On-Campus Marketing: Do's and Don’ts For Connecting With Students

Editor's Note: The following is a guest Marketing Mulligans post written by Elizabeth Johnson, assistant editor of My Dog Ate By Blog, a site which focuses on politics, technology, and pop culture issues related to education. In the following piece, Johnson outlines several useful tips for brands interested in connecting with students through on-campus marketing. Annually, Corporate America spends hundreds of millions of dollars interacting with and engaging college students, a highly-influential audience that represents over $300 billion in spending power.
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Students have a wealth of potential when it comes to consumerism. While both high school and college students are sometimes on a limited budget, they also have more of a disposable income. When it comes to getting the attention of students, it helps to know how to properly market to them. You don’t just want to get to campus and start throwing fliers around. While board postings don’t get a lot of attention, there are ways to make sure that your messages are heard. Here are a few do's and don’ts that are helpful to follow when marketing to students on campus.

Do bring food. Students have big appetites that their budgets sometimes don’t allow them to indulge. Even those super skinny girls, who bat their eyes and say they’re dieting, will be drawn to tables with free food. You don’t have to break your marketing budget providing a five-star dinner. Many will be happy to take a look at or even try your product with the promise of a slice of pizza or a bag of chips.

Do know how to utilize fliers. You see them everywhere on both college and high school campuses. Students are constantly bombarded with fliers. People stick them on telephone polls or cars, and they are shoved into a students' hands constantly. Why give the students another piece of paper they’re going to throw away? Still, there are ways to use fliers and places to put them that will get their attention. Silly as it sounds, the backs of bathroom stalls are a great place. The janitor might take them down, but students will read them while they're up.

Do understand the needs of the students. It’s offensive to show up on campus with a marketing campaign designed for 45-year-old professionals. While there’s sure to be a few of those on campus, some might even be students; you need to understand who your base is here.

Do get in good with the faculty. If your product is student-specific, especially if you’re marketing a textbook or bookstore, professors might be willing to help you out a little. They might dedicate some time at the beginning of their class to a brief presentation, if you make your case clear and specific enough.

Don’t bother a student while he's trying to get work done. When a student is sitting in the hall with his head down reading a chemistry textbook, don’t go up to him, get his attention, make him look up, and hand him your flier about your product. He’s there to do work and if you bother him while he’s trying to learn, you’re sure to lose at least one potential customer.

Don’t give away free junk. Food is not junk. Food is what a student wants. Unless you want to hand out something a student wants, such as a nice pen or an iTunes gift card, don’t bother distributing anything.

Don’t step on the teachers. If a teacher is kind enough to allow you some class time with his or her students, don’t speak for longer than three to five minutes. Make sure you cater your presentation to the class, and thank the students profusely afterwards.

If you follow these rules, and try your best to be respectful of the campus environment, you might find that students are the most responsive and loyal consumers out there.

Drake University Fails To Make Grade With New D+ Advantage Campaign

As the higher education market has become more competitive and sophisticated over the past decade, both for-profit (e.g, Corinthian Colleges, DeVry University, University of Phoenix, etc.) and traditional non-profit universities have proactively created and executed integrated marketing communications campaigns designed to garner more students, faculty members, government funding, research grants, alumni support and donations, corporate partners, and enhanced local, regional, national, and global reputations in specific disciplines.

After all, higher education is big business, with billions and billions of dollars at stake each year, so it makes sense that today's generation of colleges and universities aggressively differentiate themselves using a broad range of tactics to achieve certain objectives. Most of the campaigns I've seen focus on typical criteria: the latest US News & World Report and Bloomberg Businessweek rankings, recent awards and research grants, diverse student bodies and faculties, athletic team prowess, cultural, social, and recreational opportunities, and a whole slew of other benefits and value adds. In addition, most of the campaigns are relatively conservative and predictable, but occasionally, I see real flashes of genius, creativity, and brilliance. Unfortunatey, this is not one of them.

And that leads us to Exhibit A for collegiate marketing gone awry: Des Moines, Iowa-based Drake University's new "D+ Advantage" campaign. That's right: D+. As Brett Michael Dykes points out in this piece on Yahoo!'s The Upshot, "If you were going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a higher education, would you want the end result to be known as a 'D+' education? Probably not." For the record, the tag line for the new campaign is not all that bad: "Your passion + our experience."

But the general problem with the campaign is in the execution. As we all know, and as numerous Drake faculty, students, and alumni pointed out, D+ is universally synonymous with sub-par academic performance. Adweek's Tim Nudd noted on his AdFreak blog that the campaign "seems to position Drake as a school whose standards barely exceed total failure."

Drake University officials defend the campaign as "intentionally edgy" and appropriate for the target audience. In a communiqué to students, faculty, and alumni, university leaders said, "The D+ was not designed to stand alone or represent a grade. Instead, it was designed to be paired with prose and draw attention to the distinctive advantages of the Drake experience. Our experience in the survey and in the field suggests that the kind of students whom we want to attract to Drake easily understand and appreciate the irony of the D+, and that it is having the intended effect of encouraging students to find out more about what makes Drake so special."

That very well may be, but when it comes to traditional branding and on-point marketing creativity, there's only one letter grade for Drake University that makes sense in this case: F.

Actually, the campaign could have packed the same punch if it was dubbed "The Drake Advantage" and was branded with a compelling, but alternative, visual presence.