Of course contact lenses are consistent, but can the same be said of marketing?

According to its literature, Johnson & Johnson uses a “multi-patented process that took years to perfect.” Business executives in countless industries have repeatable methodologies and processes, such as Six Sigma and total quality management, that ensure consistent, high-quality customer experiences with a physical product—from massive Boeing 747s to diminutive Toyota Corollas.

But marketing tends to be the outlier, less focused on a consistent methodology and more reliant on the “golden gut.” Some marketers just “get it.” Others are a little farther off. They rarely have a common language to describe their intuition, the hunger pangs of creativity. 

So should we be surprised that, according to Korn Ferry, CMOs have the shortest tenure in the C-suite?

Give Your Team a Common Lens Through Which to See the Customer

To truly improve customer experience and your brand’s marketing results, you need a common language and methodology to empower everyone on your team to advocate for the customer.

The conversion sequence heuristic is part of a patented methodology developed by  to help marketing teams better understand the customer experience and practice customer-first marketing. It was derived from and has been validated by experiments on more than 20,000 sales and marketing paths over 20 years. It brings a cognitive framework to the factors that affect the probability of conversion. It is not an equation to solve, but rather a thought tool to understand and optimize the factors that affect the probability of conversion for every message—from landing pages to print ads—that represents your brand to the customer. 

Probability of Conversion

You can never guarantee conversion, but using this methodology, you can increase its probability. Make sure to choose conversion objectives that truly serve your ideal customer.

Sample questions for your team:

• Is the conversion objective in the best interest of the customer?
• Does the conversion objective match where the customer is in the thought sequence at this stage of the buyer’s journey (e.g., asking the customer to buy before they’ve learned enough about the product)?
• Is this the most beneficial conversion objective we can ask the customer to take, given our limited ability to get the customer’s attention (for example, deciding what to prioritize on a homepage)?

Motivation (of the Customer)

The coefficients (numbers) in front of each letter indicate its impact on the probability of conversion. Tapping into your potential customers’ has the biggest effect on conversion.

Unlike the other factors of the heuristic that you can control, you can’t control motivation. You can only understand it.

Like the other green elements in the heuristic (and those with plus signs), motivation is a positive element. The better you tap into motivation, the better the customer experience and the more you increase the probability of conversion.

Sample questions for your team:

• Do we truly understand the customer’s motivation, or is our thinking clouded by company logic? 
• What evidence or data backs up the assumption we are making about the customers’ motivations?
• You are not the customer. You are in a very different age group/income bracket/geographic area/etc. What evidence leads you to believe the customer has the same motivations as you?

Clarity of the Value Proposition (Why Act?)

The appealing, exclusive, credible and clear answer to the question, “If I am your ideal prospect, why should I buy from you, rather than any of your competitors?” is your .

Sample questions for your team:

• What can we do to add credibility to this value claim? Why should the customer believe us?
• Doesn’t our competitor make that same value claim? What additional value can we offer that is difficult for competitors to replicate?
• Do we truly have a value proposition for this offer or product? Should we choose to advertise a different offer or product instead while we take steps to increase its value?

Incentive to Take Action

When brands don’t ask for customer-first conversions or don’t have a true value proposition, they try to compensate by overdoing incentives. is paired with friction in the heuristic because it should only be that little extra something that helps overcome friction, not the entire reason for the customer to act.

Sample questions for your team:

• Are we only acquiring customers because we have large incentives? Would we lose many of our customers if we stopped offering incentives?
• Will this incentive damage the long-term perception of our product’s value?
• Does this incentive reduce our margins too heavily? 

Friction Elements of the Process

The minus signs in the heuristic indicate elements that hinder conversion and hurt the customer experience. is an aggravation factor, representing psychological resistance to elements in the conversion process.

Like the other red element in the heuristic, friction is a negative element in the mind of the customer. Therefore, the more you reduce friction, the better the customer experience and the higher the probability of conversion.

Sample questions for your team:

• Do we really need all those fields in our forms? Are we actually using the data we’re collecting?
• Can we let customers access that information/make a purchase/etc. without registering for an account? Does the value we get from account registration outweigh the pain we’re causing?
• Is it absolutely necessary to make our requirements for what a password must contain so onerous? Does the value in security outweigh the pain to the customer?

Anxiety ���������t Providing Information and Receiving Value

is another negative element. It’s a psychological (and not always rational) concern stimulated by a given element in the conversion process. Anxiety and friction can never entirely be eliminated, but you can optimize your marketing initiatives to reduce their impact on conversion.

Sample questions for your team:

• Do we really need to ask for that sensitive information (e.g., social security number, driver’s license number, phone number)? How do we know the value to the business outweighs the anxiety we’re causing for the customer?
• Are we clear enough in our marketing messaging about the value the customer will receive after purchasing the product to reduce anxiety of a purchase?
• Is the way we’re using customer data in personalization going to cause anxiety in the customer?

Empower Your Team to Pull the Cord When the Customer Experience Isn’t Right

The Jidoka quality control method used by Toyota includes the famous Andon cord. It was draped over an assembly line to empower every worker to ensure a high-quality customer experience. If something was wrong, workers could simply pull the cord to alert co-workers and management or even stop the assembly line.

Does your team feel similarly empowered? What about partners who work on your brand?

With a consistent methodology, everyone has a language to explain what isn’t working and how to fix it. 

Invite the Customer into Your Marketing Department

Customers don’t have a seat in your marketing meetings or at your agency pitches, but they should. As a marketing leader, you shouldn’t rely on individual star performers in your organization to make it happen.

Use the conversion sequence heuristic, or a consistent methodology of your own creation, to bring a common language to your team and empower them to create an amazing customer experience.

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​Under the sunlight of social media, few strategies have blossomed like influencer marketing. But when used errantly, few strategies have the same capability to quickly wilt a brand. 

is built to win consumer trust, especially when compared with traditional online ads. Consumers are blind at best and irritated at worst by pre-roll, pop-up and banner ads. Influencer marketing is less intrusive and more flexible than traditional online ads; it can be small and quiet, big and booming or somewhere in between. An influencer can be a teenage girl posting about her favorite hamburger joint to make a few bucks, or it can be reality star Kim Kardashian posting about a clothing line to make $500,000. Whether teenager or celebrity, influencers create and post ad-supported content to their own accounts, bypassing ad blockers and potentially popping into millions of social media feeds. Followers can block or unfollow individual influencers, but there’s no ad blocker for influencers as there is for traditional ads.

But marketers see influencers as more than just a means to bypass ad blockers: They see influencers as a chance to engage with a new generation of consumers, people who have always had the option to skip, ignore or completely avoid ads.

It’s unsurprising, then, that influencer marketing has grown with such vigor. In 2017, , according to a survey by Klear. Another survey, the Association of National Advertisers’ April 2018 report predicts that marketers will spend $101 billion on influencer campaigns in 2020, up from $81 billion in 2016. 

Despite marketers spending more on influencer marketing, it’s “still the Wild West,” says Karen Koslow, co-founder and managing partner of health and wellness influencer agency . “Brands don’t understand how to use it, but they have everybody knocking on their door about it,” Koslow says. “The question is: Are we being smart?”

