The Ologie marketing concept survey
If you have not yet taken the Ologie Grinnell marketing concept survey, please do so before reading this musing. I would not want to influence your opinions. It should take about fifteen minutes
Warning! This rant, like many of my rants, does not necessarily progress in a comprehensible fashion. You will find some abrupt shifts in topic, logic, or even style.
I had great plans for musings I might write today. I have an email from an accepted student that I was planning to respond to. I had some nice recommendations for students. I even considered a short piece on curmudgeonly fun [1]. Then I made the mistake of taking our marketing concept survey. Now I just have to rant.
My initial experiences with Ologie, our marketing firm, were good. They seemed thoughtful. They seemed to have understood what makes Grinnell special. They were clearly interested in feedback.
I see bits of those impressions in the concepts they’ve provided to us. They clearly understand that we make students work hard, that we mentor students, and that students grow. They seem to understand that we care about diversity and social justice. They’ve found ways to convey those issues.
But then there are the problems revealed by these pieces; there are many.
We’ll start with some obvious problems. The survey is not accessible; I can tell that without much work. There are images that have no alt text. They have videos that we have to listen to and that lack closed captioning. Do they not understand that we have both a moral and a legal responsibility to make sure that any video we put on the Web is accessible [2]? And those are the easy ones to identify; a student trained in accessibility issues tells me that they do not properly link their radio buttons and the accompanying text, which makes it nearly impossible for a non-sighted person to click the right button.
They also use the term brand
. I’ve written about my objections to
that term before. For those who weren’t paying attention
[3], here’s a definition I found of that term [4].
brand
verb
gerund or present participle: branding
1. mark (an animal, formerly a criminal or slave) with a branding iron.
No, I don’t think I want that connotation associated with my institution. We should not use terms that refer to human punishment. We should not liken ourselves to a criminal.
Third, they treat faculty and trustees as the same group in the survey. Excuse me? Don’t you think that the people who interact daily with our students and who are in charge of the curriculum might be somewhat different than those who manage the endowment and interact with our students only on occasion?
I see that they’ve also left out Parent of Prospective Student
and
Guidance Counselor
. I suppose we don’t care about those groups [5].
I’m not a marketing expert, but I also find myself puzzled by the overall
approach. We get to watch two five-minute videos that discuss the overall
concept, the marketing to prospective students and parents (viewbooks
and micro sites
), the marketing to faculty (ads in Chronicle),
the marketing to alumni (potted prairie or pamphlets), and perhaps
other marketing I missed. But those are different kinds of marketing.
Shouldn’t we react to them separately? While I think it’s fine that
every group respond to all of the kinds of marketing, wouldn’t A/B tests
on each kind be better? And, while you would pay attention to all of
the responses, wouldn’t you want to be able to focus on the particular
target audience?
I also worry that two important audiences are missing from these concept pieces: prospective donors and prospective employers. What makes donors (who are not necessarily alumni) want to give to the College? What makes employers want to hire our graduates? Fortunately, I think both concept pieces help address those issues, at least in part, in that they emphasize that we care about Focus, Diversity [6], and Tenacity.
As a computer scientist, I find the UI frustrating. For example, I wanted
to find out about the video player they use, so I command-clicked on the
video and selected About JW Player 6.12.4845 (Pro Edition)
[7]. But that
made it impossible to go back to the survey [10]. You think they could
choose better survey software.
In terms of content, something that particularly frustrates me is their
advertising for faculty. The advertisement describes Gina Clayton, founder
of the Essie Justice Group, and a winner of the Grinnell prize. I
admire Clayton, and I’m glad that she won the prize. But the advertisement
says nothing about why one would want to work at Grinnell. She’s not an
alum, so it tells them nothing about our students. I guess all it says
is that we give away lots of money. It wouldn’t be all that hard to
update the advertisement to say things like Grinnell Prize winners
not only give talks on campus, they also hold workshops for students,
host students in internships, and even mentor some students. Through venues
like the Grinnell prize, we provide students with a particularly deep
exposure to issues of social justice and encourage them to pursue such
issues.
Of course, I’d prefer Work with amazing students. Teach in
a curriculum in which you never have to offer a required general education
course. Participate in an active student-faculty research community.
Embrace diversity [11].
Even the tagline of A Place of Mind
would be
significantly better.
There are two concepts, one called A Place of Mind
and one called
Open
[12]. Both are grounded in similar issues: We may be in the middle
of nowhere, but we are connected and prepare you to work anywhere; We
push students hard; We are diverse [14]; and so on and so forth. Open
speaks a bit more to mentoring.
Unfortunately, Open
is also an instance of some of the most mediocre
typography I’ve seen in awhile. The writing also reflects some institution
other than Grinnell. Here’s an example.
And while at Grinnell College our landscape is bounded by vast grasslands and open sky, our people are defined by an intense focus on intellectual greatness and a vast commitment to social good. Students, mentors and peers. To an individual, ready to build a bigger future for all.
What’s up with those last two sentences
? I suppose you could combine
them into one. I also wish that we wouldn’t like about vast grasslands
.
Our landscape is bounded by vast farmlands of soy and corn. There are
some great bits of prairie, but they are the exception, rather than
the rule. I do think the text could be turned in to something great. But
it’s really mediocre right now.
Of course, I also hate some of the details in A Place of Mind
.
In particular, there’s the phrase boundaries are yours to establish
and expand
. In one sense, I’m glad that it’s explicit that people can
establish certain boundaries. That’s one of the things that consent is
all about. However, given what No Limits
did to student perceptions
of acceptable consumption, I worry that this also suggests that students
are free to make their own (bad) choices about consumption.
