA is the willingness

for people to push boundaries and to do things not in the only-TV-campaign point of view. Deboree: Today and tomorrow, there are two fundamental elements that have always been at play, but because they have changed, and they’re not the same formula that they used to be, that’s where everyone’s gotten confused. At the end of the day, it’s still the two same fundamental things. [The first is] understanding your audience. That’s one thing that many brands get wrong because they’re trying to guess where their consumers are, they’re trying to guess how they behave and they’re trying to guess how they communicate with each other. The second element is understanding your brand. Don’t try to be something that you’re not. Don’t try to speak to a consumer base that is not going to resonate with your core message or your core offering. Stick to that resonance point of what your brand is and what it stands for, and reach those people that are perfectly adept at connecting with it. Then you have this one-to-one connection going on between brand, consumer and whatever message point you’re sharing with them. m

NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

AnnuAl MArketing ServiceS Directory knowledgebase

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. In short, marketing is communicating value. Marketing services can range from market research, branding, online marketing, advertising, analytics, data collection, creative services, product development, and much more. Every year, the American Marketing Association publishes the Annual Marketing Services Directory. This directory can help you find the right company to help turn your marketing vision into reality. AN ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT TO THE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 ISSUE OF MARKETING NEWS. COPYRIGHT 2016 BY THE AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 82 MARKETING 82 NEWS | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016

AnnuAl MArketing ServiceSknowledge Dama irectory base careers DATA-DRIVEN BRANDING

INDEX TO THE

Annual Marketing Services Directory ADVERTISING

BUSINESS/CREATIVE RESOURCES

DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT

ab+c Creative Intelligence Bates Creative Fadel

Fadel

CAREER/EDUCATION Burke Institute NYU School of Professional Studies

AGENCY/FULL SERVICE

CONSULTANTS Centerline Digital CMI Customer Lifecycle, LLC

Bates Creative Centerline Digital

DatabaseUSA Stirista

DATA/ANALYTICS Customer Lifecycle, LLC Stirista

BRAND PROMOTION GGP / General Growth Properties PPAI

DIGITAL MARKETING Bader Rutter Edelman

ab+c Creative Intelligence, one of the largest agencies in the region, is a 45-yearold full-service marketing communications firm with offices in Wilmington, Delaware, and Philadelphia and Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. The agency brings creative intelligence to local, regional, national and international clients in a variety of industries. Adweek selected ab+c as one of its 50 “Top Shops” in the nation. Locations: Wilmington, DE ; Philadelphia, PA; and, Bloomsburg, PA.

ab+c

Contact: Paul Pomeroy ppomeroy@a-b-c.com http://www.a-b-c.com

MARKETING RESEARCH/ TRAINING Burke Institute

MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS

DatabaseUSA

DATABASE MARKETING

BRAND MANAGEMENT

GLOBAL MARKETING Strativity Group

BUSINESS INFORMATION

Bader Rutter GGP / General Growth Properties Williams Whittle

ab+c Creative Intelligence Bates Creative

MARKETING RESEARCH/ QUANTITATIVE Eureka Facts

ab+c Creative Intelligence Bader Rutter Edelman Williams Whittle

MARKETING STRATEGY

MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS GRADUATE PROGRAMS

ONLINE EDUCATION

Williams Whittle

WVU Reed College of Media

NYU School of Professional Studies WVU Reed College of Media

MARKETING RESEARCH/ FULL SERVICE

PROMOTIONAL PRODUCTS

CMI Customer Lifecycle, LLC Eureka Facts RTi Research Strativity Group MARKETING RESEARCH/ QUALITATIVE Eureka Facts

There is nothing easy about being a BtoB business. Complexity is common, differentiation is difficult and purchases are not made on a whim. To thrive in a business like yours, you need to challenge convention. Inspire new ideas. And make change happen. That’s transformation. And that’s what we help you do. Transform a business, a brand or even an entire industry. We are Bader Rutter: The premier independent business marketing agency in the United States.

Bader Rutter Milwaukee, WI – Chicago, IL Lincoln, NE dquigley@bader-rutter.com http://www.bader-rutter.com

PPAI SEMINARS/ ONSITE TRAINING Burke Institute VISUAL COMMUNICATIONS SpeedPro Imaging

Clients seek Bates Creative out to create change for their business. Bates meets that challenge with artistic intelligence— strategic insights and a keen eye for impactful design— that exceeds clients’ goals. The agency delivers branding, print and digital solutions that start with a mission and build into customized holistic experiences.

