In this Q&A, Fordham University’s Marketing VP discusses a new brand platform designed to differentiate the institution, grow brand awareness and battle the complexities of higher education marketing, which include targeting more than 20 personas, the ROI long game and the demographic cliff.
Higher education marketing needs more differentiation, according to Justin Bell, Fordham University’s Vice President for Marketing and Communications.
It’s become a “sea of sameness,” Bell said, where every school touts its research, beautiful campus and successful student outcomes post-graduation. It has become such an obvious formula for university marketers during college football games — when many universities advertise on TV — that Reese’s created a parody commercial with its own “Reese’s University.”
The spoof was funny because it rang true, Bell said. To stand out, Fordham is leaning into experiential marketing to showcase its unique attributes. The university is a private, Jesuit (a religious order within the Catholic Church) institution in New York City. Experiential marketing is trendy in other sectors and higher education is just tapping into it now.
Fordham’s New Brand Platform Markets to Distinct Personals
Bell joined Fordham two years ago to strengthen its brand and create a brand platform that defines what Fordham brings to the table for prospective students, current students, alumni and more.
“This is really about strengthening the brand in order to continue to elevate our prestige and elevate perception of Fordham in the market so we can continue to be competitive,” he said.
The team conducted six months of research, interviewing 8,000 individuals across its audience personas to inform a new identity for the brand. Its new slogan is “For What Matters.”
“It goes much further than just a style guide. It’s about how do we show up both verbally and visually,” he said.
Fordham has 20 audiences it markets to including prospective students, prospective students’ parents, current students, current students’ parents, faculty, staff, employers, alumni and peers. Peers are other institutions it competes against, because that impacts rankings.
The brand’s marketing has to speak to any of those audiences. The goal for the new platform is for it codify who Fordham is across all those personas.
“It has to be flexible enough that all those audiences can see themselves in that Fordham master brand,” Bell said.
Demographic Cliff Impacts Higher Ed Marketing
Bell believes that it’s more important than ever for universities to differentiate themselves because of these larger trends:
- Due to population demographic shifts, there are fewer high schoolers in the U.S. This means there are fewer students universities can market to, increasing the competition among universities to attract top caliber students to apply and enroll in their schools.
- With more universities — including Fordham — accepting the common application, students are applying to more colleges because it’s easier to do. The average number of colleges Fordham applicants are applying to is eight, Bell said.
Fordham feels these shifts. While its enrollment is strong, its yield is low, Bell said. In higher education, the yield is the percent of admitted students who enroll. At Fordham, it receives about 50,000 applications each year, half of which it accepts. Of those 25,000 accepted students, about 2,500 show up on campus in the fall, which is a 10% yield.
“It’s not very distinctive or strong, as far as other schools,” Bell said. “One of the big reasons for that is we are competing in a high market, as far as your Columbias or NYUs in New York City.”
The percetage varies by school, but an institution’s yield is on average 15-25%, Bell said. Fordham is always looking to increase the number of applications it receives and increase its yield over time. With fewer students to market to — many of whom are applying to more schools — increasing the yield can be tricky.
“There are times where we hear students applying to over 20 institutions,” he said. “It’s become a trend to apply to more, which is really driving that yield down because we have to admit a lot more in order for those students to actually show up at our door, because they’re applying to so many schools.”
Bell sat down with Chief Marketer to discuss the complexities in higher education marketing and its recent experiential pizza pop-up.
Chief Marketer: Can you talk about the types of marketing that Fordham did before and how this is different?
Bell: Prior to this rebrand, Fordham did a lot of more traditional marketing in higher ed, which was a lot of email marketing, a lot of direct-to-student marketing. We have a team of recruiters that are out canvassing the U.S. at different feeder schools doing college fairs.
Prior to this rebrand work, we didn’t really invest in paid media. That was just not part of our vocabulary. So as we have evolved and modernized our brand with this new brand platform, we are now out there purchasing media.
We’re doing out of home right now in New York, as an example, to really drive top-of-funnel brand awareness … We’re going to be launching that in other cities over the the rest of the year as we roll out the brand as well.
CM: Did you have to increase the budget to now do paid media?
Bell: Yes. I was brought in two years ago to unify a communications team and a marketing team into one division that really is waking up every day thinking about growing and protecting the Fordham brand. That’s our vision.
Prior to my arrival, those teams were working independently of each other and just doing functional work of trying to recruit directly to students, not really focusing on growing the brand.
This has been a real shift in thinking for Fordham as to what’s our brand, what’s our story, and how do we show up consistently in the market to grow. That awareness has been a big focus and that comes with investment.
We were very much under investing prior to my arrival. We’ve intentionally invested in this process as many institutions are because it’s becoming more and more competitive to compete for those students in the marketplace.
CM: How much would you say it increased?
Bell: We’ve increased our spending by 15% of our overall budget. When we think about what does that factor into compared to our revenue, as an institution, we’re spending about 1.5% of our revenue in marketing and branding efforts compared to the industry [which] is about 2% to 6%. So we’re still under spending compared to the industry.
