The green buzz is out there, and it’s not going away. Twenty plus years ago we saw a huge surge in the market for recycled papers. Almost as quickly as it began, it dissipated, because at the time, the paper industry wasn’t prepared. You had to pay a premium for an inferior product. But fear not, the market has spoken, and the paper industry has responded. Here are some tips to help you take steps toward greener pastures.

1. Request certified paper sources — The two most prevalent forestry certification organizations in the U.S. are the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI). The purpose of these two organizations is to make sure the harvesting of trees and management of forests is done in environmentally and socially responsible ways. Requesting that materials be printed on paper originating from certified sources ensures that you are contributing to positive sustainability practices.

Requesting that materials be printed on paper originating from certified sources ensures that you are contributing to positive sustainability practices.

Each organization has a chain-of-custody (CoC) certification that tracks the raw materials from the certified lands, to the paper manufacturer, to the paper merchant, and finally to the printer — all of which must have CoC certification. By maintaining this chain, we are able to place an FSC or SFI logo on your print materials. So, not only are you making an environmentally responsible choice, you’re also letting your constituents know it.

2. Check the recycled content — It’s important to note that not all FSC-certified or SFI-certified papers are recycled. Within each certification type, there are papers ranging anywhere from virgin paper (no recycled content) to 100% post-consumer waste (PCW) recycled content. Many coated papers (such as gloss, dull, or matte) are 10% PCW; some paper stocks contain as much as 30% PCW (very few coated papers carry a recycled content above 30%). There are quite a few uncoated papers available with 100% PCW recycled content. Be sure to specify if you want to print your marketing materials on recycled paper in addition to using FSC- or SFI-certified papers.

3. Compare costs — Not all recycled paper is more expensive than non-recycled paper. Recycled papers are getting more and more competitive with their virgin counterparts. One hundred percent PCW papers can be as much as 10% higher in cost. On the other hand, some of the 10-30% PCW papers are comparable in price with non-recycled equivalents.

4. Look for quality – Recycled paper quality has improved greatly over the last decade. It’s a common misconception that recycled papers are discolored, rough, or flecked with colored fragments, but this is no longer the case. Both the appearance and printability of recycled papers are now on par with most virgin papers. In fact, it’s hard — if not impossible in some cases — to tell the difference when comparing paper swatches or print samples.

There are also a few paper mills making even greener strides by manufacturing papers using hydroelectric-generated power or wind power. Mohawk Paper has an environmental calculator to help you quantify the environmental impact of going green on your next printing project.

More on certification: To FSC or SFI? That is the question.

Gene Middleton, our senior creative/print project manager since 2001, is a 29-year veteran of the graphic arts and printing business, the last 15 of which have been spent in educational marketing. He manages the creative and production details of print projects for several of our client schools, has extensive client contact, and is also the manager of our client services and production departments. Gene’s knowledge and creativity are in his blood — his parents ran a community newspaper — plus he’s a kind-hearted man with a delightful sense of humor. We wanted to share some of his knowledge and joyful personality …

Q. What are some typical errors that can happen during the production process?

A. Incorrect info — for example typos on a spec sheet where one little incorrect digit can loom large — say 1,000 vs. 10,000 quantity, or PMS 431 vs. PMS 413 — one is a light gray, the other is a dark gray.

Or errors of various types, such as electronic pre-press glitches, for example copy inadvertently getting deleted from a page or re-flowing to another. Or a technical problem with the printing process — maybe a form of smearing that we call offsetting, or a problem with the binding process — maybe inaccurate folding.

Human errors and machinery malfunctions come with the printing territory, but we like to think we’re good at limiting problems at the Stein end of things. We’re “diligent to the point of paranoia” when it comes to checking proofs and writing print specs and shipping instructions.

Q. Can you give a couple of examples of how Stein’s production process improves the quality of a school’s publications?

A. More than once I’ve looked at a school’s publications (not one of ours!) and thought, “if they’d done a better job with photo editing, their pictures would be less muddy, flat, dark, etc., and the school’s campus and people and facilities would look more appealing and inviting.”

A key area of print production for us is photo editing. We have high standards for print quality of images. We’re fortunate to have talented photo editors on staff, and it’s standard operating procedure for them to color correct all of our images for print. Then the designers or project managers review these edits and sometimes we’ll make further color correction or retouching requests. We try to make our schools look “snappy and happy.”

We’re also sticklers for using PMS colors for key theme colors in a campaign and for large solid ink coverage. We prefer not to “build” these colors out of 4-color process screens. This allows the common colors to be more consistent throughout a piece and from piece to piece. It also allows smoother solid coverages of these colors, and prevents “color compromises” in the 4-color process photos on the piece to allow best possible reproduction of the photos. PMS colors cost a little more but are well worth it.

