The Re|Source Newsletter

January 2005, Vol. 05, Issue 1

Helping you simplify, focus, and energize your marketing to drive business results.
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SMU and the Marketing of Higher Education

Marketing is big business in higher education. Competition is fierce among private and
state universities for the brightest students, major donors, and top-notch faculty members. How has marketing evolved within higher education? What are private universities doing to remain competitive?

We talked with Patti LaSalle, associate vice president and executive director of Public Affairs at Southern Methodist University (SMU) to discuss how marketing, promotions, messaging, and brand strategy are shaping the future of this prestigious institution. Read more...

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For nearly 20 years, marketing, according to the American Marketing Association (AMA), was described as “the process of planning and executing conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of goods, ideas, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals." But that changed in August 2004 with the adoption of a new definition that puts more focus on the customer:

Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.

The shift to customer-centric marketing began in earnest back in the 1980s and gained headway as the Internet economy put power in the hands of consumers. “Build it and they will come” was particularly naïve at a time when incremental changes, not revolutionary new products, were the norm. Companies needed to understand more about their customers to develop products that better met their needs – and with growing competition, they needed to build better customer relationships to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

But let’s get back to the definition. There’s depth in the phrasing that’s worth a closer look.

An organizational function. It should be – but many companies don’t have an organization-wide marketing concept. Instead, marketing is the responsibility of a department, not of every person in the company. Is it difficult to achieve a marketing-driven, customer focused organization? Yes, but to build strong customer relationships, marketing, indeed, needs to be much broader than it traditionally has been.

A set of processes. Marketing is more than brochure creation and production. As a function that connects with the customer for the good of the organization, marketing takes on a strategic dimension that’s no less important than product development or finance. The discovery, planning, implementation, and measurement processes inherent in sound marketing practice emphasize the significance it can have at the corporate planning level.

Creating, communicating, and delivering value. Marketing bridges the gap between what the company offers and what the customer needs. It seeks to understand the customer, as well as communicate the product or service offerings. But to do that effectively, communication needs to flow two ways. This is vital for the creation of value that is relevant, and the delivery of value that is appealing and persuasive.

Managing customer relationships. In this definition, managing customer relationships – not just marketing communications – is a responsibility of marketing. The traditional marketing department is sometimes far removed from direct interaction with customers, discussions about product improvements, or even from the development of customer acquisition or retention programs. The new definition subtly speaks to a need for strong marketing interaction with many departments – sales, product development, manufacturing, and testing, and other departments that deliver or decide upon products and services for the customer. This also speaks to measurement: Marketing has to become more adept at measuring and analyzing results across the company.

Putting the customer into the marketing definition has been long overdue. The next challenge is making the definition a corporate reality – ensuring marketing is a key organizational function connection the enterprise with the customer “in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”

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Sales is the lifeblood of an organization, yet shrinking budgets, shortened product life, longer sales cycles, competitive pressures and rapidly changing markets have made selling more difficult. At the same time, the sales function has also changed – from single-focus front-end selling to managing the entire customer sales experience – pre-sale, sale, delivery, and post-sale.

Similarly, marketing has also undergone a transformation in the past two decades. Businesses recognize that marketing not only impacts customers, but influences stakeholders, channels, the media, and partners. More organizations are exploring the executive-level, strategic value of marketing and how it can drive corporate strategy and a customer focus.

Given these challenges, and the rise of customer-centered business practices, marketing and sales can’t operate in separate silos, touching each other in a superficial manner. For both these functions to be successful, they need to work off the same customer information, synchronize their programs, and be evaluated to common goals. This is where technology can help.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) ensures that the data is available centrally, marketing promotions are designed to support the sales process, and tracking systems are set up to measure the effectiveness of both sales and marketing. Executives get visibility into sales and marketing performance and the salesperson is relieved of a lot of the administrative chores.

Today’s practitioners understand that CRM is a powerful tool that can enhance sales effectiveness when overlaid with these concepts:

the solution is targeted at the needs of the salesperson
the technology supports the sales process
a detailed mapping of sales and buying stages occurs
formalized marketing processes and systems are developed
marketing initiatives complement the appropriate sales stages
the organization fosters an environment of collaboration
smart metrics are instituted to measure sales and marketing efforts

To be assured, a CRM system implementation is not without its difficulties. Yet as sales, marketing and technology forge tighter links and gain accountability, the organization can realize the bottom-line results that come from monitoring and measuring not just activity, but productivity.

Contact us to understand and create marketing programs and materials that support your sales process effectively.

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A brand is often described as a name or symbol used to identify and competitively differentiate a single product (Corvette), a product family (Chevrolet), or a company (General Motors).

Over time, however, brand has come to mean much more than a logo. A brand has a psychological feeling to it. It’s infused with meaning through the actions, products, people, communications, and physical presence of the organization. This means that the brand has character and personality. It also means that communicating the brand is similar to an individual conveying his personality – it takes time to form an impression and for that impression to take hold.

A brand can evolve on its own, but it is much better to develop a proactive brand strategy. Savvy organizations formulate a brand concept – the image they want their brands to have. In doing this, they hope to influence the brand image – the consumer’s mental picture of the brand and what they believe about it, rightly or wrongly.

Part of the brand concept is the aesthetic identity – the visual and sensory components of the brand. The identity should be a comprehensive and consistent system that visually expresses brand character. Elements of the identity system include logos, brochures, packaging, communications style, and signage. Often overlooked are other aspects of identity such as the buildings and landscaping as well as office décor and furniture. From this list, it’s easy to see that design and messaging are essential to identity system development.

Looking at the big picture, the identity supports the brand, creating a visual and experiential framework in which consumers develop brand impressions – a brand image.

This means that even small-scale decisions about identity can impact a company’s brand. As a company manages its naturally evolving identity system in an integrated and consistent way, it can strengthen its brand and enhance its image with its target audience.

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“According to David Pottruck, CEO of Charles Schwab and a former marketing head, CMOs need to speak the language of CEOs. ‘Almost all CEOs are focused on revenue growth,’ he says. ‘If you don't grow your revenues, you are sunk.’ According to Pottruck, while CEOs can clearly see the benefits of paying salesmen more for what they sell, the value of marketing is often not as clear.

“If CMOs are unable to quantify the value of marketing, marketing budgets will inevitably get cut, and marketing spending will gravitate toward short-term demand generation initiatives at the expense of brand and relationship-building initiatives.”

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Interview — Sevin Rosen Funds: Positioning New Companies for Success
Commentary — Using Customer Issues to Create Marketing Messages
Case Study — Identity Makeover: How A Small Company Made a Big Impression
Notable Quote — The Questions Executives Never Ask
Q & A — What is a Communications Audit?

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