Many marketers aren’t being smart, according to a Chicago-based influencer who also founded creative firm . He says that many marketers seem to forget the purpose of influencer marketing—engaging, honest and authentic communication with potential customers—as soon as they adopt it. But in a market saturated with disingenuous ads, Michael says that winning brands will drop the pretense of one-to-many advertising and adopt the many-to-many communication of influencer marketing. This, he says, will authentically connect brands to their biggest fans. 

“Good marketing comes with knowing how to create a good relationship,” Michael says. “The best marketers understand that the human experience is all about connection. If you’re not thinking about how you’re connecting with people, your brand is probably not going to have a very big fingerprint in the world.”

Most marketers understand how important authenticity and relationships are in influencer marketing. The ANA reports that 58% of brands worked with fewer than 25 influencers over the past year, which shows marketers’ desire for better relationships with influencers, the report says. But as Koslow said, many corners of influencer marketing still seem lawless, devoid of the ethics, principles and creativity that compose great marketing campaigns. 

“The issue for influencer marketing is there’s not enough strategy or discipline, and there’s too much people-chasing,” Koslow says. 

Some brands have fostered authentic connections while others have chased people—and their gigantic audiences—too hard, producing useful examples of successes and failures in influencer marketing. Stories of both can guide marketers toward ethical, creative and authentic influencer campaigns.

The Legal Necessity of Transparency

In 2014, Warner Bros. paid several YouTube personalities to review the video game “Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor.” The campaign reached millions of people, but led to the Federal Trade Commission investigating Warner Bros. before accusing the company of paying for reviews. Payment wouldn’t have been a problem if the influencers were transparent with viewers about the transaction, but the , not impartial. Warner Bros. asked the reviewers to discuss the game positively and not show “bugs or glitches that may exist” or any “negative sentiment,” according to the FTC’s complaint.

It’s unclear how much money, if any, the FTC fined Warner Bros. (the FTC did not respond to requests for comment regarding this case), but the commission publicly demanded that Warner Bros.’ future influencer campaigns follow the FTC’s sponsored content rules. That is, Warner Bros. can’t misrepresent an influencer marketing campaign as independent reviews, and it must disclose any material connections—money, products or otherwise—between the company and its influencers.

The FTC clarified the reason for these rules in an : “On a personal blog, a social networking page, or in similar media, the reader might not realize that the reviewer has a relationship with the company whose products are being recommended. Disclosure of that relationship helps readers decide how much weight to give the review.”

Koslow says that even if companies only send influencers small products or coupons in exchange for social posts, influencers must tell viewers they were compensated. Influencers can tell viewers with a hashtag (#ad, #Partner and #Thanks[brand] are all popular), a lead-in like “Sponsored:” or any other way that clarifies their relationship to the company. For example, some video influencers mention their ties to the company within the video or its description, while many bloggers lead their post with an italicized acknowledgment that they have been paid by a company. 

Influencers Should Actually Use Your Products

Transparency appeases the FTC, but Koslow says that it also builds trust with followers. Trust is essential; the best influencer marketing trades on it. If a company or an influencer betrays that trust, the campaign may harm the reputation of both. “There are a lot of people out there who don’t care what the product is,” Koslow says. “As long as the price is right they’re taking it. But as a follower, you have to see whether you think somebody is a total shill versus someone who needs to make money but is still believable.”

Koslow says that her clients always use a product before posting about it. As health and wellness professionals, their credibility is at stake each time they post a recommendation. She believes this should be a rule across influencer marketing.  

A 2012 Microsoft Windows 8 ad campaign gives an object lesson as to why it’s a bad idea to flout this rule. The $1.5 billion ad blitz for Microsoft’s new flagship operating system paid for endorsements from celebrities such as Gwen Stefani, Jessica Alba and Oprah Winfrey. Perhaps this was a good idea, but a tweet from s.

“Gotta say love that SURFACE! Have bought 12 already for Christmas gifts. #FavoriteThings,” Winfrey tweeted in November 2012. Her laudatory post was marred by a big reveal in the top-right side of the tweet: Winfrey had sent this tweet from the Twitter app for Apple’s iPad, Microsoft’s biggest competitor. 

This was the worst-case scenario for both Winfrey and Microsoft; she looked like a shill, and Microsoft looked like it couldn’t pay people to use its new operating system. Scenarios like this are why brands need to work with genuine influencers who actually use their products.  

When Low Res Agency’s Michael started as an influencer, he stuck to working with Chicago brands that he already liked, such as local bars, coffee shops and eyewear stores. Now that Michael runs Low Res Agency, he calls “natural fit” the most important part of an influencer campaign. Natural fit is what brands must find in influencers to avoid Oprah-Microsoft moments and to create content that resonates with followers. 

“Most brands don’t know how to authentically [find influencers] because they don’t have a person in the marketing department who is discerning enough to look at whether it’s actually a good partnership,” Michael says. “To see if this person has the same values or carries themselves aesthetically in the same way as we do is important when we’re considering a new partnership. Otherwise, it’s going to cause confusion with your followers, and it’s just going to be noise.”

Give Consumers Real Information

Even genuine posts can be noisy and baneful if they skirt rules or misinform followers. Kim Kardashian is perhaps the world’s most popular influencer—as of June 2018, she had 200 million followers across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram—and when she recommends a product, many of her followers listen. During Kardashian’s 2015 pregnancy, she touted the benefits of a morning sickness drug produced by pharmaceutical company Duchesnay. Soon after her post, the Food and Drug Administration accused her and the company of , a violation of FDA rules. Within a month, the FDA forced Duchesnay and Kardashian to post what Kardashian tagged as a “#CorrectiveAd” on Instagram. 

“I guess you saw the attention my last #morningsickness post received,” before launching into 300 words of apologetic bafflegab. “The FDA has told Duchesnay, Inc., that my last post about Diclegis (doxylamine succinate and pyridoxine HCl) was incomplete because it did not include any risk information or important limitations of use for Diclegis,” the post continued. “A link to this information accompanied the post, but this didn’t meet FDA requirements. So, I’m re-posting and sharing this important information about Diclegis.”

The post went on to cite risks and limitations of the drug, but it was quickly pushed down in her feed by posts about an MTV awards show. Corrective ads and similar posts make followers leery, and that’s a big reason why influencer campaigns need more than a hard sell. If trust and authenticity are the goals of influencer marketing, companies must give their consumers something both authentic and valuable.  

, named most successful brand with online influencers by , gives value to its followers by hosting community and online events featuring influencers, according to Melissa Musgrove, head of social media at Regions Bank. These events—called “Real Talk” in-person and “Twitter parties” online—go beyond money and banking and into discussing leadership, career growth and financial education.

Musgrove says these events feature influencers with varying audience sizes, from micro- to macro-influencers, allowing the bank to engage with a variety of its customers. Micro-influencers may engage followers more easily in Twitter parties, while expert influencers who have a mid-level or macro-sized audience may fill the seats at Real Talk events. For example, Regions often works with former NBA player Antoine Walker, who infamously lost more than $100 million after retiring. Walker has spoken about his financial hardships at multiple Regions Real Talk events, including a .

