Contributed by: Taylor Trussell
Strategic Consultant, Stein Communications

Many books dissect and analyze the Millennial generation, and the views expressed run the gamut from the starry-eyed boosterism of Strauss and Howe’s Millennials Rising to Huntley’s paradoxical conclusions in World According to Y to the sophomoric psychologizing of Generation Me by Twenge. It’s easy to find profiles of this generation, but divining how to translate these profiles into useful marketing strategies isn’t.

Then there’s Lisa Johnson’s Mind Your X’s and Y’s: Satisfying the 10 Cravings of a New Generation of Consumers. What makes this book so different is that it gives you a veritable road map for marketing to Millennials. (While the X in the title obviously refers to Generation X’ers, Johnson maintains that X’ers are more or less following the Millennials’ lead in terms of what’s hot.)

The ten fundamental cravings of this generation, according to Johnson, are:

• Personalization
• A sense of adventure
• Less formal, more focused communities
• Good design
• Ways to filter information
• Peer-to-peer recommendations
• Participation rather than mere consumption
• Brand experiences that create emotional connections
• A sense of spirituality
• Giving back with their time and abilities

All of these have clear applications to educational marketing, but in the interest of space, I’m going to focus on only those cravings most readily adaptable.

Personalization
At first glance, this one seems obvious. Everyone knows you have to personalize. But here’s the twist: Johnson’s point is that mass personalization — pulling names from a database — doesn’t cut it anymore. These kids are used to feeling like the center of attention and tapping into that sense requires personalization that clearly shows a living person was paying attention to them.

Now, of course, you don’t (and, realistically, you can’t) produce genuinely personalized materials for every prospect. Johnson suggests developing ways to personalize materials for “bull’s-eye customers.” How do you deliver a personalized message to bellwether students in new markets, for instance? Or, perhaps you target high school teachers with personalized messages.

A sense of adventure
“Adventure” here doesn’t mean learning to street luge. Rather, there is a craving for engagement that goes beyond everyday experience, and it comes from the fact that experience functions as social currency. Remember, this is a generation that notifies the world of their every move via Facebook and Twitter — uncommon experiences impart cachet, especially among undergraduates, who are really just stepping out into the larger world.

What is your school doing that takes kids out of their ordinary zone? And before you say internships or foreign study, keep in mind that every school can claim these in one way or another. These are requisite experiences, so unless they’re unusually prestigious or exotic, they’re not going to stand out. More importantly, how are you communicating these experiences?

Good design
Today, it’s all about design. Good design has become a competitive edge insofar as good design connotes the good life; it creates an emotional attachment. Just look at the iPod’s following. How many technology companies are churning out me-too products on the basis of Apple’s design?

You’re never going to have to design consumer products, but what Johnson is emphasizing is the high expectations this generation has when it comes to design. Strong and consistently designed communications are key to resonating with your audience. They build confidence in the very idea of your school.

Peer-to-peer recommendations
With so much marketing clamoring for our attention, the old push approaches are no longer as effective as they once were, especially among this generation of prospects who have been imbibing advertisements since birth. Instead, they’re sidestepping the usual channels and going straight to the source — their peers, your students. (Oh, and by “usual channels” I’m including the students blogging on your Web site.) They’re turning to Facebook and Flickr for an uncensored (in every sense) view of what it’s like to be a student. They’re using the recommendations on College Prowler and College Confidential to gauge how well they’ll fit in. And it’s not just your students — parents are also relying on Web forums to get an idea of what their child can expect.

This is a reversal from the traditional marketing formula of loud, often, and always positive. Now, the point is to recognize that there are conversations about you taking place, and if you’re not a part of them, you’re at the mercy of every ill-informed but opinionated joker with a Web connection. By joining in (or by having a work-study student join in) and offering a candid view of your school, you can build tremendously positive word of mouth.

