Is it good business for companies to add women to their boards? That is the question two professors—one from Pace University and another from USC—attempted to answer in The Conference Board’s latest Director Notes publication. The report, entitled “The Effect of Gender Diversity on Board Decision-making: Interviews with Board Members and Stakeholders,” investigates the argument […]

Digital transformation requires asking some hard questions about an organization’s basic operating assumptions, business models, available talent and skills, and organizational culture. Here are five questions to help kick start what is often a complicated conversation. 1. Does our organization have a digital strategy that goes beyond implementing technologies? 2. Do our leaders have the […]

It’s tough to see a former client fall upon hard times. Such is the case for me with the predicted closure of ITT Technical Institute.

You may have heard, this for-profit chain of tech schools has run into trouble with U.S. Department of Education. Translation: No more government funded student loans. Without access to these loans and with additional sanctions that have been imposed, this once leading vocational school for hundreds of thousands of non-college bound kids and older adults seeking a new career will likely close for good.

When I worked as the creative director for the ad agency on the account, we knew that the ITT Tech (International Telephone and Telegraph) brand and its distinctive block letter logo still carried a lot of positive brand equity as an early technical innovator, going back to its founding in 1920. It has always commanded instant brand recognition and respect around the world, putting it in the same league as other early tech industry brands such as GE (General Electric) or Western Electric (now Lucent Technologies). ITT Tech started out in 1946 as Educational Services, Inc. and was a wholly owned subsidiary of ITT Tech until its IPO in 1994.

Over the course of its history, the tech school chain grew to approximately 130 campuses across the US. Driving that growth was our client’s understanding and appreciation for aggressive marketing in the cities where it had schools. Our mantra was simply to “Get Asses in Classes.” To achieve that, and long before the Internet, mobile delivery platforms and social media, we utilized the transformative power of television. More than any other media, along with 800-number call centers, this proved to be a sophisticated direct response strategy to feed the school’s never-ending appetite for new applicants.

Always the chief “antagonist” in our commercials was the “4-year liberal arts college.” Throughout many of these 30-second and 60-second mini-life dramas (following the formula of identification + self-realization = discovery + call to action) we reached our target on daytime TV reruns like “Gilligan’s Island.”

My job was to direct the creative and TV production for these spots to pitch ITT Tech’s exciting curriculum offerings like electronics, drafting, auto mechanics or office management careers, and position against boring and pointless academic courses served up in a college lecture halls. We promised an exciting, rewarding, hands-on lab experience that should naturally lead to an exciting, rewarding, hands-on career. In the mind of our “Gilligan’s Island” rerun fan, this was a slam-dunk no-brainer.

We produced TV campaigns in waves, with each spot carefully scrutinized and scripted per formula to elicit the most phone rings. Leads generated by our commercials were tracked every week in CPL (Cost Per Lead) client/agency meetings, where spots we might love in the creative department would die an ignominious death on the altar of lead-generating efficiency. But one thing we all agreed on: nothing made the phone ring like a new TV campaign. As a result, we were constantly in production. ITT Tech was, as we liked to call them around the agency, a “lead junkie,” and we were its quickest and most accommodating fix. But then we had a fairly robust economy that actually had jobs at the other end of that two-year degree. Today it’s a different story.

Over the years, I’ve observed many institutions of higher education, as well as private post-secondary technical schools, following pretty much the same formula we practiced for ITT Tech. Some of the larger advertisers in this arena are SNHU (Southern New Hampshire University), Liberty University, Strayer University and DeVry University. Even giant state universities have become far more sophisticated in their brand building and messaging. But interestingly, even with all the message delivery media options at their disposal, television is still a preferred medium to tell their stories of empowerment through training or education. Nothing, except for personal direct testimony, can deliver the compelling persuasive power of video, and nothing as yet invented delivers it as effectively and efficiently as television.

Higher education brands, because of their intellectual product, automatically occupy a higher perceived status in the consumer’s mind of trust. Therefore, their messages are given more believability, as a rule. Couple that with a respected brand name, and you’ve got an enormous strategic marketing advantage that a vocational school can leverage for decades. And so it was for ITT Tech.

But even the best education marketers, just as with any brand, are not immune from external factors and market forces beyond their control: a major recession, fewer job opportunities and a shrinking middle class. Under these conditions, aggressive marketing may actually exacerbate the downward tumble of an institution teetering on the brink, not save it.

The ITT Tech story, sadly, is a sign of the times and perhaps a warning to all vocational schools like it. Because when you’re in the business of delivering careers, it’s usually best to have a marketplace where you can have careers to deliver.