Although Musgrove says metrics for Twitter parties are positive and easy to track, measuring the value of the in-person Real Talk events can be difficult. However, Musgrove says she’s received good qualitative data about the in-person events. “Apart from measuring the campaign, I think these activities have a halo effect on the brand,” Musgrove says. “A lot of that is reflected [over the] long term in metrics like brand favorability.”

Avoid Gimmicks

When Snickers launched its successful U.S.-based “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” campaign in the U.K., the company paid British celebrities to tweet about subjects they weren’t known to care about. Snickers’ goal was to grab the attention of the celebrities’ followers before cheekily revealing that the unusual tweets were a ruse to sell Snickers. 

Katie Price, a model who tends to tweet about entertainment and fashion, posted messages such as “Large scale quantitative easing in 2012 could distort liquidity of govt bond market. #justsayin” and “Great news about China’s latest GDP figures!!” After four geopolitical posts, Price posted a photo of herself posing with a Snickers candy bar, tagging it “#spon.” This campaign surprised her followers, though perhaps not the way she or Snickers had hoped. Hollywood Branded, an influencer and content marketing company, says many of Price’s followers before she revealed the tweets were part of an ad campaign. The tweets led the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority to . The ASA ruled in favor of Mars, the parent company of Snickers, but their findings didn’t change the confusion that Price’s followers felt. 

The biggest problem may not have been that Snickers duped Price’s followers, but that Price failed to create content her followers could engage with. Instead of engaging her followers, Snickers was satisfied with making them feel like fools.  

A better way for brands to appeal to an influencer’s audience is to give the influencer creative control. Low Res Agency’s Michael says his personal favorite influencer campaign was with Grey Goose, which flew him and other influencers to France and gave them tours of its distillery. To Michael, this felt more like working with a friend than an overbearing creative director.

“They just asked us to enjoy the experience, but obviously when you treat someone to a great experience, you’re going to want them to share it,” Michael says. “It felt very authentic in the sense that they weren’t trying to sell or advertise anything. They were just like, hey, this is our story. This is how we do things. This is how we think. It felt more like a good friendship than trying to sell something to somebody.”

When companies create insincere or dishonest campaigns, like such as the Snickers U.K. campaign, people feel dubious. People know disingenuous piffle when they see it, and Michael says they’re more sensitive to it than ever before. “Advertising doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but when it becomes gimmicky, people can read that,” he says. Instead of being gimmicky, Michael suggests that brands use influencer marketing to tell authentic stories and collaborate with people who want to create content for a brand.

Numbers Aren’t Everything

When Kendall Jenner handed a police officer a can of pop as a peace offering amid a protest in a 2017 Pepsi commercial, an almost-audible gasp of mockery and disbelief emanated from social media users. This was not what Pepsi had hoped for; the ad was calling for peace during a time of social and political anger in the U.S. Perhaps Pepsi had hoped the commercial’s peace offering would reverberate through Jenner’s nearly 100 million social media followers (and, of course, sell some pop). Instead, the Jenner-Pepsi ad drew snide responses, such as one from Bernice King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter, who tweeted, “If only Daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi.” It also drew calls to boycott Pepsi; New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow tweeted that he’d be boycotting Pepsi until the company apologized, tagging the brand and attaching a list of its subsidiaries. Blow’s call for a Pepsi boycott was retweeted more than 1,600 times. 

Pepsi quickly pulled the commercial from air and apologized to both consumers and Jenner, saying, “Clearly we missed the mark, and we apologize. We did not intend to make light of any serious issue.” 

This may have been an instance of what Koslow calls “people-chasing.” Although marketers may be attracted to a celebrity’s huge audience, such influencers won’t work for every campaign. Sometimes, smaller is better. For example, a recent survey by Markerly found that Instagram influencers with , while influencers with more than 10 million followers have a like rate of 1.6%. Macro-influencers will inevitably draw more eyes to a campaign, but marketers must ask if they will be the right eyes. Without targeting, marketers who aim for audience size are simply practicing a new-fangled version of spray-and-pray marketing.

Brands often think influencers with a larger following “must be doing something right,” Michael says, but a large following doesn’t guarantee a good fit. “It just means that they have a big number stamped on their name,” he says. 

Koslow says marketers who work on influencer campaigns often stop thinking strategically when they see a big follower count, believing that more is automatically better. But statistics suggest there is value in micro-influencers. Stakla’s “2017 Consumer Content Report: Influence in the Digital Age” reports that 60% of consumers are , while 23% say their purchases are influenced by celebrities. 

“If somebody has 1,000 followers, most of them are their friends,” Koslow says. “Marketers have to be smarter; they can’t just chase the new shiny penny. They have to ask the smart questions, so they can weed out the players that are just trying to sell something versus someone who can be a strategic partner.”

Avoid Sloppiness, Embrace Realness

When the line of genuine communication between influencers and their followers breaks, embarrassing moments tend to follow. In one memorable gaffe, reality star Scott Disick accidentally posted a note meant for his eyes only from protein powder manufacturer BooTea Shake. Disick posted a photo to his Instagram feed with the caption: 

“Here you go, at 4pm est, write the below 

Caption: 

Keeping up with the summer workout routine with my morning @booteauk protein shake!”

In the photo, an intense-eyed Disick posed with a jar of BooTea Shake’s protein powder. Instead of coming off as a ringing endorsement, the photo looked akin to a paid pose with a fan at a reality TV convention.

This kind of sloppy disingenuousness is unhelpful for the brand and the influencer. Brands would be better served by looking for genuine reactions from celebrity influencers or organic responses from their own followers to post on the brand’s social media accounts. Regions Bank uses the latter, Musgrove says, and followers respond positively. Using stories from followers gives brands creative control—something BooTea Shake clearly wanted or needed in Disick’s case—but also allows brands to tell positive stories by people who love them.

Musgrove’s favorite example was when a customer commented on Regions’ Facebook account, writing that she and her husband had taken out a loan from Regions to adopt a child. She thanked the bank for playing a role in completing their family. “What an amazing and powerful thing to be able to have had a hand in,” Musgrove says. “Our customers might not necessarily be passionate about Regions, and they might not be passionate about a checking account or a savings account, but they’re incredibly passionate about the life that our products and services enable them to live. We really want to capitalize on that.”

Musgrove says stories like this create positive memories for followers and encourage others to share their stories. After posting the couple’s adoption story, Musgrove says that she received multiple stories from Regions Bank followers across the country. “We try to tell their stories in bigger ways,” Musgrove says. “It’s a very organic influencer strategy and it requires listening and following up.”

Form Long-term Relationships with Influencers 

You can’t please everyone on social media, but Musgrove says that you can radiate a pleasing image by building relationships with reliable influencers. As many of the above examples show, it’s easy for companies to have miscues and errors when they match with the wrong influencer. When Regions was planning to use influencer marketing in 2012, “horror stories” scared Musgrove and Regions, making them conservative in their approach to partnering with influencers.

“Some brands came with good intentions but forged some … partnerships with influencers who became not so positive reflections on the brand,” Musgrove says. “That’s why we’ve been so passionate about finding influencers and aligning ourselves with people who we think have good stories to tell and … that we would want to represent our brand.”