Participation rather than mere consumption
With a reliance on peer recommendations comes the expectation that peer-generated content will flourish. Your audience has grown up using digital media to create and express themselves — whether they’re posting music videos to YouTube, blogging, or posting on friends’ Facebook walls. Organizations that embrace the participatory aspect of online communications engage their consumers and create trust. If I see that someone is so invested in her school that she’s shot a video herself and posted it on TheU.com, I’m going to feel a stronger pull toward that institution than I will from simply watching a Flash introduction on the same school’s Web site. Participation validates a sense of authenticity.

This is a difficult leap for most schools to make, in large part because an architecture of participation requires self-governance and openness, and schools are most comfortable with clearly defined hierarchies. But without self-governance, there’s no ownership; and without ownership, the community lacks the self-monitoring and self-repairing nature that makes them so dynamic.

How can you create participatory communities? What areas can you open up to let your students participate in the content generation? How about a turning your student life pages into a wiki?

There is much more here than these brief summaries suggest. The book is a terrific analysis of the mindset of your market. Johnson explains each craving and offers reasons for why a craving is so prevalent. She also provides numerous case studies to illustrate her points, and to make the application of these points even clearer, she ends each chapter with a “Workbook” section devoted to questions you should be asking yourself. More than a broad analysis, Johnson provides an idea generator and critical tool that will help you orient and evaluate your marketing efforts.

Contributed by: Ross Lenhart
Senior Vice President, Stein Communications

College Unranked, edited by Lloyd Thacker, a thirty-year veteran of the college admission and college counseling professions and executive director of The Education Conservancy

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
– Albert Einstein

On picking up my paper on a Sunday morning, I came upon an article on the front page about our local public university and its determination to raise its rankings in the coming year for the next edition of U.S. News and World Report to be published in the late summer of 2008. The article informed the local tax paying public that the university was sending its Executive Vice President to Washington to talk with the folks at USN&WR to get a handle on how they might accomplish the task of having their name move up several or many notches on the ranking scale. I am now willing to bet that when the VP returned to campus, he gave a full report on how “we need to do this and we need to do that.” In other words, another cathedral of higher learning will make administrative decisions based on the good offices of an editorial board determined to sell magazines for pure profit — decisions which will cost money and time not necessarily based on the common good for its students and university community. It seems to me that $1,000 in travel expenses to Washington might be better spent — maybe in scholarship money for a deserving student or the purchase of a microscope.

In candor, I do understand my local university’s dilemma. They are caught somewhere in between reality and their desire for positive public perception. How in the world do colleges find themselves in this situation? It’s between a rock and hard place, and it’s pure Catch 22. I suspect that even though many institutions of higher learning have little respect for the rankings, they are caught in the trap of supplying tons of data and traveling to such places as offices in Washington in order to climb up the ladder to be listed with the competition according to the rather faulty gospel of USN&WR. Further, I feel that beneath the surface, colleges may detest this exercise. It doesn’t make sense, considering we’re dealing with an intellectual community. Then why don’t they do something about it? I guess it’s called pure courage.

Through a series of essays by knowledgeable and respected college and university admissions officers, secondary counselors, and college presidents (see listing below), College Unranked provides much food for thought regarding the aforementioned question. It is a call for courage. I suspect that College Unranked may be the seed that has started a ground swell. And it hasn’t taken long. I met the editor of College Unranked and also the leader and founder of this movement six years ago at a National Association of College Admission Counselors annual conference. I remember thinking that this idealist was on his way to flail at windmills. Recent history has proven how wrong I was. Lloyd Thacker and his Educational Conservancy are here for the common good. What they are doing is admirable. They are slowly moving our attention to affirm educational values in college admissions. Recently, he was a definite influence at the 2007 NACAC conference in Austin. And you can’t pick up a Chronicle of Higher Education today without reading his name or seeing a quote. He’s our professional conscience, and he’s here to stay. College Unranked leaves us with a listing of recommendations of what we can do to alleviate institutions like my local university who is caught in this trap. Thacker and his band of professionals and allies remind us at every step, “Education is a process, not a product. Students are learners, not customers.” And, more importantly, “Students’ thoughts, ideas, and passions are worthy to be engaged and handled with utmost care.”