Q. How do we save money for a school in our printing and prepress areas?

A. We get good buys on paper and we try where possible to increase press layout yields to save paper and press time. Sometimes we print several different items on a press sheet if the deadlines for all the pieces allow it and if the quantities and sizes of the pieces lend themselves to it.

We also try to work wisely in design and production art to be efficient with time and keep costs down. But we don’t rush through projects. That’s a good way to make mistakes that we’ll have to go back and fix. Or much worse, it could cause an expensive printing error on our part.

Q. What are some client benefits you especially like that are a result of the Stein creative process?

A. Something I especially like about the way we serve our clients is our commitment to getting specific measurable results for them based on good research and info gathering. I also like our nice knack for creating publications and messaging that attract the kinds of students our schools are looking for. We always love it when we hear apps and accepts are up over the previous year or years a few months after we’ve launched a new campaign.

Q. You are one of the funniest guys I know. Do you use that gift in your work?

A. Levity can be the lubricant for creativity — within reason of course. Sometimes there’s a fine line between constructive and disruptive humor in creative meetings! But a light heart and a light touch really can help people lighten up, and that can help jump-start the idea flow.

Humor can also help us all endure stress and frustration when things get hectic and tense . . . say for example, during the entire month of August!

Q. What do you do better now than you did 10 years ago?

A. I have more experience and because of that I think I have better intuition about how things can go haywire if they get off to the wrong start. I’d like to think over time I’ve gotten better and better at preventing potential problems in quality or schedules. I don’t know if practice makes perfect, but if we’re paying attention it sure does make us get better!

Carol Phillips at Millenial Marketing observes that

“Gen Y says their biggest challenge is ‘busy-ness’, the sheer volume of things they want and need to do. There simply isn’t enough time to do it all. As a result, they see their lives as ‘hectic’, ‘exciting’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘fun’. However, busy-ness also is the main barrier to achieving things that are really important to them, like staying in touch with old friends, making new friends and finding time to lead a ‘balanced’ life.”

When marketing universities and colleges to high school students, there’s a tendency to hype up the high-energy, never-stand-still aspects of life on campus.  (At least, I know I’m guilty of it.)  Think of how many “24/7″ or timeline-themed viewbook concepts you’ve seen.  The point, of course, is to convey a sense of how and to what degree prospects will be engaged once they’re on campus.  “Come to our school!  Bored is the only thing that’s hard to be!”

It’s all meant to appeal to an audience that expects continual activity.  But it’s very easy to forget that this busy-ness is also a stressor.  And it’s taking a toll: anecdotal evidence and hard data indicate that the use of on-campus mental health and counseling services is climbing; we’re also seeing the growing practice of a gap year as students declare that they just need a break.

As Phillips reminds us, what students crave and what’s in short supply is balance.  Emphasizing the ways your students step off the busy-ness treadmill, how they find balance between competing demands, also has its appeal.

This time of year is like an early Christmas at Stein. Client projects are finishing up for fall delivery, and almost daily we get in samples of completed publications. Here are some recent printed pieces that are standouts.

Wesley College

Welsey College was looking for a complete redesign of its admissions campaign with a goal of shifting perception from a regional college to that of an academically innovative institution.

We took a no-nonsense tone with the copy and created a sophisticated design to appeal to students’ pragmatism and high expectations. One cool aspect of the concept is that it uses atypical sizes. The viewbook is about 6 x 9 inches and the visit piece is conveniently back-pocket-sized.

Bo Uzzle, design; Taylor Trussell, writing; Kathryn Spruill, account.

Wesley viewbook and visit piece

Woodberry Forest

The Woodberry Forest project involved extensive brand research and interviews. From our research we developed a brand narrative and key messages, the first expression of which is a new viewbook that captures Woodberry’s strong sense of brotherhood and academic rigor.

Bo Uzzle, design; Taylor Trussell, brand research and writing; Jennifer Bagley, account.

Woodberry viewbook spread

Arizona State University

ASU is being guided by a clear vision focused on the concept of the new American university. Our goal was to present this bold vision but without hyperbole, which could diminish its validity. Our concept for the resulting publications was storytelling with a purpose, defining the vision in the context of real people doing real things to make a real difference in the world.

Bonnie McQuagge, design; David Harrell, writing; Jay Williams, account.

ASU prospectus spread

Contributed by: Denis M. Stokes
Director of Admission, Christ School

From Part I of this marketing article, we know that marketing is multidimensional, consisting of Product, Place, Price and Promotion. In the first article, we focused on Product and Promotion. From that discussion, we know that marketing is outward looking — recognizing unmet needs or underserved needs in the marketplace and the decision to meet those needs. And, we know that Promotion, while an important dimension of marketing, is just one dimension and thereby complemented by and dependent upon the other dimensions. In this article, we cover the remaining dimensions: Place and Price.