More brands are now taking a long-term approach to influencer marketing; 62% of brands compensate influencers as brand ambassadors or partners rather than one-time contractors, according to the ANA’s influencer report. Michael says that long-term relationships with influencers cultivate more creativity, better collaboration and increasing credibility for brands.

“The partnerships that I’ve enjoyed the most are [with brands] who want to create something interesting together, where we’re like-minded,” he says. “I think that’s the biggest takeaway: Brands should try to find ways to work with people whom they want to create great work with. The goal should always be creating better work or better opportunities.”​​

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When Ellie Mirman led a , she’d watch in awe as the company’s engineering team worked on new projects in short-but-methodical bursts. The team would use these monthlong bursts, called sprints, to create and test potentially valuable projects. At the end of each sprint, the team examined what was successful and what wasn’t—if something was successful, it was adopted; if it wasn’t, it was ditched. “We were working really close with them,” says Mirman, who served as HubSpot’s director of marketing for the inbound funnel. “It rubbed off on us, and we decided to give it a shot.”

Each month, Mirman’s team focused on a new sprint—the most important projects were tested first—and eschewed other new ideas until future months. After many sprints, Mirman had a better view of which marketing projects were wasteful, which were worthwhile and which needed changes. “Let’s look at this month: What worked, what didn’t and what can we cut?” Mirman says she’d ask her team after each sprint. Like the engineering team, Mirman’s team adopted the programs that worked and ditched those that didn’t. 

Sprints are a common tool in agile and lean processes, two complementary practices popular for decades in manufacturing. Now, these processes are becoming popular across marketing departments: reports that 77% of marketing departments using agile practices adopted them in the past five years. Additionally, 44% of agile marketers say that they use a hybrid methodology, such as the lean-agile combination that Mirman implemented at HubSpot. (She’s now CMO of , a market and competitive intelligence company, and continues to integrate lean-agile processes into marketing practice.) 

, partner at marketing consultancy CMG Partners, defines lean as a methodology that continuously reduces waste and limits the amount of work in progress. Agile, on the other hand, improves effectiveness; Lange says that adopting agile processes means constantly looking for new tasks, experimenting with them and learning if they work. “Together, they can do wonderful things,” he says. His company, which assists larger organizations in adopting these processes, reports that increase their profits and revenue.

How can marketers—whether in small business, the middle market or a Fortune 500 company—use lean and agile principles to their advantage? Lange and Mirman explain the paths to success. 

​​Center on the Customer

Each time Lange begins consulting with a marketing department, he’ll ask the team’s leader about the process the team uses. Most will say that they use a customer-centric process, yet Lange often finds that marketing teams don’t consider the customer until the end of the process. Marketers who adopt lean and agile marketing must first ensure their process is customer-centric, he says, as customer value and response are essential to lean and agile success.

Lange recently worked with a company that, after years of using lean and agile processes in its manufacturing plants, wanted to extend the processes to its marketing team. When Lange examined the team, he found that its process was focused on potential business value and ease of business implementation; potential value to the customer was nowhere to be found. After adopting lean and agile principles, Lange says that the marketing team went from working on more than 20 projects based on business value to working on four initiatives based on value to the customer. Then, the company worked backward to figure out how the initiatives brought value to the company. 

By making its marketing process customer-centric, the department also forged a shared language with other teams, including sales, customer support and product development. This allowed the marketing team and larger organization to quickly find new value for customers. “They brought multiple business functions together with a unified language that wasn’t dependent on any one function but rather on one customer,” Lange says. 

Avoiding Marketing Overload

Soon after Mirman adopted the hybrid agile-lean model at HubSpot, she says that the overwhelming feeling of having too much to do—, according to a study from Workfront—largely disappeared. “You can’t do everything, right?” Mirman says. “You have to figure out what’s most important.”

With a lean-agile process in place, Mirman could see everything her team was doing or planning to do. After each sprint, she saw what worked and didn’t work, what ideas her team had for the future and what the rest of the company was requesting of her team. With this overview of the department, Mirman could slot different projects into sprints throughout the year, more easily regulating her team’s workflow. One month, her team might launch one big project and two small ones; another month, they may have time for two big launches and one small launch. “It really helps you manage expectations and then get results,” she says.

Most marketers have ongoing projects that seem to collect more tasks until the projects balloon out of control. Few teams consider cutting back, but Mirman says that cutting out needless tasks is one of the benefits of lean and agile marketing. “Being able to say ‘no, not right now’ allows more projects to actually get done,” she says. “We’ve scaled back on projects that didn’t have that big of an impact. We’re looking for a higher hit rate on things that we do.”

By controlling what her team undertakes each month, Mirman says that she avoids the common marketing mistake of making “big wild bets that you don’t learn from until a year later.” Instead, the team learns from their small tasks and adopts the most successful of them, she says, always asking themselves how they can improve in future sprints. Mirman keeps a backlog of ideas ready to test, she says, weighing each idea by its importance before slotting the best ideas into sprints. 

In a recent sprint at Crayon.co, an item on Mirman’s backlog proved successful. Her team noticed people browsing the company’s website were searching for competitive analysis templates, so Mirman wrote on her backlog to test these templates. The company had never created this kind of content before, but they scheduled it into a sprint. “And it did remarkably well,” she says. “It was a test we wanted to do for a long time, but we hadn’t found the time for it.”

Since this test, Mirman says that they’ve created similarly popular templates. But a year later, the original competitive analysis template is still the company’s most popular piece of content.

Failure and Honesty

If marketers adopt lean and agile processes, then they will need to become comfortable with failure and honesty. Lange says that this may be the most difficult part for marketers, especially those who work at larger companies without what he calls a “startup mindset.” Those who work in larger companies tend to be uncomfortable with failure, self-assessment and the potential of looking bad in front of peers or bosses because of a stilted environment. But in a lean-agile environment, marketers must figure out how to experiment, fail and learn. 

“The mindset should be how to experiment in producing campaigns [to] reduce work and the amount of effort required to put something in the marketplace,” Lange says.

In some cases, experiments may show that long-running projects have little value and can be cut. Lange consulted with a marketing department that was sending 52 e-mails to its clients each year. The department wanted to see if it needed to keep sending this many, so it reduced the number to 12 e-mails sent per year as part of a lean experiment. When revenue held steady over the testing period, the department again cut the number of e-mails to four per year. Revenue continued to hold steady; within a single experiment, the department cut 48 e-mails from its year without losing money. 

Marketers often don’t want to countenance that some of their processes aren’t necessary, but Lange says that facing the problems and experimenting with new solutions will mean quick—even if uncomfortable—improvement. “You’re a scientist looking to fail,” Lange says. 

Although Lange says that lean and agile principles have great potential in marketing, adopting them can be a difficult mindset change across a company. These processes will change how people work;  successful changes of this kind are never assured. To attempt this kind of change takes fortitude, Lange says, but to be successful takes hard work. 

