“Homogeneity was a small price to pay for the erasure of decision fatigue. It liberated our minds to pursue other endeavors, like work.”

“Technology was gnawing into relationships, community, identity, the commons. Maybe nostalgia was just an instinctual response to the sense that materiality was disappearing from the world.”

Uncanny Valley

“The experience economy would have us think that experiences are discrete commodities, packages that can fill the otherwise empty spaces of our day-to-day lives. It seeks to transform any event, however mundane, into a profit-making opportunity, as though nothing counts as an experience until it’s sold or until there is an app for it.”

The winners in this new economy would be what the Tofflers call “psychological corporations,” which would be able to navigate the transition from an economy predicated on “material satisfaction” to one based on “psychic gratification,” in a consumeristic parallel of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs.

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A lot has been made of marketing ‘personalization’ both inside our industry and outside. And while it might be easy to remain steadfast on either side of the aisle, the use — and nuance — of the word has lead it to become more of a principle than an absolute business practice. Similarly, because we believe the consumer wants personalized communications and we can deliver, we should seek to expand the practice throughout the funnel.

In higher ed, it’s easy to advocate for personalization. We operate in a high-involvement category, enjoy long customer journeys and market one of our customers…

As consumers’ attention drifts among more and more media channels, we need to continually examine our media choices, strengthen the connections along the consumer’s path to purchase and remain consistently tethered to a strong, central brand idea. All considered, to keep the brand’s positioning strategically integrated and message consistent.

Below are five studies to help produce better results through an integrated marketing communications approach.

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(1) There’s a long tail to digital advertising

When using an integrated approach, exposure to advertising placed in more than one channel increased search behaviors.

Insight:

Don’t stop at…

Enrollment marketers have little control over price, place and product. We are tasked with developing a robust series of communication activities to drive razor-thin efficiencies.

This drive has evolved our practice into a model — defined more by outsourcing— that is neatly packaged and labeled as “search.”

Strategically, this model is questioned because in many ways it removes the importance of the how and the why of our communications, in favor of efficiently distributing communication activities, while negating big brand ideas. …

As our industry’s marketplace constricts and demographics shift, enrollment marketers are faced with the need to make our efforts more effective. No matter the type of institution, we face more competition, increasingly fragmented media environment and continued pressure to “fill the funnel.”

As the current “search” model continues to be questioned, the move from finding the most efficient way to distribute communications to managing effective marketing outcomes can seem daunting (even with the rise of ghost/stealth applicants). …

When planning and budgeting, it’s easy to place media creation above media placement. However, the more we create synergies across channels and across entry points, the more impactful and efficient enrollment marketers’ efforts can become. In many cases, social media gives us a great canvas to truly integrate our efforts and combine marketing activities to produce recruitment results.

Summer has arrived and enrollment marketers are gearing up for another recruitment cycle. And as the need to increase inquiries and applications becomes another communications objective, we must find for new ways to make our communication efforts more effective.

Knowing that social…