In College Unranked, the only exception I would make is that marketing the educational process is held in a rather unfavorable light. As a person involved in educational marketing, it is obvious that I have to take serious issue with this idea. Darn right I would. If I didn’t always hold an altruistic view of my work of providing students with straightforward and honest information so that they can make an informed decision regarding a college choice, then I wouldn’t be in this business. I might instead opt for Madison Avenue in order to glorify soap. I love the educational process and, for some forty years, have helped colleges tell their stories… even telling them in ways that fit into the very chapters found in College Unranked. There are many of us in college marketing who have made a career of doing just that. I would admonish Mr. Thacker to reach out and communicate with us who have always put the student first in our work. Collectively, we would have much to share for the common good. And, yes, he might be surprised.

College Unranked is a very responsible document. It is a book written by knowledgeable professionals who raise meaningful concerns regarding the very important life-changing decisions of young people. If I were in charge of training professionals coming into college or secondary school admission counseling, this book would top my list of required reading. A few older pros might benefit as well. No, Lloyd Thacker, you are no longer flailing at windmills. Keep reminding us of our responsibilities and the real importance of the work that we do. You had the courage to take on a national magazine and raise issues that needed to be addressed, and maybe your courage will continue to be infectious. I hope so.

Contributors to College Unranked:
Lloyd Thacker, Executive Director of The Educational Conservancy
Kim Stafford, Director, Northwest Writing Institute, Lewis & Clark College
William M. Shain, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, Vanderbilt University (now at Bowdoin)
William Fitzsimmons, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, Harvard College
Marlyn McGrath Lewis, Director of Admissions, Harvard College
Charles Ducey, Director of the Bureau of Study Counsel, Harvard University
Bruce J. Poch, Vice President and Dean of Admissions, Pomona College
Mark Speyer, Director of College Counseling, Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School
James M. Sumner, Dean of Admission and Financial Aid, Grinnell College
Paul Marthers, Dean of Admission, Reed College
Sean Callaway, Director of College Placement and Internships, Pace University Center for Urban Education
Richard H. Hersh, Former President, Trinity College
Karl M. Furstenberg, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, Dartmouth College
William Adams, President, Colby College
Ted O’Neill, Dean of Admission, University of Chicago
Michael Beseda, Vice Provost for Enrollment, Saint Mary’s College of California
Sid Dalby, Associate Director of Admission, Smith College
Colin S. Diver, President, Reed College
Robert J. Massa, Vice President for Enrollment, Student Life and College Relations, Dickinson College
Harold Wingood, Dean of Admission, Clark University
Matt Fissinger, Dean of Admission, Loyola Marymount University
Craig J. Franz, FSC, President, St. Mary’s College of California
Philip Ballinger, Ph.D., Director of Admissions, University of Washington

A conference is a huge opportunity to build relationships with extraordinary people, people who might have significant impact on your professional or personal success. To make sure that you maximize the return on your (and your institution’s) investment of time and money to attend, you can’t afford to be a conference commoner. You have to be a Conference Commando.

In preparation for the NACAC annual conference, we encourage you to read these tips from Keith Ferrazzi, author of best-selling book Never Eat Alone and one of the world’s most connected people. He talked himself into Pennsylvania’s Kiski School on scholarship before making his way to Yale for his undergraduate degree and then to Harvard for his MBA. Now, as Founder & CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, he provides market leaders with advanced strategic consulting and training services to increase company sales, and enhance personal careers.

Click here to download a PDF of Keith’s Conference Commando tips.

If you benefit from these tips, you may also enjoy Keith’s Tip of the Week email. Subscribe today by visiting his web site.

Never Eat Alone tells a tale of relationships and how success is about working with people, not against them. “Relationships are more like muscles — the more you work them, the stronger they become.” How to use the internet in your relationships, how to broadcast your brand, how to expand your circle — it’s all there and it is valuable stuff for you, the dedicated college, university, and school professionals who are in it not for the money, but for the process of education. You will find and understand and appreciate the obvious altruism in the pages of this book.

Contributed by J.D. Fite
Account Manager, Stein Communications

In preparation for an upcoming TABS (The Association of Boarding Schools) presentation, Stein Account Manager J.D. Fite asked his fellow employees at Stein for help. We all pitched in to provide him with a reading list of books we had found valuable in pursuit of professional excellence. In lieu of our normal book review, we thought that sharing such a listing with our readership might be an interesting and worthwhile exercise.

