Introduction:
My client is North Dakota State University (NDSU), specifically working with the school of business to promote their graduate program. Currently NDSU operates in Fargo, North Dakota Where their main campus resides. Their school of business is an off-campus location where the business programs runs and operates. This location is Barry hall, located in what many considers Fargo’s business district, and is intended to integrate business students into the business world. According to the North Dakota State University Enrollment Census Summary, the fall semester of 2020 enrollment to the college of business sees 1,436 under graduates and 148 graduate students. 965 undergraduate and 101 graduate males, 471 undergraduate and 47 graduate females (Schuluchter, 2020).
While enrollment numbers fall nationally (US Census Bureau, 2020), and Covid-19 has caused economic uncertainty; in times of recessions there tends to be a trend of more students getting their graduate degree. The idea is that while they wait for the economy to bounce back, they will come out with more credentials and capitalize on the better job market. There is also a shifting need in consumers. Current and future students are looking more closely at brands impacts on such things as social equity and social corporate responsibility. In order to stay ahead of the curve NDSU is looking to implement changes in their programs, attitudes, and advertising to reach the growing values of current and future students. While NDSU is taking on many changes, the focus of this rebranding pertains to highlighting and focusing on women in business. A positive secondhand success of this campaign is also the potential positive attitudes this will generate for the program and NDSU as a whole. As mentioned earlier, the growing value shift for companies to take social action is growing in the desired demographics and this campaign aligns with those values. While there can be many ways that a campaign focused of a marginalized group has the potential to backfire, we take this into account when planning out the process and take extra measures to prevent such the case.
The goal that will be addressed in the rest of this paper is to launch a campaign for the NDSU business graduate program to encourage and to be more welcoming to women of business. Some facts, ideas and goals that will be later discussed are:
· While total NDSU graduates are 51% male and 49% female, in the college of business the statistic shifts to 67% male and 33% female.
· The job market is at a low currently, and as more people get laid off, getting a masters can be an attractive incentive to come out more qualified.
· There is a growing demand for businesses to address and partake in social equity and Corporate social responsibility.
· NDSU is financially competitive and offers a better value for an education.
· Fargo’s business activity is growing, Home to Microsoft headquarters and soon amazon, on top of the city’s expansion, there will soon be more jobs, a more attractive climate and NDSU is looking to capitalize on all of these factors.
· For the women in business initiative, we would like to see graduate enrollment reach over 40% for women. As well as open the door to partnering programs such as Forte who focus on empowering women with outlets and resources to getting higher education.
I reached out to the director of the graduate program for more information. The information I got from that is as follows:
· The MBA program is a generalist program aimed at professionals in the FM area.
· NDSU tends to get a reasonable number of engineers who are starting to move into more managerial positions, but we also get students with other kinds of experiences, and some international students.
· They revamped their program several years ago. The new program has several advantages which is used to pitch it.
o it is flexible – you can take a lot of courses at once and finish quickly (as little as two semesters with a heavy load), or you can take it slower and balance the academic work with your full-time job. Classes meet in the evenings, and each course is 8 weeks long.
o It allows you to take elective courses in groups which can be bundled into graduate certificates. These courses have been designed with business trends and the needs of local businesses in mind, and include: Leadership & Managerial Skills, Business Analytics, and Digital Marketing.
o As far as promotion outlets go, they use a number of different approaches including:
§ Radio ads
§ Social network ads
§ Print ads
§ Billboard (this is through University relations)
§ Alumni / word of mouth
This firsthand information will be useful in forming the ideas and decisions further on in the campaign planning process.
NDSU’s current competition is the competing colleges in the area. While NDSU is a cost-effective education, so too are the ones in the area. Connecting with partnership programs such as Forte will allow us to differentiate from other programs that might struggle to connect their students with affluent mentors. The surrounding schools such as Moorehead and Concordia also have not taken an approach to market towards women. This campaign will allow NDSU to break head of the others and root themselves in a positive image.
Campaign Description:
The general direction that this campaign will be taking is broken down further in the following paragraphs. Key factors to keep in mind is that we will be focusing on print ads, social network ads and connecting with other prominent movements/ outlets to reach a wider audience.
Target audience:
The target market will be defined as women, seeking a way to become more qualified to, in-turn set themselves up for a spot in a managerial role/ leadership. The age range can vary greatly, from women currently in an undergraduate degree, (18-25) to the working-class women looking for opportunities to become more qualified (30-40). The target audience’s geographical location will be the South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota range as we still want to target closer residents.
