Finding your Blue Ocean

August 2021

I’m wrapping up the final details of my revised brand sprint for higher ed and to be honest I’m somewhat surprised at how much the v1 edition of this sprint left so much undone. Not in the usual way that I routinely find my past work not as good as the last thing I did — I made my peace with that feeling years ago.

No, this time it’s because my experience actually using the v1 sprint with teams over the last year has shown me that it really just scratches the surface of what a brand sprint should do.

The first version of the sprint was based on the original, developed by Jake Knapp and others at Google Ventures. I studied this sprint and pulled it apart, reassembling it with my understanding of higher ed brands, developed over past projects with clients. I immediately identified the GV sprint’s shortcomings, such as:

• An over-dependence on team member’s feelings, not data
• A start-up perspective that doesn’t acknowledge there are actual people who already have a perception about your institution
• Three hours is clearly not enough time, so how much time is enough?
• No real attempt to answer the biggest question: why are we doing this?

It’s this last point that gave me the most trouble.

Why would your institution have a need to work on the brand? There a few reasons and vary from place to place, but primarily it comes down to this: your brand is among your most powerful marketing tools, and is a big part of how many apps you received this year, what your yield was, how successful your most recent giving campaign was, and even where you rank relative to competitors. Was it good enough? Maybe it was…will it be good enough next year, or the year after?

In other words, if your current brand can’t change the status quo, what will it take to grow your opportunity?

So my v2 of the brand sprint is all about 1) answering that last question, 2) understanding what’s needed to change it, and then 3) imagining what your new brand needs to grow your opportunities. This will likely be a combination of your current brand attributes that are working with your current audience and new attributes that enable you to reach new students, parents, donors, and everyone that interacts with your brand and comes away with a first impression about your institution.

This change came about in part because of a framework I spent time with over the last year: the Blue Ocean Strategy. It’s a multi-step process to examine your core business and find new markets, but the big idea is this: your company — or university — currently competes in a red ocean. That is, you fight it out with competitors for market share in a body of water that has far too many boats furiously feeding on a known supply of fish. At some point the better strategy is explore where the competitors aren’t, and go fish in those blue waters. Examine what you offer now, understand what the blue ocean customers value, and adapt to serve these customers without competition. Executed successfully, you’ll have the ocean all to yourself, or at least with many fewer competitors.

This notion — that there are red oceans and blue oceans — plugs neatly into a brand sprint for higher education. To go back to the original question: why would you update your brand? To attract new applicants to your school. You’re already reaching applicants in the red ocean, maybe with some difficulty. Where will new applicants come from?

design

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

No, this doesn’t have anything to do with higher ed, but is just an amazing document of one woman’s design career (and also it’s 3 years old but new to me). That her career began in the 1950s is even more amazing — women didn’t really have design careers in the 50s, or 60s, 70s….actually it’s a fairly recent trend. But Solomon pioneered the field that we came to call supergraphics — visual elements simplified and enlarged to extreme size and applied to surfaces not typically covered. The technique was not only visually striking, it changed the way we perceive the spaces that architects thought were done when the builders finished their work. Her aesthetic inspired designers that would later get all of the credit for popularizing the style (of course) and become designer-household names, while she worked in relative obscurity.

Visions Not Previously Seen is great title for this short video, as it amply documents how Solomon’s work was so new and original. Now, this style of design is commonplace, and you could argue has been through a few revivals since the mid-century style took off. But seeing how it was conceptualized and applied in the most unusual way is mesmerizing. It’s part of the Adobe Create series and is worth your 15 minutes.

trends

Hybrid from now on

From terminalfour, this piece about student satisfaction is another datapoint in the long-running series around what’s wrong with the college experience and how to fix it. Interestingly, this bit of research originated at wework, famous for inflating the value of their co-working office business then melting down when investors wanted to peek at the balance sheets.

But even wrong people can have right ideas sometimes, and buried in the maybe self-serving research is the idea that students increasingly value a “third-space” availability. Pre-COVID this usually meant the on-campus lounge or off-campus coffeehouse, but during COVID this was whatever the student could find, usually something they arranged themselves. Now, the folks that brought you remote office space sold by the picnic table seat suggest that students expect that the future will include third, and probably fourth and fifth spaces from their college experience:

“The degree of campus openness and whether a student has access to an alternative third place greatly impact students’ ability to have in-person experiences. Universities should anticipate students adjusting their enrollment and residential plans in Spring 2021 based on access to these essential spaces.”

These n-spaces will take on many forms, but I’d expect students will value the kinds of places they see in the remote work lifestyle popularized these days. But perhaps more importantly, students will expect that college can and should be hybrid from now on, and that schools not only provide this but are optimizing for it. wework ideas

bookshare

Blue Ocean Shift

by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

I’m recommending this book mostly because I’ve consulted it so much during my brand sprint for higher ed revision. The first iteration of my sprint didn’t dive too deeply into why you’d want to update your brand, which left me questioning the entire purpose of the sprint. This book, which I discovered over the course of many design sprints in 2020 offers a new way to think about growth and how to achieve it.

Blue Ocean Shift is the follow up from Blue Ocean Strategy by the same authors; I’m recommending this book because it’s more action-oriented, with step-by-step instructions to build a growth strategy with your team. But what do I mean by growth? Isn’t this book mostly for product managers? Yes, and that’s where I found the insight to revise my brand sprint. If you are changing something about your brand, it’s likely because it’s not performing with your current audience, or it’s not resonating with another audience you need. You need a growth strategy for your brand.

The essential shift in thinking is the idea that any mature business, even a university, currently competes in a red ocean (think sharks feeding). Rather than fighting with others over an artificially constrained market, find blue ocean water where untapped markets and customers exist, and adapt your product and marketing approach to attract new customers without competition. This isn’t just regional — blue ocean thinking can reveal opportunities like non-traditional students, certificate-seekers, partnerships with local industry, and other unfished waters.

Not all of the exercises in the book make sense for higher education, but I’ve gathered enough from it to build most of my brand sprint around this framework.