Bates Creative batescreative.com NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

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AnnuAl MArketing ServiceS Directory For over 40 years, marketing and marketing research decision makers worldwide have turned to the Burke Institute, the premier provider of state-of-the-art marketing research training, for their professional development. Since our founding in 1975, Burke Institute has trained more than 80,000 participants from 10,000 companies, in 40 countries. We have developed a structured learning environment, using real world case studies, delivered by seminar leaders with advanced academic credentials who work in the field. Visit our web site and learn more about our seminars, certificate of proficiency programs, and onsite training options. Experience our unequalled commitment to excellence by attending one of 20+highly acclaimed marketing research seminar offerings or combine a group of courses into a unique customized program for your organization.

Burke Institute Contact: Jim Berling, Managing Director info@BurkeInstitute.com www.BurkeInstitute.com

Customer Lifecycle is a global research based consultancy that works with B2B and B2C companies to get more value and better business results from research through significantly improved coordination, deployment and integration of research findings and customer requirements into the day-to-day management and operations of the organization. With reach to more than 3 million individuals in 160+ countries, we conduct strategic qualitative and quantitative research in multiple localized languages on a worldwide basis.

Customer Lifecycle, LLC Bolingbrook, IL Rehoboth Beach, MD Princeton, NJ kaferenz@customerlifecycle.us http://www.customerlifecycle.us MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 84 MARKETING 84 NEWS | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016

No two client engagements are the same. As a modern marketing laboratory, Centerline approaches challenges and opportunities with this mindset. We are always looking to apply the right mix of talent, time, process and action to each unique situation to deliver custom solutions that better connect brands with their audiences.

Centerline Digital Centerline.net

DatabaseUSA is the industryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leading provider of Business & Consumer information. Our 16 Million U.S. Business database is Triple-Verified and is the most accurate anywhere. We also feature 6 Million Medical Professionals (with Specialties), 15 Million Executive Emails, 225 Million Consumers and over 100 Million Homeowners. Plus, a Money-Back Guarantee.

Database USA databaseusa.com

As a world-class consulting firm focused in behavioral sciences, CMI provides valuable information based on the evolved principles of market research to accelerate marketing productivity. Our solutions equip organizations with the knowledge to influence their intermediary partners, ultimately empowering consumer purchase intent.

CMI Cmiresearch.com

Edelman is a leading global communications marketing firm that partners with many of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest and emerging businesses and organizations, helping them evolve, promote and protect their brands and reputations.

Edelman edelman.us

AnnuAl MArketing ServiceS Directory A state-of-the-art qualitative research facility with full service research and analysis firm that delivers high quality insights for Smart Research Solutions. Facility and Field Management Fully-equipped focus group facilities One-on-one interview rooms - Cognitive/ usability labs - Product/computer testing room - Latest digital technology Qualitative and Quantitative and Services Recruitment of hard to reach audiences nationwide - Data collection Segmentation Market characterization - Marketing optimization - User-center designs for products or services Advanced analytics - Content analysis - Organizational assessment - Geographic Information System (GIS) - Group discussions/focus groups - Intercepts Foreign language translation - ExpressQual - Membership Matters - Segmentos Millennial Panel - PIMS Certified to ISO 20252, the international standard for market, opinion, and social research. Location: Washington Metropolitan Area

Eureka Facts Patricia Omaña – Business Development Manager omanap@eurekafacts.com http://www.eurekafacts.com

Through undergraduate, graduate as well as career advancement courses and diploma programs that span a plethora of industryrelated disciplines, the School has shaped the very landscape of professionally oriented education. In the classroom, in the field, and online, our programs have inspired the next generation of leaders, to innovate, communicate, and succeed in a constantly changing world that offers limitless opportunity.

NYU School of Professional Studies sps.nyu.edu

FADEL’s Asset Rights Clearance solution, ARC, is a first-of-itskind product offering that completely streamlines your teams' creative process by enabling users to check and clear permissions to use digital asset rights real time, speeding up the production cycles, reducing overhead costs and mitigating compliance risk.

FADEL

General Growth Properties

fadel.com

ggp.com

Promotional products are an essential branding media that advance marketing campaigns. Promotional products break through the constant hum of advertising and give brands access to personal advertising space they can’t buy. For company/career resources visit, http:// ppai.us/1UHF6QX.

PPAI promotional productswork.org

Our clients, some of the largest and most respected companies within their industries have counted on RTi Research for more than 30 years to connect the dots, tell the story, and help influence decisions. Clients come to RTi seeking higher level, more insightful thinking and extraordinary service from senior level professionals; they stay because we deliver on our promise — supporting our clients’ personal and organizational success.