“Leadership has to be committed to taking advantage of the benefits and it has to be inspired by the top,” he says. “But the actual hard work is done by the people doing the work.”​

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The economic value of a college degree is widely recognized. Burleson Consulting estimates the net present value (NPV) of a bachelor’s degree in business administration, versus graduating from high school, to be $350,000. The NPV of an MBA is estimated to be $800,000. While those figures presumably account for the lost wages while attending school, the income gains are offset by the total costs of the advanced education. A bachelor’s degree from a state university costs approximately $100,000, according to The College Board, compared to the more than $200,000 tuition incurred by students at some private universities. The Financial Times estimates the average total cost of an MBA to be between $160,000 and $220,000. 

While the math suggests that both undergraduate and master’s degrees show a positive ROI, the educational investment is largely up front, which often leads to large student loans that students may not pay off until middle age. And it’s only going to get worse with tuition and fees rising at a rate of about 3% per year while financial aid has failed to keep up.

With declining government support, business schools are increasingly dependent on tuition and fees for income. Their largest expense is faculty salaries. According to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the starting salary for a “doctorally qualified” business school faculty member often exceeds $100,000 but can reach $150,000 to $175,000 depending on the school and field (accounting and finance being the highest, with marketing in the middle). Research-oriented universities tend to pay more and require less teaching; that’s not to say faculty there have it easy, but what are they working on during nonteaching hours?

The implication is that at most major business schools a large portion of student tuition is subsidizing faculty research. Compared to the natural and social sciences, business school faculty are not usually expected to bring in research grants. That places even more of the research burden on tuition. Knowing that, a business school student or alumnus might reasonably ask, “What am I getting for the research portion of my tuition dollar and the sacrifice that it required?” 

A group of scholars from various business disciplines are asking that same question at the system level. The group, the (cRRBM), includes leading marketing voices Mary Jo Bitner, the Edward M. Carson chair in service marketing at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, and David Reibstein, the William Stewart Woodside professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. This group’s position paper suggests students are not getting enough from their investment. It’s reasonable to expect that faculty research would inform lectures and textbooks or that professors’ research is helping define best practice around their subject matter and provide fact-based guidance for approaching real-world problems and opportunities. One might assume the audience for this knowledge are their students and the business community. In the spirit of conscious capitalism and responsible science, there might also be the expectation that some of their research contributes to a better world that is more economically prosperous, environmentally sustainable, fair and just in terms of gender equality and wealth distribution and free of unethical and deceptive practices. But are these expectations being met? For the most part, the cRRBM has its doubts, and those concerns are not business-discipline specific.

The group takes issue with a dysfunctional ecosystem in which the currency is peer-reviewed journal articles which mainly serve to advance faculty members’ careers. In this system, “research impact” has a different meaning than a practitioner might think. It has mainly to do with the number of times an article is cited in other academic articles and journals, with only a tangential relationship to improving management practice or addressing social issues. 

Too often business research is published not because it is useful or actionable in practice, but simply because it is theoretically or methodologically interesting to other scholars. In the judgment of the cRRBM, some of the factors contributing to crises of relevance and integrity in academic business research include: focus on academic audiences, overemphasis on theory, selection of esoteric topics, scientific writing style, inaccessibility to practitioners, bias toward exaggerated findings, bias toward positive findings as opposed to replications and null results and devaluation of interdisciplinary work. 

Marketing is not immune to these criticisms. Though it’s not true of every article published in the field, leading journals display these questionable characteristics in varying degrees. 

In its position paper, the cRRBM offers a set of sound principles for responsible research in business and suggests actions for various key stakeholder groups to take. On top of those good ideas, here are some additional thoughts:

To students: Push faculty to provide evidence of the veracity of their assertions in lectures and textbooks. By challenging conventional wisdom, you might stimulate research that is rigorous and actionable. 

To parents of undergraduate students—especially those who are also alumni: As the paying customer, schedule periodic appointments with faculty, department heads and deans, and make clear your expectations as to what a business education should be delivering. Ask questions about the programs of research that faculty are conducting and why those topics are important. Share examples of problems you face in your own business that could be addressed through faculty research.

To department heads and deans: Get over the idea that 15% to 20% faculty engagement in outside, paid consulting is bad—even among younger, untenured faculty. Considering that many faculty progress straight through their education into a teaching role with limited work experience, consulting is an excellent opportunity for them to confront real-world problems. These engagements often involve the collection and analysis of hard-to-come-by data and sometimes the opportunity to publish findings or conclusions with a client that straddles the worlds of academics and practitioners.

It is unclear whether a shift in focus of academic research could help contain tuition and fee increases, but it could certainly improve the return on that investment. One outcome might be a rise in sponsorships, grants and endowments. This could occur if faculty, faced with the expectation of conducting relevant research, were more motivated to seek out data and financial support from corporations, nonprofits and professional associations. Likewise, those same entities might increasingly look to business schools as evidence providers for the pressing issues they face. While clear rules would need to be established around research objectivity and what can or can’t be published, those are solvable issues. ​

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Artificial intelligence has been a trending topic for quite some time, and its use is on the rise in every industry. According to a report by Salesforce, 51% of marketing leaders state that they currently use AI in some way, with 27% planning to start using it in the next two years. As AI continues to grow, it will progressively impact how our society functions and transform the way we work.

As with any transformative technology, AI has marketing professionals on their toes, leaving them to wonder about the fate of their jobs. Should you anticipate a massive disruption by AI threatening the security of your job?

Marketers, have no fear: AI isn’t going to replace you or any of your colleagues just yet. AI is incredibly advanced, but it is not sophisticated enough to master human IQ and emotional intelligence.

We haven’t yet experienced the full potential of AI, but as it comes to fruition, it will need the support of humans, and it will compel marketers to build their expertise. While AI may replace a few routine marketing functions, it will create new roles and transform the role of the modern marketing expert.

Here’s how to embrace the future of marketing with AI and ramp up your skills to evolve alongside it.

Embrace AI with Open Arms

To develop skills suited to support AI, you must first understand its current and potential uses.

AI can automate repetitive tasks and sort massive amounts of data. From analyzing which type of content resonates with a specific persona to curating the content all on its own, AI is incredibly proficient at providing deep insights into consumers and optimizing workflows. By automating redundant work, AI gives humans the opportunity to craft sophisticated strategies and prioritize meaningful tasks.

The best way to survive the AI shift is to embrace its strengths and how it complements your capabilities. By understanding the limitations and possibilities of AI, you can understand how it will change and enhance your work.

Become Fluent in Analytics and Data

AI makes marketing tasks more efficient by enhancing data-driven decision-making. Marketers are now better able to identify their target consumer and understand the consumer’s needs.

AI is well-equipped to manage and sort data. It identifies insights, predicts patterns and highlights valuable relationships that humans may miss.

However, the data AI delivers needs to be translated by a human. Marketers must understand analytics and interpret the outputs to drive meaningful connections and actions, which will allow them to understand consumer behavior and motivations.

You Can’t Put a Price on Emotional Intelligence

The continuous integration of AI into the customer-centric world changes how consumers interact with and purchase from brands. This type of technology drives customer demands and expectations higher, forcing marketers to deliver better experiences.