What are the “takeaways” from the experience? Let me distill them down into 7 points:

1. There’s no substitute for positive brand equity, such as in the case of ITT Tech.
2. Even a well-established brand can be a successful category disruptor, as in the case of ITT Tech against the whole higher education system.
3. Positioning the yearnings and desires of your target audience as the protagonist against an unsympathetic, stifling educational system antagonist makes for a great brand story that resonates.
4. Staying true to a formulaic script approach does generate results in the direct response discipline and can actually be liberating, not limiting, to good creative talent.
5. Knowing your target audience well is, well, everything.
6. With no disrespect intended to my digital colleagues, television is still king to this audience. Maybe not for long, though.
7. Brand positioning and integrity for some direct marketers must, at the very least, be just as important as direct marketing itself. The marketplace is constantly in flux, buffeted and battered by things like changing economic conditions, emerging competitors, or shifting demographics. The brand is the one constant against the storms that will surely come.

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Mr. Clean does it all over the house, and there’s a sexy Mr. Clean Super Bowl commercial to prove it. Sarah’s fantasy manifests after she discovers a spill on her stove. A sensual Mr. Clean, dressed in tight white form-fitting clothes, appears in her living room ready to do the dirty work — all throughout her house.

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: Leo Burnett, Toronto

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By Judy McLevey, former Associate Director, The Conference Board Governance Center Investors, the C-suite and boards have different views about what is, or should be, considered material information. A company’s financial results would be considered material by all parties. Based on SEC rules, companies are required to provide updates on their financial results on a […]

The comment I’d like to highlight this week was left on Jen Brea’s TED Talk by Serena Morriss, who is currently suffering with ME. Although many community members have shared their personal experiences with the condition, Serena also asks those of us who are physically well to do more than listen. For anyone moved by the Jennifer’s struggle, and the struggle of so many others, Serena directs our desire to help towards actionable steps: “use your voices on our behalf, to raise awareness, but also put pressure on governments and health organizations.” She calls on those who can, “to fight for us, to get behind scientific research, to lobby governments to put money into proper scientific research and…to stand up for us, to fight the prejudice discrimination that we face by being wrongly labelled.” I hope that Jennifer’s talk, as well as Serena’s comment and the comments of other community members, helps us all to make changes that will help those living with ME/CFS to feel even a little less forgotten. We, the physically well, can’t ignore the lived experiences of Serena and Jennifer, and so many others.

A powerhouse coalition will change the way vaccines are made — and help us prep for the next global outbreak. (Because it’s not if but when.)

One of the cruelest ironies of the recent Ebola outbreak: There was a promising Ebola vaccine already, sitting in a Canadian lab, awaiting human trials — the last step away from being approved to use on people. But development had stalled in 2010, and it wasn’t ready to use.

“Why is it that the Ebola vaccine wasn’t fully developed at this point?” asked vaccine advocate Seth Berkley in March 2015 on the TED stage. “Mainly because of the financial risk in developing it. The sad reality is, we develop vaccines not based upon the risk the pathogen poses to people, but on how economically risky it is to develop these vaccines. Vaccine development is expensive and complicated.” 

As he concluded, “There’s a complete market failure. If we want vaccines, we have to provide incentives or some type of subsidy.”

Last Thursday, January 18, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Berkley saw the launch of exactly that: CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a fund from a coalition of countries, labs and foundations that will create incentives for academic and industry labs to create and test vaccines, and will help form global partnerships that will speed reaction times. The first $460 million of backing comes from founding partners including the governments of Norway, Germany and Japan, the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; other nations are poised to join. The organization expects to raise the full $1 billion that it needs for the next 5 years by the end of 2017.

The first targets will be the MERS-CoV, Lassa and Nipah viruses.  

In an email to TED after the launch, Berkley calls this fund “exactly the type of initiative I called for in my TED Talk.  It was also set up well by Bill Gates as he did the epidemic talk right before mine.”

Watch this clip of Bill Gates at the CEPI announcement:

Berkley shares more details: “I participated in the Davos launch today and am excited that CEPI could be put together and funded over the last year. It brings together companies — both large multinational vaccine companies and small biotech companies — to pursue two goals: First, to create some vaccines for known pathogens that are at risk of epidemic spread.  They will be produced and go through early-stage testing and then will be stored to be immediately ready for response to an outbreak.  Second will be to develop, test and validate platforms that could be used for novel agents that might appear as part of an outbreak. These will allow us to be much further prepared to move quickly if a new pathogen appears.” 

Berkley runs Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which was launched at the WEF in 2000. “Gavi has immunized 600 million addition kids, changed the marketplace for vaccines and prevented more than 8 million deaths,” he notes. (The WEF-Gavi partnership was highlighted at the main entrance to this year’s forum.)

Seth Berkley runs Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which launched at Davos in 2000 and was featured this year at the main entrance to the event. This year, the CEPI launch is counted among the top 10 achievements at Davos 2017. Image courtesy Seth Berkley.

His group will work closely with CEPI, he says, “with the idea that if useful vaccines are produced for diseases of epidemic importance, Gavi could purchase doses for a stockpile so that the world is prepared if outbreaks occur.  This work can be seen as global insurance against the evolutionary certainty of future infectious disease outbreaks.”