RTi Research Norwalk, CT – Matawan, NJ Westerville, OH drothstein@rtiresearch.com http://www.rtiresearch.com NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

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AnnuAl MArketing ServiceS Directory SpeedPro Imaging is the nation’s leader in large format graphics specializing the highest-quality products including wall murals, event graphics, trade show displays, vehicle wraps and window graphics. With over 130 locations across the U.S. and studios in every major metro area, SpeedPro helps businesses meet their visual communcation needs.

Stirista is a data-driven marketing company that specializes in creating custom audience segments and executing campaigns via digital, email, and social channels. Our multichannel marketing approach gives you real conversions and leads. With over 400 segmentation options, email and online advertising, we give you the power to reach anyone, anywhere.

For over 14 years, Strativity Group has led dozens of organizations around the world into a new era of customercentricity. With over 175 completed projects in 21 countries impacting over 400 million customers and 700,000 employees, Strativity brings worldclass experience combined with a focus on measurable results.

SpeedPro

Stirista

Strativity Group

stirista.com

Strativity.com

www.speedpro.com

Unleashed Technologies is an enterprise WostingSM (web + hosting) firm based in Columbia, Maryland, providing complete solutions to clients across multiple vertical markets. Unleashed Technologies has earned the distinction of being one of Inc. Magazine’s top 5000 fastest growing private companies in 2013, 2014, and 2015

Unleashed Technologies unleashed-technologies.com MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 86 MARKETING 86 NEWS | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016

Our focus is the marketing of nonprofits and associations. Clients look to us as the experts to market their brands; they don’t want to have to teach us their industry. They hire us for what we bring to them. We deliver clear and compelling integrated, multiplatform marketing programs from a starting point of deep experience in the category.

Williams Whittle Washington, DC – Alexandria, VA rwhittle@ williamswhittle.com http://williamswhittle.com

The West Virginia University Reed College of Media offers two online graduate programs: the award-winning Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) program and the new Data Marketing Communications (DMC) program — the first master’s degree in the nation to focus specifically on the impact data has on marketing communications.

WVU Reed College of Media Mediaonline.wvu.edu

RÉSUMÉ TIPS

The Evolution of the Résumé BY ZACH BROOKE | STAFF WRITER

 zbrooke@ama.org

ona Lisa.” “The Last Supper.” “Vitruvian Man.” The résumé. One of these things is not like the other. Yet all can be attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, the towering Renaissanceera genius credited with profound advancements in the arts and technology. Even someone of Leonardo’s caliber needed a written inventory of his background. In 1482, he dashed off a summary of his skills to the Duke of Milan in hopes of securing an armament position. Eighteen years later, a traveling English lord carried a handwritten letter of introduction which he presented to acquaintances and called a résumé. Written summations of work experience have persisted and evolved ever since, but you don’t have to go back to Leonardo’s time to unearth dramatic changes to curriculum vitae arrangement and presentation. It was a whole different ballgame as recently as 20 years ago. “There has been an obvious sea change since the mid-‘90s. Given that online résumé submission is now the norm, gone are the days of obsessing about the proper bond weight for the paper that a résumé should be printed on,” says career coach Chandlee Bryan. With the changes in the physical medium of résumé submission, there has been an increased emphasis on visuals to help stand out among the deluge of applications each open position now receives after it’s posted online. “There is certainly a heightened expectation that résumés should be visually captivating—especially when applying for creative positions in marketing,” Bryan says. “However, a visually captivating résumé used as a formal application for a position is only effective if it is decipherable by the software with which it is reviewed.”

Complicating the trend to create a more eye-catching résumé is the need to format it in a way that can be read by modern résumé processing software that serves as the initial screening process at many organizations. According to Bryan, who has worked with applicant tracking systems (ATMs), these programs scan résumés for preset keywords, which can be missed if arranged in novel ways with unusual fonts. “Through my … training, I learned that there are only four fonts which can be read by all ATS systems: Times New Roman, Arial, Calibri and Helvetica,” says Bryan. “The ATS systems also cannot always read columns, tables or callouts. Therefore, I recommend that résumés intended for any online applications be formatted simply with a strong summary header at the beginning of the document.” Once your résumé makes it to human filters, it’s become useful to be generous with hyperlinks to supplemental material, such as online work portfolios. “Given that resumes are frequently seen online, links to a personal website, social

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media or published articles are also useful. If your employers are not household names, you could also link your employer names to the company website in case the reader wants more information,” says Caroline Ceniza-Levine, career expert at SixFigureStart.com. “One of the most common issues I see on résumés is people listing their responsibilities, rather than their achievements, as supporting bullets under their employment history. Or, when they do share achievements, they often lack the specificity to make them impactful,” says Eden Abrahams, managing partner at Clear Path Executive Coaching. “Laszlo Bock, who leads people operations at Google, recommends a great formula for writing about accomplishments on résumés: Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y] by doing [Z].” Abrahams offers the following comparison: • Developed and oversaw implementation of several new online products to reinvigorate core brands. versus • Developed and oversaw implementation of several new online products to reinvigorate core brands after conducting a comprehensive global customer needs assessment, resulting in double-digit profit margin growth for five consecutive years.