The list is wide and varied. It features Lloyd Thacker and his two College Unranked books that both take on the commercial magazine college ranking system, and also attempts to put values back into the college admission process. Thomas Friedman and his The World is Flat are on the list. Strategic Marketing for Educational Institutions by Kotler and Fox, which has long been a text for graduate programs in higher educational administration, was also nominated. Ironically therein is a chapter featuring Stein Senior Vice President Ross Lenhart as a parent in tandem with his son in pursuit of just the right college. Stein folks have also read the previous book reviews featured in The Scoop: The Price of Admission by Daniel Golden, and Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone. The Gatekeepers by Jacques Steinberg is a book to be read and enjoyed by any college admissions professional, as it chronicles a year spent through the recruitment, decision, and matriculation process at Wesleyan University. Well-written, it reads like a novel.

It’s no surprise that our Stein readers have also naturally concentrated on branding, the use of the web, the wants and desires of America’s youth, and the future of higher education. As with you in the halls of ivy, we have always maintained that reading is of great value and will lead to a greater awareness, understanding, and vision in the challenges that we face in working with you to reach the goals that we mutually share.

Therefore, peruse the list, pick out a book, and enjoy the benefits! You can also view this list on Stein’s GoodRead’s account.

The Abandoned Generation: Rethinking Higher Education
By Thomas Naylor and William H. Willimon

Advancing Higher Education in Uncertain Times
By Dr. Larry Lauer

Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth
By Ben Shapiro

Bright College Years: Inside the American College Today
By Anne Matthews

Building Strong Brands
By David A. Aaker

College Unranked: Affirming Educational Values In College Admissions
Edited by Lloyd Thacker

College Unranked: Ending the College Admissions Frenzy
By Lloyd Thacker

Competing for Students, Money and Reputation: Marketing the Academy in the 21st Century
By Dr. Larry Lauer

Designing Web Usability
By Jakob Nielson

The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College
By Jacques Steinberg

Getting the Right Things Right: Personal Strategies for Reinventing the Life You Want
By Charlie Hedges

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
By Chip and Dan Heath

Millennials Go to College
Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation
Millennials and the Pop Culture
By William Strauss and Neil Howe

Mind your X’s & Y’s: Satisfying the 10 Cravings of a New Generation of Consumers
By Lisa Johnson

Never Eat Alone: and Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time
By Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz

The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids
By Alexandra Robbins

The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates
by Daniel Golden

Strategic Marketing for Educational Institutions
By Philip Kotler and Karen F.A. Fox

Thinking for a Living: Creating Ideas that Revitalize Your Business, Career and Life
By Joey Reiman

The Tipping Point: How Little Things can Make a Big Difference
By Malcolm Gladwell

Transforming a College: The Story of a Little-Known College’s Strategic Climb to National Distinction
By George Keller

What Matters In College
By Alexander Astin

When Hope and Fear Collide: A Portrait of Today’s College Student
By Arthur Levine and Jeanette S. Cureton

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
By Thomas Friedman

How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges — And Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, by Daniel Golden, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Wall Street Journal
Contributed by: Ross Lenhart
Senior Vice President, Stein Communications

George applies to his state university and also to Yale. He is refused at his state university and is accepted at Yale. George’s father is a well-known Yale alumnus, and George Junior waltzes through the Eli gate to a Cole Porter tune on a warm September morn, perhaps taking a seat of a student who was more deserving.

According to Daniel Golden, this scenario is repeated time and time again on the American university horizon — especially in the admissions offices of our elite and prestigious colleges and universities. This scenario is what The Price of Admission is all about. This book is a great read for those connected in any way with college admissions. Golden raises many questions that we have all known to have been there but, like a sore on our body, we refrain from scratching it because the end result could be somewhat unhealthy. Sometimes it’s hard to get out of our comfort zones and confront those questions that are right in front of our eyes. But these are questions that never go away — by their presence year in and year out, we adopt those ways of thinking without thinking at all. It’s just easier for us that way, and they lie there persistently right under the rug in front of our desks. Golden wakes us up from this sleep walk and causes us to think. This in itself makes this book worthwhile.

