I have blogged extensively in the past about the importance of knowing who your most valuable customer is, and knowing what they value and making sure your value proposition stays aligned with that customer, or even those customer segments.
But what if your target customer doesn’t even know you exist?
There was a really interesting article in The New York Times last weekend called “Colleges Market Easy, No-Fee Sell to Applicants” and I wasn’t surprised to see that it made the front page. The article, by Jacques Steinberg talked about a crafty new way some lesser known college programs are attracting more applicants, by making it really easy to apply (no fee and no essay needed), in some cases even labeling them “Distinctive Candidate Application” to make the applicants feel as though they are being hand picked. Most of us have gotten loads of junk mail from credit card companies who want our business, and I throw those out because I realize how little differentiation there is in many of those credit cards. But colleges, like a lot of businesses are different in the sense that they all actually offer something unique, whether it’s the location, or their specialties, or whatever.
Application fees for education have all sorts of interesting elements, in that for some schools it makes sense to charge a fee just so that people who really think they have a shot at getting in will apply, and that’s certainly the case for some of the bigger name schools like Michigan, Stanford, Harvard. But for every one of those big name schools, there are a hundred lesser known programs that have something special to offer, and it makes all the sense in the world for them to target students who seem to fit the profile of their ideal student body base to get on their radar and see if those students will apply.
In the case of businesses that are not a household name, certainly the internet has made it easier for most organizations to put their value proposition out on the web to help customers find them, and I think this is a great example for that. But there is also another piece of this which is looking at whether you are treating a part of your organization the right way in terms of metrics and in terms of assessing its role in the performance of the overall. Beyond just whether something is a cost or a source of revenue -what is its job? In the case of applications, in the past many schools treated applications as a cost recovery model and simply assumed that enough students would learn about their schools and that would be enough to fill up the classrooms. By making applications free, these are schools that are turning the application process itself into a marketing activity to raise awareness and attract top students, and a more diverse student body. Very clever.
I used a similar analogy when I used to ask people whether WiFi access in a coffee shop should be treated as a marketing expense to bring people into the store and keep them there to buy more things, or an actual product where you would charge them for it. It was a bit of a trick question I would point out, because either is a valid treatment of that offering – it’s simply important to be specific about what its job is and to measure it accordingly. If it’s to be a marketing tool, quantify that and see if it’s doing its job, and if it’s a “product” that you sell, measure it that way, but also keep an eye in that case on impact on other product sales.
This is good rethinking of an otherwise ho-hum commodity step “how” people go about applying for schools that translates very well into the business community as well.
-Ric
Leave a Reply