AI provides social insights that allow you to deliver messages across various channels based on customer behavior. However, it falls short of the emotional capacity needed to genuinely connect with consumers. AI lacks the competence to understand context along the customer journey. Different factors, such as location and culture, significantly impact customer journey and experience, most of which are only possible for humans to intimately understand.

Human empathy and emotional intelligence (EQ) allow us to understand the consumer and tailor content for a highly personalized journey and experience better than AI can.

A combination of sophisticated analytical skills and EQ empowers marketers to use AI to target their core customers in ways that weren’t possible just a few years ago.

Unparalleled Creativity Cannot Be Simulated

Consumers expect more than just a great product or service from a brand. They want to connect with the company, and they expect an incredible, seamless buying experience. This experience creates loyalty and repeat business.

Nothing can connect to the emotions and feelings of a human better than another human. AI allows humans to focus on creative work and other tasks machines can’t do. If you have a unique, creative mindset to complement sharp technical skills, your competence is unmatched by any transformative technology.

Lifelong Learning Is a Must to Survive

AI will decrease the amount of effort and time marketers spend on day-to-day tasks, but it can never replace the human touch successful marketing requires. Marketers who continuously learn, expand their skills and evolve alongside technology will always be able to survive.

AI will always need human input to maximize its value. Marketers must learn many new technical skills to get ahead. Doing so will help you speak the language of AI and deliver more value as a marketer. The best marketers use innovative technologies to enhance their skills and results for their employers.

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Some moments matter more than others. In The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath teach marketers how to capitalize on an unexpected peak moment for customer satisfaction. 

Marketers talk a lot about Big Data and analytics—how artificial intelligence and automated systems may soon power and enable the front end of many of our customer-facing experiences. I’m a technology advocate and I believe in data, analysis and facts. I also believe marketers need to comprehend human behavior and psychology to strategically deploy digital tools such as AI. 

That’s why The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact is a must-read book for all marketers, and perhaps for all executives.

The Heath brothers are no strangers to the best-seller list. Their prior books, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard and Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work are all provocative and well worth a marketer’s time. In The Power of Moments, the Heaths articulate why certain moments matter more than others and how marketers and business leaders—even public policy makers and leaders of nongovernmental organizations—can achieve greater effectiveness by understanding the psychology and strategic application of the power of moments.

The opening tale is of two Houston-based charter school founders, Chris Barbic and Donald Kamentz, who were sitting in a bar in October 2000, watching ESPN after a 14-hour day. 

The Heaths explain, “It was national signing day, the first day when graduating high school football players can sign a ‘binding letter of intent’ to attend a particular college. For football fans, it’s a big day.”

“It blows my mind that we celebrate athletics in this way, but we don’t have anything that celebrates academics in the same way,” Kamentz said. 

Barbic and Kamentz thought: What if we created our own “signing day,” when our students announce where they will attend college? 

Over the next six years, their students—who hail from underserved communities, are economically disadvantaged and whose parents have not attended college—could get on a stage and announce to their friends and family where they were going to college. The event grew to more than 5,000 attendees and even attracted then-Education Secretary Arne Duncan. 

The signing day concept created a peak moment that was more than just memorable, it was motivating. It inspired younger students, who might have otherwise not chosen college, to work harder and drive toward the opportunity of being on stage.

The Heaths describe the quirks of our mind and why “peak” moments and “ending” moments can be powerful. 

Their explanation of the “peak-end rule” explores why parents of young children might spend a day sweltering in the heat and long lines of Disney World: The thrill of riding Space Mountain (a peak moment) and the joy of seeing their children don Mickey Mouse ears at the end of the day (an end moment) can tip the overall balance of a day to the positive and keep customers coming back.

The authors also tell of the Magic Castle Hotel, one of the top-rated hotels in Los Angeles that routinely beats out the Four Seasons and the Ritz Carlton on service quality. How is this possible when the pool and other physical amenities of the Magic Castle Hotel are less impressive than their rivals?

 “Let’s start with the cherry-red phone mounted to a wall near the pool. You pick it up and someone answers, ‘Hello, Popsicle hotline.’ You place your order, and minutes later, a staffer wearing white gloves delivers your cherry, orange or grape Popsicles to you at poolside. On a silver tray. For free,” they write. 

The Magic Castle Hotel has found a way to deliver a peak moment for anyone on vacation in Los Angeles, and it leads to outstanding satisfaction scores.

The Heaths explain that defining moments are created by one or more of the following four elements:

• Elevation: Defining moments rise above the everyday routine.
• Insight: Defining moments rewire our understanding of ourselves or the world.
• Pride: Defining moments capture us at our best—moments of achievement or courage.
• Connection: Defining moments are social (e.g., weddings, graduations, baptisms, vacations, work triumphs, bar and bat mitzvahs, speeches and sporting events).

The Heaths remind us that there are times that matter. First days matter. Transitions matter. Milestones matter. And truly negative experiences, which the authors refer to as “pits,” matter. 

“Transitions should be marked, milestones commemorated, and pits filled,” they advise.

Then there’s the concept the Heaths discuss called “breaking the script,” deviating from the expected experience. 

“Breaking the script is strategic surprise,” they write, and the Magic Castle Hotel broke the script with their Popsicle hotline. 

The question The Power of Moments raises is this: Can McDonald’s break the script and offer strategic surprises and create moments that matter? Can you, as a marketer, achieve this in your organization?

With guidance from Chip and Dan Heath, you’ll be well along the way to achieving moments that yield success.

For those of you looking for a powerful book that will guide you on digital technology, pick up Human + Machine: Reimaging Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson. 

After all, marketers need to understand digital technology and buyer psychology.

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College doesn’t always seem accessible to everyone, particularly not for students from low-income families. School administrations can tout their financial aid packages, but that doesn’t mean word gets out to the families they would benefit most.​

And even then, the language used in financial aid services can be confusing. 

Add to this the perception of higher education as elitist—a claim propped up by the many expenses it takes just to get accepted: tutors, test prep and application fees to name a few.

 found the overall number of children from low-income families attending college increased rapidly in the 2000s, but the bulk of this increase occurred at two-year colleges and for-profit institutions. According to the report, the percentage of students at four-year and selective colleges from the poorest families saw no significant change.

Working-class families can perceive enrollment at state schools like the University of Michigan as unattainable. The Equality of Opportunity Project found 16% of University of Michigan students come from families in the bottom 60% of earners, while 9% of students come from families in the top 1% of income distribution. Although the 2016 median household income in Michigan was $50,803, the median income of parents sending their children to U of M was $156,100.

Acknowledging the perception of low-income inaccessibility, the University of Michigan launched an initiative called the Go Blue Guarantee, under which U of M will sponsor tuition for state residents with a family income of less than $65,000. Marketing News spoke with Kedra Ishop, vice provost for enrollment management at the university, about how the school is raising awareness of the program and changing the public’s view of the institution.

​​Q: How did the University of Michigan get here—here being such a high percentage of students from high-income families and a shrinking population from low-earning families? 

A: The price of higher education has changed a lot over the last couple decades, be it housing or the periphery cost associated with getting an education. 