All of the scattered pictures of Mac field also bother me, given that Mac field is currently unusable. I know that it will be back, but still. Seeing pictures of Mac field also makes me worry about whether the Ultimate teams will have sufficient space, given the addition of pathways.
In writing this piece, I went back to look at parts of the survey [15,16].
This time through, I chose Prospective Student
since I’m the parent of
a prospective student [17]. After about three questions, I got to the
following question:
In what year did you (or will you) graduate from Grinnell?
That question makes almost no sense. I’ve just indicated I’m
a prospective. I’m not even sure that I (or, more precisely, my
son) will attend. The possible answers make even less sense. For
example, I can select Before 1970
. What’s worse is that if I
don’t select something, I can’t progress through the survey.
I don’t know what to do with Through extensive research, the college
has worked to better understand who Grinnell College is and the value
it brings to students, the community, and the broader world.
Our
style guide says that we capitalize the C
in the College
. And
is the College doing this work, or is Ologie?
I’m not quite sure why it bothers me, but the sample faculty profile
is of a fictional faculty member, Salvatore Landis, PhD
with the
two following blurbs:
There was a time when I wasn’t this organized. Let’s enjoy it while it lasts.
A place of work should be no more or less cluttered than the mind who dwells there.
What does that say about Grinnell? Is it even useful? Why an elderly white male as our representative [18]?
They mention that Grinnell is 7th among alumni with PhDs in science
and engineering fields in recent years-above Harvard, Princeton,
and Yale.
I think that’s percent, rather than absolute numbers,
but I’m not sure. But why don’t they mention that we do even
better in producing foreign language Ph.D.’s [19]?
There’s more, but I think I’m done for now. And it was somewhat useful
to write this musing. Although there are many parts that really really
really frustrate me, I do see some glimmers [20] of hope within. There
are some really good concepts. Both Open
and A Place of Mind
are
reasonable taglines. If I ignore the bad writing, the description of
Grinnell near the start of Open
is pretty good. Perhaps I should learn
to see the forest for the trees.
Here’s the email that I received about the survey.
The partnership between Grinnell College and our marketing firm Ologie has made great progress in the last few months.
- They started our relationship by reading everything they could find about Grinnell College; then we gave them more.
- They spent time with research from Art & Science and studied the creative foundation laid by CRANE MetaMarketing.
- They came to campus and interviewed students, faculty, and staff. Follow-up interviews were conducted virtually with trustees, alumni, guidance counselors, and parents.
- In February of this year, we were all invited to participate in an institutional perception survey.
The strategy team at Ologie has been considering the survey results and thinking about everything they’ve read, heard, and seen about Grinnell College. Their discovery and reflection has culminated in two beautiful, authentic, and distinct creative concepts.
We know that your time is limited as finals approach and the semester ends, but we would very much like to incorporate the perspective of the faculty in our market testing. If you are able to take a few minutes between now and May 31 to review the concepts developed by Ologie, we would be very grateful.
Just click on the link below, or copy it to your favorite browser. You will be led through a series of questions and be given the opportunity to share your reactions.
http://www.surveywriter.net/in/survey/survey2154/Grinnell.asp
Thank you.
Jim Powers
Director of Communications
communications@grinnell.edu
[1] Don’t worry. Given that it’s finals week, there will come a day in which I have very little time, and I’ll write that short piece.
[2] Since more and legal responsibility
has come up in other areas
recently, I’ll reaffirm that I prioritize these issues for moral reasons
and that I mention the legal issues because (a) administrators like to
remind me of them and (b) it’s a way to make sure that others understand
just how strong these responsibilities are.
[3] Including, it seems, the folks at Ologie and in Communications.
[4] I was irresponsible and did not cite the source. I’m pretty sure it’s just what came up on Google. Yeah, something close to that appears at https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+of+brand.
[5] There is a None of the above
button. It brings you to a page that
says We appreciate your participation, but your profile does not meet
the qualifications for the survey. Thank you.
.
[6] Of course, they count Diversity
as Diversity of experience, thought,
and culture.
If that’s what someone focuses on in a diversity statement
for my department, I’d be disappointed that they did not think more about
embodied diversity, financial diversity, and more.
[7] Yes, JW Player permits closed captioning. So it’s not the technology, but rather The Ologie folks [8,9], who are at fault.
[8] As opposed to Theology
folks.
[9] Of course, they’d also be at fault for picking bad technology. I guess they just can’t win, except by doing the right thing.
[10] I even tried to go back a few pages at once using Firefox history. No luck. It wants to fast-forward you to wherever you ended up.
[11] That’s my ten-second summary of why one would want to teach at Grinnell. I’m pretty sure I have a longer one somewhere. I’d expect that a good marketing person could identify these issues and express them better than I.
[12] I’ll admit that I forgot the name of A Place of Mind
, even though it’s
the tagline I significantly prefer.
[14] Using their limited definition of diversity.
[15] There does not seem to be an explicit or implied set of guidelines on participation.
[16] That’s how I discovered that you can’t take the survey if you
click None of the above
.
[17] Yes, there’s a slim chance that youngest son may attend Grinnell. I wouldn’t bet on it, though.
[18] Well, white
is pretty representative of the faculty;
male
is less so; old
is even less so.
[19] This list says we’re second.
[20] No relation to Glimmer labs.
Version 1.0 of 2017-05-14.