It’s all about privilege, and it is about the ongoing recipe of the admission office mixing privilege together with affirmative action together with what is just plain fair into a bowl to be mightily stirred at the right temperature to satisfy appetites, and thus making everybody happy in the hungry halls of ivy. Oftentimes, according to Daniel Golden, the cooks overplay the privilege part of the mixture to the detriment of the other two ingredients, creating something less than a healthy diet for the future of our American society and for the American university conscience.

This book is not boring, and it is not filled with statistics to make a point. Golden is a storyteller and uses real world examples. At times it reads like a novel. Each chapter covers how privilege sneaks into the world of college admissions in a variety of ways. Just to name a privileged few:

Political Privilege: President Terry Sanford of Duke often calls Dr. Jean Scott, Dean of Admission, into his chambers to discuss the admission of the less qualified sons and daughters of the politically important in the great State of North Carolina since President Sanford is the former governor. Dr. Scott marks each request and graciously and courageously holds her ground, and then exits Duke, with its political privilege, for less pressured territory. She is now the President of Marietta College after holding other subsequent prestigious positions in college admissions.

Legacy Privilege: Notre Dame requires that somewhere between 20 or 25 percent of all freshman classes be legacy students, thus denying places to other students who might be more qualified who do not have a leprechaun tied tightly around their necks.

The Privilege of Wealth: Senator Bill Frist contributes $20 million to his alma mater, Princeton University, and just by coincidence his son applies and is accepted to Princeton within 12 months of the contribution. There is strong evidence that there are those in his son’s senior class at St. Albans who were more qualified academically and were denied acceptance to Princeton. Senator Frist is on record as opposing affirmative action, except maybe as it affects his own family.

Faculty Privilege: Golden brings up something which is not often discussed — that of lowering the gates for sons and daughters of employed faculty members who are often receiving a tuition remission, in addition to the affirmative nod in the selection process.

These are just a few of “the privileges” cited in The Price of Admission. Race and gender privilege are also covered. The book is filled with fascinating examples of the ways in which our system of selection to our colleges and universities is cloaked with fallacy right before our very eyes. I am sure that there are those who will challenge Golden on the grounds that such privileges birth solid, strong, and financially solvent college and university communities. I am certain Golden would answer, “But at what price?” Golden not only strums the strings of our guilty conscience regarding privilege and the college admission process, but he takes it one step more and cites those purists who perform the process of selection in a privilege and wealth blind way. His two examples are Berea and Caltech. His whole point is that American education must act in a way that is filled with integrity. This in itself has to be part of the educational process — to teach our young people from the get go that their own selection to attend their college or university has been based on fairness and equality. What better lesson could a student learn approaching higher education? Golden made me feel that there has to be a sense of social and moral responsibility about the process itself — devoid of “privilege.”

Speaking of privilege, I had the privilege of a short conversation with Daniel Golden after his session at the most recent NACAC Convention in Pittsburgh. He is personable and likeable. Not particularly a crusader type, but an individual truly concerned about the future of American higher education. I encouraged him to look into another matter “under our rug” — that of the obvious lowering of the academic gates for those who are physically (but not perhaps mentally) privileged in order to fill our athletic college and university coffers. With a grin, Daniel Golden winked and said that perhaps he would.

The Boys & Girls Clubs of America recently published the results of its Youth Report to America — the largest national survey developed and administered by teens. 46,000 teens responded, and the report delivers their candid message. The report covers the following broad areas: teen outlook (how teens view their futures), relationships, teen issues, and view of America. According to the report, teens view education as critical to their futures. 33 percent of teens polled believe that knowledge is a key to success, while 74 percent think college is necessary to meet their career goals. A substantial number (40 percent) agree that “finishing school” is one thing that they can do to make life better for future generations. This is a must read for anyone involved in education.

To download the report, go to: http://www.bgca.org/youth/images/YouthReportToAmerica.pdf