In most cases, a typical student stays within 75 to 150 miles of where they’re from to go to school. Institutions that have a national or statewide profile tend to be where these kinds of [accessibility] issues are discussed. Some institutions attract students who can be mobile and who have a higher-ed background in their family. This notion of going away to school is not a concept that’s unfamiliar to those students; in fact, it’s something they’ve been striving toward their entire lives. 

All of those things have contributed to institutions like ours having a higher population of high-income students relative to lower-income students who might be making different choices for a lot of different reasons. There’s been a lot of work—by the College Board, institutions, community-based organizations—to change awareness and behavior, so talented students with the smarts to get into some of these schools that seem out of reach can pursue that. Likewise, [there are] schools changing their financial aid policies and the way they promote themselves to students to let them know that there are welcoming places for them. They have aid to help students financially and a desire to have economic diversity represented on their campus.

Q: Not everyone has parents who are alumni. Has there been an effort to change the perception that there must be precedent in the family to go to U of M?

A: There’s been a lot of conversation in the last 15 years around diversity in college admissions. We focus a lot on racial and ethnic diversity, but diversity is larger than that. It’s also socio-economic diversity. It’s geographic diversity. It’s having first-generation students in your student body. Institutions are much more deliberate now about how they present themselves to those populations. We’ve come to be purposeful about making sure, for a state institution like Michigan, that we’re reaching out across the state and into the Upper Peninsula and telling those students, “If you do the hard work that it takes to be a high-achieving student, to be admissible, there’s a place for you here—and we’ll help with the cost.” 

The largest surge of college-going students that we had would have been back with the GI Bill. We had a very different population of students pursuing higher education [after WWII]. That created the first wave of second-generation students and started to build these alumni bases. In the last couple of decades or so, there’s a pursuit to make sure that we’re remembering that and going back to students that haven’t had that kind of access, haven’t sought that kind of opportunity and providing for them as well.

Q: That’s a good transition into talking about the Go Blue Guarantee. How are you getting the word out about this program?

A: When I arrived at Michigan, President [Mark] Schlissel had been here a couple of months longer than I had, so he was relatively new to campus. He had gone around the state and had conversations to get to know Michigan and the University of Michigan and our influencers. One of the questions he asked was, “How can we simplify our messaging about financial aid?” The University of Michigan met full demonstrated need for families in the state of Michigan, so if you were a Michigander, and you had financial need, we would meet it. There are only a few public institutions that have the resources to be able to do that, and yet the perception out there was that Michigan was too expensive. Certainly, if you look at a price tag of upwards of $28,000 for a state where the median income is around $65,000, it seems pretty out of reach. 

There’s a disconnect there. We also understand that financial aid is complex, and the language around financial aid is complex. You need to explain what “demonstrated need” means and what all of the forms are and why you need them. His [Schlissel’s] challenge was to inform in a language that was clear about our promise. He also wanted to make sure that we signal to students that cost is not a prohibitive factor for families in the state of Michigan. If they think, “I can’t go to college anyway. I can’t afford it. Why would I take algebra in the eighth grade or spend that extra time reading?,” we wanted to influence those behaviors early on, so students could make choices that might prepare them for the University of Michigan. 

We wanted to make sure that our promise would be sustainable. We were approached by a faculty member [Sue Dynarski] who’s very active around the simplification of the [Free Application for Federal Student Aid]. She wanted to test a message to families right off the bat, giving them up-front information about cost, what we’re going to pay for and what’s free to them and put it in their hands early to see if that would change their behavior as it relates to applying to the institution. 

We worked with her and a team of researchers to test a marketing message. We did it as a research study, allowing us access to state-level data that would identify students that we could send these packages to. We reached out to students, their families and their principals and counselors. The packet said that we had identified the student and would like to offer them the HAIL (High Achieving Involved Leader) Scholarship, which satisfies tuition at the university. Their application fee would be covered, the FAFSA is free to apply for financial aid and the fee for the profile—which is another financial aid document—would be covered as well. We told them: Your job is to work hard. Get the best grades you can, be active and engaged. Let’s see if you can get admitted, and then we’ll take care of this other piece. 

We had really good success in the first two years of the intervention with a marked increase in applications from the students that received the packet, relative to the students that didn’t receive the packet. In 2016, applications increased by 41% and in year two by 39%. That helped frame what became the Go Blue Guarantee. We spent more than a year on analysis to make sure we could set a standard dollar amount of aid that was sustainable over time. We didn’t want to put something out and have to change it. We were able to [cover tuition costs for students] at that median income level because we think that sends a powerful signal to the state. It is not a promise of admission, but it does take some of the sting away from students.

We announced the guarantee about this time last year. We first took care of all of the current students on campus that qualified for the Go Blue Guarantee and made sure that they were receiving the promise. This incoming class that will arrive with us in the fall will be the first incoming class to receive that promise.

Q: And you have another program called Wolverine Pathways, correct?

A: A team of folks from the university recognized that there was a disconnect between preparedness for the University of Michigan and the population that we had in our applicant pool. When we have students coming from differently resourced backgrounds, it’s difficult for all students to achieve at the same level. Our admissions process looks at students in context, so we don’t compare a student in a school that doesn’t have [advanced placement] classes and expect them to have AP classes on their transcript. That doesn’t make sense. Sometimes students need supplemental work to be successful here, even if they are the strongest student coming from their particular environment. The program starts in the seventh grade. It’s a rigorous commitment that’s meant to change the pipeline of students and increase the number of students from diverse backgrounds who are ready to apply to institutions like ours when they finally get to high school. [Editor’s note: Of the 89 high school seniors in the WP program, approximately 41 will be matriculating to University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and 27 to University of Michigan-Dearborn this fall.]

Q: Let’s say you get these students prepared, and they’re accepted. Does the school see any remaining barriers for students to feel welcome in Ann Arbor? I’ve only passed through the town, and it seemed like night and day compared to the surrounding areas. 

A: Night and day, you’re exactly right. I came from a really small town in Southeast Texas before I attended the University of Texas at Austin, and I had a gazillion and one episodes of culture shock going to this large, gilded flagship institution. Ann Arbor is very much in that same vein. It’s a wealthy campus, a wealthy community relative to the state at large. It looks and feels different. One of the things we’ve been very careful of as we ran the HAIL study that led us to the Go Blue Guarantee is to be thoughtful about some of these issues. When our first group of students came in, we ran focus groups and did research projects to ask them these questions: Tell us what was right and wrong about the process. How are you feeling? Where are you disconnected? 

One student was walking on State Street, went into a store, saw a Canada Goose jacket and commented that it was $800. Her comment in this focus group was, “That’s more than my mom makes in a month.” It’s a coat, and they’re everywhere! It’s so different. 

We don’t want to be guilty of just changing the numbers on the front end, bringing more students in and changing our percentages. We also want to be very thoughtful about serving the students once they get here and developing communities for them. Some of them were very vocal with us the first year about where we were good at that and where we weren’t. We listened to them and created programming to make sure that we were supportive of them. One of those was the SuccessConnects program that’s meant to close the gaps.

[We’re] measuring their retention rates: Are they moving through the university at the same pace as other students? Early data says that they are. There are always gaps with students, but it’s not as significant as it could be, so we’re pleased that we’re making progress in that way.