“Of course, I am also happy to report that there are 300,000 doses of the Merck VSV-Ebola vaccine available if there are outbreaks in the interim, and Merck has agreed to submit the vaccine for regulatory approval by the end of the year.  Gavi will then set up a formal stockpile.  This vaccine had a 100% efficacy rate in trials in Guinea.  So one of the two experimental vaccines I held up on the TED stage is now a reality.”

“I think this is a great example of TED highlighting a global problem worthy of a new idea.  That idea being socialized, leading to a new paradigm that can make a real difference in the world.“

By Alex Parkinson The deadline to enter the Excellence in New Communications Awards, presented by the Society for New Communications Research of The Conference Board (SNCR), is fast approaching—Friday, February 3 is just over a week away! So, don’t delay. Submit your case studies ASAP, so you can be in the running for these prestigious […]

A cautionary tale and best practices for marketers who want to share memes and celebrity likenesses in social media marketing.

24Today I break with my usual Brand Book Bites format of author interview and book overview to share about the book Shoe Dog:  A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight.  This wonderful book combines corporate memoir (Knight recounts some of the most significant moments in the early years of Nike’s founding) with personal confessional (Knight reveals with surprising candor his fears, vulnerabilities, and mistakes).  I suggest you read Bill Gates’ write-up about the book which perfectly captures its essence.  And while I agree with Gates’ assessment that it doesn’t seem Knight set out to teach the reader anything, I do think it conveys some important lessons and observations about starting a business and building a brand — and that is what I want to share here.  So here a just a few of the gems of wisdom that I gleaned from Shoe Dog:

Running a business is — or should be — like running itself.  I’ve found that too many people operate their businesses as if it were only a means to an end — making lots of money, selling lots of stuff, being “successful.”  All of that can be true, but it also seems that running a business can be an end unto itself.  The motivation can, or as Knight seems to suggest, must come from within yourself.

In writing about his idea to start a running shoe company, Knight observed, “Few ideas are as crazy as my favorite thing, running. It’s hard. It’s painful. It’s risky. The rewards are few and far from guaranteed. When you run around an oval track, or down an empty road, you have no real destination. At least, none that can fully justify the effort. The act itself becomes the destination. It’s not just that there’s no finish line; it’s that you define the finish line. Whatever pleasures or gains you derive from the act of running, you must find them within. It’s all in how you frame it, how you sell it to yourself.”

Believe in what you’re doing — or no one else will.  As an entrepreneur, you must be utterly convinced that what you’re doing is worth doing if you expect anyone else to do so also.  As Knight reflected on why he was so much better at selling shoes than mutual funds, he asked himself, “So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.”

Managing inventory, not marketing, is the key to your viability.  A wise colleague of mine Jeff Harbaugh often writes in his MarketWatch column for the action sports industry about how managing inventory is more important than marketing these days.  It’s a concept that many brand-builders bristle at, but even Knight, perhaps one of the greatest brand-builders of our time, believes it.  He wrote, “Supply and demand is always the root problem in business. It’s been true since Phoenician traders raced to bring Rome the coveted purple dye that colored the clothing of royals and rich people; there was never enough purple to go around. It’s hard enough to invent and manufacture and market a product, but then the logistics, the mechanics, the hydraulics of getting it to the people who want it, when they want it—this is how companies die, how ulcers are born.”

Your brand should characterize your culture, and vice versa.  In my book, What Great Brands Do, I explain that Great Brands Start Inside — meaning, great brands start brand-building by cultivating a strong brand-led culture inside their organizations.  Nike’s story supports and explains this notion that brand and culture are inextricably linked.

When Knight was trying to convince an attorney, Rob Strasser, to join the company after having represented it in a lawsuit, Knight said to him, “You’re one of us.”  “One of us,” Knight wrote, “[Strasser] knew what those words meant. We were the kind of people who simply couldn’t put up with corporate nonsense. We were the kind of people who wanted our work to be play. But meaningful play. We were trying to slay Goliath, and though Strasser was bigger than two Goliaths, at heart he was an utter David. We were trying to create a brand, I said, but also a culture. We were fighting against conformity, against boringness, against drudgery. More than a product, we were trying to sell an idea—a spirit.”

Be clear on the #1 thing you must do.  “Pay Nissho first.”  Knight wrote that this mantra was “my morning chant, my nightly prayer, my number one priority.”  Knight explained that he had concluded that paying his secondary bank, Nissho, was the #1 thing he and his company had to do every month in order to keep their line of credit at their primary bank secure — and they had to do that in order to have the cash to run the business.  Having that clarity kept the company alive.  Every leader needs to have such clarity.

Business is a noble cause.  Knight said it all:  “It seems wrong to call it ‘business.’ It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner: business. What we were doing felt like so much more…We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me.”

related:

brand book bites from Onward by Starbucks CEO Schultz

In CSR, Nike Just Does It

brand book bites from Birth of a Brand by UGG Founder Brian Smith

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