CM: What was it prior to the changes you made?
Bell: It would’ve been less than 0.5%.
CM: This brand platform just started rolling out, is that correct?
Bell: Our brand launch was at the end of July, and so with that has been a whole refresh of everything from website, environmental signage around campuses. We have new TV commercials, new out of home that’s actually gone out, even leaning into experiential. Higher ed is not typically doing experiential to connect with its audiences, but we’ve leaned into that to break through the sea of sameness and stand out.
There’s a big conference every year, NACAC, that’s a conference of admissions counselors. So you have high school guidance counselors that help high school students prepare for college and make that decision as to where they’re going to apply.
This past year, it was in Columbus, Ohio, and we actually took over a pizza shop across the street from the conference center and invited all those high school guidance counselors to come over to the pizza shop, which we renamed the Fordham Pizza Shop, in order to create a branded experience, to have them come in and get a taste of New York, and get a taste of Fordham while they were at NACAC.
We brought New York to them because a lot of them are from the other parts of the country that can’t come to New York necessarily and take a campus tour. There was a line around the block. That conference sees about 6,000 individuals, and we had just shy of a 1,000 people come through the one-day activation.
CM: How do you measure the success of an event like that?
Bell: Well, we had a choice, right? The conference itself offers sponsorship. So we could actually have gone and sponsored the conference and had our name hanging up in the conference and whatnot. For about the same price we could do this pop-up instead, which had a much bigger impact. We had individuals talking, telling us, we were the talk of the conference from the experience perspective.
We had different tactics as far as to measure how many people came through the door. Then we have a follow-up campaign of everyone that came through; we’re sending them a Fordham pennant to hang up in their office in their high school. We have a whole email follow-up campaign that will continue to track those individuals that came through the activation to see exactly how many students apply from those high schools. And then, ultimately, how many of them do show up and enroll at Fordham. There’s a whole ROI measurement tool set up to measure that flow of students who are coming from those feeder high schools.
CM: So TBD.
Bell: Yeah, it’s way too early. That’s the thing about higher ed marketing, is it’s a marathon, not a sprint. In many cases, you are trying to shape the hearts and minds of high schoolers starting in their sophomore year. You have the sophomore year, junior year, senior year, three years of courting them and getting them to one, put Fordham on their short list of schools they want to attend, and then ultimately apply and choose to come to Fordham if accepted.
It’s a long cycle that we have to ultimately navigate. We’ll start to see some impact of that activation at the end of this year. We’ll see some of that come back for the seniors, but we’ll really start to see that payoff after two to three years after those sophomores and juniors come through the full cycle as well.
CM: Right, because this is targeting the guidance counselor, who is influencing the student.
Bell: That’s part of this process, right? Yes, we market directly to students, but we’re also marketing to those who influence decisions within the student’s cycle. And that could be guidance counselors, it could be parents of those students or families of those students. There’s a lot of influence that happens helping those students evaluate schools. We have to think about all those different audiences as we’re building the brand and building awareness.
CM: This is your first time with experiential. You said previously you would just attend that conference normally.
Bell: Yes. I personally come from the experiential sector. Before I got into higher ed, I worked for Shiraz Creative, which is an experiential agency. I left Shiraz to go work at Ohio State, and then I came to Fordham. I have that background; I see the value that exists in experiential. The money you put in, you get great ROI out of those tangible experiences, especially after COVID.
This was Fordham’s first lean into experiential, but it’s also very new for higher ed. You do not see institutions out there doing experiential pop-ups to engage audiences. We’re trying to break through the noise in higher ed and test some new approaches to engage with our audiences.
CM: So what’s next?
Bell: Probably some more experiential. We saw such a great reaction to that pop-up, and we will continue to monitor the ROI that we see on that, but we’re already planning to bring our brand to life through other experiential activations targeting different audiences. We tested high school counselors over here previously at NACAC. We’ll test and do some pop-ups here in New York to grow overall brand awareness in New York, probably in the spring.
CM: Because it’s the first time you’re doing this, are you under a lot of pressure to show results?
Bell: Yes. In higher ed, every dollar we spend is tuition dollars. It’s really important for us to make sure that we’re scrappy, we’re investing in a way that we can measure the ROI, and we are seeing great impacts already.
It’s very early in the recruitment cycle for this year, but as we’re looking at applications at this moment in time, we are 50% ahead of applications from last year.
Another big factor for us is if we can get students to come visit campus, they have a much higher likelihood to actually apply and ultimately enroll. That’s also a big goal of ours, to drive traffic to on-campus events, come take a tour, come to our open house.
We had open house at both campuses two weekends ago, and our attendance was up 38% year over year. Our applications are trending 50% ahead of last year. All signs are showing that we have great momentum. We’ll have to see where we end at the end of the recruitment cycle as far as total applications, and ultimately those what we call yield and show up in the fall.