“As much as résumés have evolved over the years, there is one premise that remains the same: If you talk to 10 different people about the best way to write a résumé, you will get 10 different opinions,” Greenberg says. “There still is not only one right answer.” NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

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RÉSUMÉ TIPS

Even though résumés have changed dramatically in recent years, there is one persistent misconception that remains, according to Abrahams: length. Whether it’s a holdover from the days of physical prints, or stems from anxiety over not wanting to waste hiring managers’ time, this is one hang-up that job seekers should leave in the past. “There continues to be an idea in many people’s heads, including people with a significant amount of experience, that they need to shoehorn everything onto a one-page résumé. That is not

MARKETING NEWS | NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016

true,” Abrahams says. “When you factor in contact information, a summary, job history highlights, community or nonprofit involvement, publications or speaking engagements and other relevant information, it’s virtually impossible to get all of that onto a single page and still have any white space left (don’t omit that). Today, two pages seems to be the default length, and three is not an uncommon length for senior executives.” On top of that enduring fallacy, there is another unaltered truism of résumé writing, according to career expert Beryl

Greenberg: that it is foolish to assume there is an ironclad, one-size-fits-all approach of to modern résumé writing. “As much as résumés have evolved over the years, there is one premise that remains the same: If you talk to 10 different people about the best way to write a résumé, you will get 10 different opinions,” Greenberg says. “There still is not only one right answer. As the candidate, you can take in the advice you hear and then decide what makes the most sense for you, your personality, style and goals.” m

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MARKETING MANAGEMENT Product Marketing Manager; San Francisco, CA; 11513.1; dev of strtgies to position prod w/in mrktplace; direct mrkting, mrkting prog mgmt, or mrkting consulting; online data msrmnt & analysis of prod, customers, & mrkt dynamics; paid media campaign strtgy & mgmt; & social media mrkting. Send all replies indicating Job ID: 11513.1 to: Niantic, Inc., Attn: Lenette Posada Howard, 2 Bryant St. Ste. 220, San Francisco, CA 94105.

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The Questrom School of Business at Boston University

anticipates an opening for a tenured associate or full professor with an established reputation as a quantitative/empirical modeler with a focus in the area of digital marketing analytics, for a position starting Fall 2017, subject to approval of the Provost’s office. The Questrom School is building a strong group of faculty with expertise in all aspects of marketing, consumer behavior, and in digital analytics, an area of strategic focus for the school. The marketing department represents an interdisciplinary group of scholars who develop consumer and firm knowledge using insights and methods from marketing, psychology, economics, anthropology, and computer science. We seek outstanding candidates who would be stimulated by and engaged with this vibrant community. Prospective candidates must have demonstrated the ability to produce original and innovative scholarly work of the highest possible quality and impact in the top academic journals. Applicants must possess a Ph.D. or related degree in marketing, economics, or a related field. Special consideration will be given to applicants who have demonstrated intellectual and institutional leadership, successful mentoring of doctoral students, and strong teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Candidates will be expected to teach undergraduate and graduate courses in marketing analytics. Salary will be commensurate with experience. Interested candidates are encouraged to send a resume, letters of reference, and no more than three research papers electronically to mktjobs@bu.edu. Applications will be accepted until Dec, 1, 2016 and will be reviewed on an ongoing basis. We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, military service or because of marital, parental, or veteran status. We are a VEVRAA Federal Contractor.

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advertisers’ ama careers index PERSONAL BRANDING ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Quick source for contacting the suppliers in the November/December 2016 issue of Marketing News. 2016 AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education / CONNECTED .................................... p. 75 URL: http://www.AMA.org/highered

Gizra ......................................................................... p. 29 Ph. 212-634-1687 URL: http://www.gizra.com

2017 Winter AMA Conference / Better Marketing for a Better World ........................ inside back cover URL: http://www.AMA.org/winter

IBM Watson Analytics ............................................ p. 21 URL: http://www.watsonanalytics.com

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AWARDS

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The 4 Under 40 Emerging Leaders Award

he AMA announced the recipients of the annual 4 Under 40 Emerging Leaders Award at the AMA’s 2016 Annual Conference. The award program honors young leaders working in marketing and its sub-fields who are making significant contributions to the future success of the industry. A committee selected from the advisory councils of the AMA reviewed the nominations and collaborated on selecting the winning individuals. The four winners of the AMA Emerging Leaders Award are:

