Comments on: Differentiation in Higher Ed Marketing

By: asansör

asansör — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:50:00 +0000

However there are different reasons why we are different from some of our direct competitors who are also liberal arts colleges

By: Higher Education Brand Differentiation: The Top of the Funnel « Building Marketing Strategies for Higher Education

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:39:36 +0000

[...] universities. Whether it be the lack of originality in the email sophomore search process, or how colleges and universities use the same words and phrases to describe who they are, or the need for colleges to have a brand strategy that differentiates them from the undergraduate [...]

By: evdeneve

evdeneve — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 20:30:14 +0000

Merry Christ- mas and Happy New Year” to everyone and see you next

By: Paul Redfern

Paul Redfern — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:40:46 +0000

When I think about differentiation in higher ed I think there are 2 levels. For instance Gettysburg as a liberal arts institution is different from Penn State for the same reason some of our direct competitors are different. However there are different reasons why we are different from some of our direct competitors who are also liberal arts colleges.

By: Andrew Careaga

Andrew Careaga — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:31:48 +0000

This reminds me of an exercise our communications staff initiated last year — 13 months ago — in an attempt to convey our campus’s distinctiveness. (Distinctiveness, not “uniqueness.” No university is unique, in my opinion, but that’s another post altogether and one that would involve an extensive discussion on etymology and semantics.)

The exercise involves creating a two-by-two matrix.

The left and right columns should define elements of your marketing messages that are important to your audience (on the right) and not important (on the left). (It helps if you have data from your audiences that tell you what they think is important and not.)

The top and bottom should then be separated by what makes your university distinctive vs. non-distinctive.

This puts all the important and distinctive elements in the upper right-hand quadrant.

The other stuff (small class sizes, caring faculty) will fall below the X axis as “non-distinctive” because everybody claims to have that stuff.

Wish I could draw you a picture.