The bright side is that with the aid of digital marketing, we can maintain a single message while changing elements of an advertisement to better suit the wide range of the audience. For example, an ad of social media would retain the same message but through options from marketing tools like Facebook ads and google AdSense, we are able to have a picture of the varying age ranges properly shown to the appropriate targets. A current student will see a female 20 something year old, while a working-class woman will see a 30-40-year-old, successfully retaining the audience identifying with the message.
The target market continues to be broken down by their values and attitudes. They are highly motivated individuals, seeking to capitalize on opportunities that will enrich them and their careers. They value independence and being able to provide for themselves. They like to make connections and utilize their resources to plan a more effective strategy for the future.
Message strategy and themes:
The idea for this campaign is to utilize a unique selling proposition. The idea we are pushing is that women can take action themselves to set themselves up to become leaders.
When thinking of the tag line for this whole campaign it is important to not jump the gun and create a message that comes off as excluding other demographics. While gender differences continue to be a hot topic, an over ambitious message can come back to hurt the brand. We want something original, catchy enough to differentiate us from other movements and makes the consumer think NDSU when they hear it. That being said there is a great amount of room to miss the target. Too cheesy, corny, callous, exclusive are all things that will hurt the message and stop the campaign in its tracks. With that noted, we decided on the campaigns message to revolve around “take the future into own hands” with the sub head of “a path to leadership starts with an NDSU Masters.
“take your future into your own hands” embodies the message theme of the campaign of empowering women to become leaders through honing their skills with a master’s degree. This is supposed to attract the target audience that is motivated and susceptible to this wording in the message. A woman who is looking ahead to be proactive will receive this message positively and engage with it continuing on to the sub head and the call to action. The sub head ties the message to the brand: “The path to leadership starts with an NDSU Masters” and is followed with the call to actions by seeking out more information on the website.
One problem to point out and over come is the possible lack of targeting in the ad. While many may see this as targeting a receptive and wider audience, for the goal of the campaign we may worry that it does not target women enough. Although in the potential ad’s, the image and focus will be women there are some points of contention. The positive is that this branding is inclusive, safe and misses the negative pit falls mentioned earlier. The reverse is that it may not be doing enough to reach the audience we intend. The crux of this problem boils down to a single question: Does targeting the audience gender through the image do enough to reach them?
One remedy is to have a second supplemental ad running concurrently with this one. This one is more on the head for the messaging and reads as such: “Today’s women, Tomorrow’s leaders” with the same sub head “The path to leadership starts with an NDSU Masters”. Some may argue that a different sub head focused on the target audience such as “empowering women starts with a an NDSU masters” or some variation of the sort may be more fitting but could actually cause more problems. With the touchy subject and brash criticism that could be receive, it might fall victim to coming off tone deaf and self-serving to a critical issue. Some may see it as capitalizing on a societal issue to push your brand, not unlike the Kylie Jenner Pepsi branding flop. On top of that, sticking with the same sub head builds the messaging strength through different ad’s and effectively starts to build brand recognition to the viewers when thinking of leadership, and a masters. Congruency in brand messaging (by sticking with the same sub heading for both ad’s) will effectively aid in achieving the top-of-mind brand recognition we would like to see.
Prominent movements/ outlets
An important part of the campaign is the collaborative push to connect with prominent movements and being active in event’s, fairs, socials, and other important networking events that can help connect us directly to the audience.
The first part of this section is upping the presence in key networking events. Within the Fargo Morehead area there are numerous career fairs, job fairs and other networking events that can be capitalized on and should through this new campaign. The idea is to take advantage of the face-to-face interaction to attract new candidates and get them the pertinent information that might be holding them back from pursuing a further search into the program.
This angle is likely to be highly successful because those who attend fairs, networking events etc. are already demonstrating the motivation to move their career in a positive direction thus ensuring we are reaching the target demographic. The one-on-one sales pitch approach is the most effective method of getting powerful information to our audience. For a program that retains a smaller volume of consumers (148 graduates in the school), It is a cost-effective approach of reaching that audience while readily overcoming the stop gaps and streamlining the process. The personnel will most likely be an internal representative of the program, meaning there won’t be an additional cost besides fees for participating in the events.