Q: A lot of these programs we’ve discussed are still new, but what have you learned so far?

A: From a marketing perspective, we’re trying to keep a lot of data on those things we can measure. In the spaces where we’ve used digital marketing, we’re watching the returns: Who’s looking at it? Who’s clicking through it? Who’s not? What are parents seeing? What are students looking at? 

We also reached out to parts of the state with specific traditional marketing pieces, ads and community bulletins to try to figure out the right way to get in. I came from a small town, and it really resonates with me that small communities tend to get their information from local news. We addressed some of the bigger digital media platforms, but we also have to think about the local advocate. [Local news outlets] might be willing to do a story for us. 

We’ve been thinking about our media presence more strategically. It can’t all just come from Ann Arbor because that alone will carry a [political association]. There has to be buy-in, and we have to make sure that people believe what we say, what we’re doing and how we can help them. The marketing will continue to change, and we’ll respond to what works. Applications are up at the university, but they’re also up in lower-income populations, and that’s what we’re looking for: Are the behaviors changing? Are they familiar with the Go Blue Guarantee? 

That whole notion of making sure this was sustainable for us resonates through a lot of our decisions. We’re in this for the long haul. It’s not going to change tomorrow, and we’re not going to claim success tomorrow. Even if we see [application] increases this year, this is a long-haul change in culture and behavior.  

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The Loyola University Ramblers’ march to the Final Four of the NCAA’s 2018 men’s basketball championship was a shock to many. Yet there they were, and fans in the Chicago area scrambled to buy maroon and gold merchandise to cheer on the team.

Thanks to some quick action by the school’s licensing agency, vendors and retailers, those fans were able to stock up on Loyola apparel—some of which even featured the popular Sister Jean, chaplain for the men’s basketball team.

“We basically had a mini office in Chicago,” recalls Ben Emmons, vice president of brand marketing at Learfield Licensing Partners. Emmons says his team rushed to provide in-store retail marketing, signage and bonus gifts with purchases. “The NCAA towel that you couldn’t buy at retail for the most part? We were getting those straight from the towel manufacturer and overnighting them. We couldn’t even stock them. The moment that Sister [Jean] gave her approval on using her image, we had a licensee in their truck driving from Minnesota with 10,000 shirts already being placed at a bookstore, Dick’s Sporting Goods and a bunch of other retailers.”

A licensing partner isn’t only for those schools bracing for a Cinderella story. The partnership can keep marks consistent, merchandise current and legal headaches at bay.

Why Find a Licensing Partner?

Emmons can list many reasons why a school would seek out a licensing partner, chief among them the opportunity to work with experts in promotion and protection. 

“We have auditors, we have legal, we’ve got a good team that comes with varied backgrounds in retail licensee development,” Emmons says. “Some were former licensees, some were former bookstore buyers. Plus, we have brand managers.”

It’s not unusual for companies or individuals to hawk unlicensed merchandise, so many schools seek out a licensing agency to protect their brands. Unlicensed products result in lost dollars for universities, and unchecked marks can misrepresent schools. A licensing partner can help staunch the number of faux university T-shirts hitting streets or cyberspace. To counter online counterfeiting, Learfield uses third-party software to shut down online auction sites selling unlicensed products.

“One area that every brand, both college and elsewhere, deals with is counterfeiting online,” Emmons says. “But also, we’re present at game-day enforcement. Depending on the situation, we’re [looking for] those people with the bags of T-shirts and working with local law enforcement.”

Emmons notes that licensing various products in multiple categories ensures a university can protect classes when filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Having a licensing partner also places the school’s brand footprint in all the appropriate areas. Agencies can locate vendors where current or prospective students are located, whether it be local mom-and-pop bookstores blocks from a university or national retailers. A Badgers sweatshirt has an obvious home in a retail shop in Madison, Wisconsin, but it also has a less-obvious—and perhaps equally important presence—in a sporting goods store in Minnesota, a state where hailed from in the spring 2018 semester.

​​Branded products are one of the most iconic ways to market a school, as evidenced by the recognizable white on navy Yale University apparel (which inspired a similar “Kale” sweatshirt popularized by Beyoncé) or the University of California, Santa Cruz Fighting Banana Slugs shirt John Travolta wore in “Pulp Fiction.” A licensing partner can keep those visuals consistent, remaining true to the school’s mission and identity.

“When Miami’s marks are displayed on merch and sold at retailers, we see this as basically a walking billboard for the university,” says Laura Driscoll, manager of trademarks and licensing at Miami University of Ohio. “It’s free publicity. With that said, we are very intentional when we’re licensing our marks because we want to make sure that … the products that our brand is being produced on align with the university’s brand.”

Driscoll says the school’s licensing partner handles administrative tasks that include processing licensing applications and renewals and managing high-level relationships with retailers and vendors.

Unexpected Perks

A licensing partner can open up relationships with national and regional vendors to carry products that feature colleges’ marks, but it can also present some unusual opportunities for schools.

Learfield partnered with sports cap company New Era, four Latino artists and six universities in Texas, New Mexico and California for the Hispanic Heritage collection. The art featured on the caps was influenced by street art that included hand-drawn letters and Mexican Day of the Dead iconography. The project is now entering its second year, during which Learfield is expanding into additional apparel and partnering with new artists and 20 schools.

“We strategically chose these artists not only for the Hispanic demographic but also for lifestyle,” Emmons says. “Not everyone wants to necessarily wear [traditional college apparel]. The student body is so diverse, we wanted to be sure we could design different types of product.”

One of the greatest benefits of this nontraditional college apparel is how it’s appealed to a new audience—both students and retailers. Emmons says the caps were sold at traditional retailers (LIDS, Fanatics and on-campus bookstores), along with some local streetwear boutiques, where it opened a new avenue for marketing to a fan base the school otherwise might not have reached.

Learfield has also worked with country music stars on product partnerships, and other unique relationships have bloomed between colleges and brands like Victoria’s Secret PINK. Some schools have tapped their own student experts. Driscoll says Miami University’s fashion and design student organizations help the school create on-trend jewelry lines that were produced by some of its licensed vendors.

Getting Started

Having a licensing partner can be beneficial whether a college is rebranding or simply trying to organize and promote its marks.

“Make sure you’re working with partners that align with the university’s brand, and don’t go at it alone,” Driscoll says. 

She recommends taking advantage of on-campus resources and knowledge, as her school did with its fashion and design departments, to gain better insights on customers. She emphasizes the importance of a solid administrative foundation. Once partnerships are in place and branded products are available, it’s time to place them in front of the audience in marketing materials.

“We hadn’t ever integrated licensed merchandise into the equation for some of our photoshoots,” Driscoll says. “Now we’re being much more intentional and making sure we’re highlighting Miami’s brand, versus whatever just shows up in the photos. We’re partnering with our retailers to ensure the brand is there.”

Prior to reaching out to a potential licensing partner, Emmons says schools should spend time understanding their brand and their goals—and that means across all departments so the college-wide marks are cohesive. He also makes one simple request: “Have your colors consistent. We’ve had schools with five different shades of green.”

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