Omar Abdala, a leader in designing programs that help companies improve their databases and network systems. He is the chief data scientist at Lotame (formerly AdMobius), where he cofounded the first mobile audience management platform. Prior to Lotame, Abdala was a data scientist at Apple, leading the creation of iAd’s targeting database using data assets across Apple Corporation. Abdala holds a bachelor’s of science and a master’s of engineering degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from MIT, and is a Ph.D. candidate on leave at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University.

online food-ordering company. She spent seven years at Google, with leadership positions in the U.S. and France for Google Express, YouTube and Chromecast. She previously worked for Samsung in South Korea and for Texas Instruments in the U.S., Finland, Germany and Japan. Coppola holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, a master’s degree in mobile communications from E.N.S.T, and an MBA from INSEAD. She is also a graduate of the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.

Carrie Montagna, a senior marketing manager with McKesson, is an expert at creating and amplifying content to drive digital marketing campaign success. She has extensive experience launching new products, creating awardwinning go-to-market strategies and supporting a sales team by accelerating leads through the pipeline. Montagna is one of the lead volunteers for McKesson’s corporate social responsibility program and was voted its 2016 Volunteer of the Year. Montagna earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Western Carolina University and has earned additional certificates in health care and nonprofit marketing.

Brad Messinger, senior vice president of client service and marketing at Rise Interactive, is a leader at driving revenue through effective orchestration of go-to-market strategy, business development and management of successful client relationships. Messinger spent three years on the board of directors for the Chicago chapter of the AMA and currently serves on the Forrester Research Marketing Leadership Board. He earned an MBA in marketing with high honors from Roosevelt University and a bachelor’s degree in communications from Eastern Illinois University.

Barbara Martin Coppola, the CMO of Grubhub, is responsible for growing brand affinity and driving user adoption at the nation’s leading

NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS

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EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS

MILLENNIALS AND

Generation Z want to develop a relationship with businesses they visit.

Is the research you do online, or in-person as well?

A BACKGROUND Rumors of the death of college bookstores have been greatly exaggerated, according to Barnes and Noble College VP of operations and CMO Lisa Malat.

“Over the past two to three years, the whole customerunderstanding piece of my job has played an important role,” she says. “We established a dedicated research platform two to three years ago where we have a group of 10,000 students—called our student point of view—who weigh in on a lot of issues with us. It’s what has been driving our business lately.” Marketing News spoke with Malat about how Barnes and Noble College engages students through research.

As a CMO, how do you balance working with the customer and working with the C-suite?

Even against stiff competition— such as Textbook.com and Amazon—Malat says the company’s research has allowed it to engage with millennial and Generation Z students in the company’s 770 campus bookstores across the U.S.

It’s a mix. We have a powerful online platform, Vision Critical, which we leverage as our backend provider, which allows us to set up a dedicated panel, so we can build relationships with these students. We reach out to them two to three times a week with everything from quick polls … to larger strategic studies about learning and overall engagement. Generational research really helps us plan for the future.

that students were coming to college very overwhelmed, very stressed out and looking for support. It was from that aha [moment] that we realized we cannot be just about a retail transaction. We have to become a complete support system for the students. We communicated to the new students all this information about what it’s like to transition to college, tips about how to get along with your roommate, how to set up your dorm room or how to save the most money on textbooks. … We were able to get to “Yes” on about 500 of our campuses giving us the freshman list. And that has been unprecedented in our industry. Now, we’re able to communicate with the incoming freshmen from acceptance level onward.

What we learn from living with students every day on campus, as well as the research we’ve done, is how millennials [and] Generation Z really want to engage with brands or with the businesses they choose to. Millennials and Generation Z want to develop a relationship with businesses they visit, so the research we do allows us to make those connections and deliver more of an experience to the students. A few years back, we wanted to take a deep dive into incoming freshmen. How can we do a better job connecting with them and driving our sales? The college bookstore wasn’t the only choice anymore. We were the only game in town for so many years, and then suddenly there are all these textbook players online. We learned

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Is that extra step—giving customers help, incentives or assistance—now necessary in all modern transactions?

I think so. If you’re going to just compete on price, or if you’re going to look at yourself as a retail transaction, you’re going to lose, especially with this generation. The brands that do well are the brands that are able to build experience, build relationships and add more value to the equation. Brands that align with students’ values and can deliver a relevant message to the consumer at the right time, as we were able to do with the freshmen. m

-HAL CONICK

NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2016 | MARKETING NEWS