Another avenue to be touched on is the outreach to partnership programs. The one we found and would like to partner with is Forte. From their website, Forte is an organization with the goal of empowering women to get their MBAs to “grow their credibility, capability and confidence”(Forte, 2020). Through their donors, they assist women by providing monetary support, connecting them to other strong women in business and providing education resources such as good colleges to attend. By allying with programs such as this, we can build a mutually beneficial relationship in which both programs can grow and flourish. The extent of the partnership can vary but by connecting with them we can utilize their women mentorship that may be harder to find in the local area. We can host speakers which could help influence undergraduate to see the value in empowering themselves with a higher education while providing an additional outlet for forte. By reaching our goal or even being proactive to increasing the gender enrollment, we can achieve shared media by garnering their endorsement and widening the reach of our program to be broadcasted nationally. This partnership has a great potential to extend the reach of the program and generate great positive attitudes to NDSU.
Execution of Marketing:
The main focus of marketing will be: online digital ads, representatives at career fairs/ networking events, and our partnership program.
For online digital ads, the tools at our disposal allow us accurately pinpoint and target our audience. Through google AdSense, we can target key words and phrases such as “Ways to move up in business”, “women in business opportunities” “leadership opportunities” and different variations of the sort. With the built-up online profiles social media and marketing platforms have on its users, targeting the gender and geolocation will not be a problem. Ads will appear in online searches and on their social media platforms to reach the target, prompting them to seek out more information. The landing page will send them to the campaigns specialized women in business campaign page which has all the information of the graduate program but is specially geared towards women, informing them of the potential path and how it will help them.
The presence of the NDSU program at career events is as simple as having a trained person show up and represent us, the biggest effort will go into finding, hosting, and connecting with on-going events.
Connecting with the partnership will take reaching out to organizations like Forte and establishing a dialogue with them to take the process further and understand the extent of the relationship and how to proceed further.
Outcomes:
Through this campaign and push to reach more women, we would like to see graduate enrollment increase from 149 students, to 200 with 40% or 80 of those students being women. According to the NDSU programs cost breakdown, with 30 credits to complete the degree, North Dakota residents would pay about $19,000 and Minnesota residents about $24,000( NDSU, 2020). With those figures (assuming 77% are North Dakota residents and33% of students are Minnesota residents for ease of estimating) we can take the current estimated tuition revenue of 149 students of $3,076,000 to $4,130,000 for 200 students. A $1,054,000 gain in tuition revenue for the school.
Ad Examples
Ads Explained:
As mentioned earlier, taking a more moderate approach to targeting women will help prevent possible backlash. The ads have the white text “todays women” over the image to first catch the viewers eyes, then as natural flow the ad shifts left to right top to bottom. To emphasis this the gradient eases viewers with the contrasting colors of NDSU. The two images reflect the two different demographics. The current college student will identify with the top ad and be shown from the execution of social media ad targeting. The phrase “Begin your journey” is meant to inspire and make them feel the path is a new journey not initially thought of for the typical college graduation path.
The second ad is slightly modified to reflect the age demographic of those currently working. The shift continues to the tweaked “Continue your journey” as they are already in a career field, it can be thought of as a path of progression to reach higher in their career.
These are just two initial variations of the campaign’s advertisement section. More advertisement will be continually filtered through to give refreshing information to the viewers and continue to build a connection with the viewer. Each new set of advertisement will touch of different aspects of the benefits to going back to college and the benefits NDSU has such as connecting them to strong women in leadership. The idea of having continual new advertisements to show the viewer also helps retain attention so that the viewer doesn’t passively skip over it.
For this campaign we are focusing solely on online advertisement for the fact that the market is very niche and the tools for online advertisement accurately pinpoints the targets, maximizing spending on advertisement compared to other forms of “shot-gun” advertising.
Conclusion:
The dominate stake holders are seen as the potential consumers- or students of NDSU. With their growing shift in values and attitudes towards brands moves to one that wants to see brands being proactive to social problems, this campaign will capitalize on that as well as serve as positive public relations with the community.
Our message strategy will be to offer the unique value proposition of offering an education that is the best suited for women to empower themselves and become leaders. This will be done with relevant message themes that cater to the target audiences’ values of independence, want to improve, and want to empower themselves and other women in the workplace. This will be reinforced with the partnership to Forte that will also lend scholarships to help women and mentors in their network to match students up with and give them experience they can’t find with our competitors. While many outcomes may be qualitative and harder to measure, such as the improved attitudes toward the university, program, and community; we would like to see enrollment increase nearly 25% with a higher enrollment of 40% women.
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