When discussing Place in marketing it is often in the context of distribution points for a consumer good or service. If you are selling a grocery store item, context of place is not only maximizing the number of stores carrying your brand — unless, of course, your strategy calls for somewhat exclusive availability — but it also pertains to product positioning within the store. Likewise, there may be other channels of distribution that add to the places at which your product is available.

With education, and particularly so since Place of our institutions is well established long before our arrival, our influence over this dimension is limited. This is not to say that we cannot influence availability of our service. Consider what some colleges and universities have done with distance education, for example.

The fact that Place for our service is well-established may or may not be a limitation. Is New York University’s location in Greenwich Village of Manhattan appealing to all? Is Swannonoa, North Carolina, home to Warren Wilson College, appealing to all? The point is to acknowledge that place is an important dimension and influences the very experiences we offer.

Leverage your Place as effectively as you can and let it naturally influence the experience offered. Know, too, that while important, Place is traditionally the dimension over which we have least control.

Price, on the other hand, is something over which the institution yields much control. One way to consider Price is to look at your institution in relation to your competitors using two dimensions: Price and Quality. (This graph and its analysis below is also considered a market positioning map; that is, an illustration of your institution’s position in relation to your peer institutions — your direct competitors.)

Positioning Map observations: Institution A is at a quality deficit in relation to its competitors. Institutions B & C, while perceived to be of equal quality, Institution B is priced at a premium. Institution D is positioned most favorably in relation to its competitors — its quality is strongest and its pricing is in line with relative alternatives. In this example, Institutions A – D are boarding schools, while Institution E is a day school, which explains the significant cost differential between a day school experience and a boarding school experience.

As the admission director at a boarding school, I must consider as competition my peer institutions — other boarding schools against which we compete directly — but I must also consider independent day schools and, to a lesser degree, parochial schools. The key here, in my case, is to recognize that we cannot compete with day schools on price. Therefore price, for me, is only a potential point of differentiation when I compete directly against peer institutions.

While Price should be reflective of the cost of delivering your service, it is also commonly used to position an institution within the marketplace. The ideal is to be positioned within proximity to your direct competitors. Being conspicuously more or less expensive than your direct competitors is seldom a wise strategy.

Education is an interesting service in that — with the exception of state-supported universities, which often represent tremendous educational value — pricing below what is expected for quality education can create negative connotations of perceived quality. Thus education is a service where price is an inverse relationship to quality. Two additional points about pricing and positioning:

While families take pride in gaining admission to the most expensive institutions — oftentimes the brand-name schools — and some readily pay the premium for the unique experience provided, there is evidence that families do respond to a lower price through acceptable ways of discounting, i.e., scholarships.

On positioning: Note the entire educational marketplace consists of schools ranging from perceived quality of 1 through 10 and the graph above simply looks at a segment of the market. Thus, unless your school is in the top tier, as you consider repositioning your institution, consider the related dynamic of how your institution may be repositioned. Note the second positioning map below, an example of a school desiring to compete against more selective schools (i.e., schools with more resources and with notably more selective admission standards).

Repositioning Map observations: Repositioned Institution A is now at a quality deficit compared to schools to be of perceived significantly higher quality. The outcome: It will be very difficult for Institution A to capture market share against its new competitors. Institution A is simply picking a fight it is likely to lose more times than not. If a school wishes to reposition itself, its best hope is to first assure that it is a recognized regional leader or market segment leader.

Each dimension of marketing plays a key role in your institution in advancing its mission. It is important to note that while a well-planned marketing strategy is necessary, such must be preceded by an honest institutional assessment of its strengths, weaknesses — things over which the institution has control, and its opportunities and threats — things over which the institution has no control other than to attempt to anticipate.

Marketing is discussed at great length on many campuses today. As an admission professional, it is important for you to not only be a part of that discussion, but to lead it, to foster it and to make known that true marketing goes well beyond cutting-edge Web sites, viewbooks, and fancy advertising campaigns.

__
Denis M. Stokes is Director of Admission at Christ School, a traditional boarding and day school for boys, affiliated with the Episcopal Church, just south of Asheville, North Carolina.

Contributed by: Denis M. Stokes
Director of Admission, Christ School

Higher education has admittedly been marketing for more than 25 years. I’ve had the opportunity to witness the rise of educational marketing since the early 1980s when I started as a young admission representative and had the good fortune to work for one of the best promoters ever.

Robin Roberts, the Director of Admission at my former institution, had a brochure for everything and a tagline for just about everything. He put our small, invisible college on the fore of promotion. We were among the few, at our level of play, purchasing thousands of Search names, courting inquiries through a series of well-timed mailings, and following up — if you can imagine — by way of phone calls.

The results were a string of years where all the important numbers increased: inquiries, applications, accepted students, and enrolled students. The model served the institution well for more than a few years, in part because it recognized that attention to marketing fundamentals was critical — especially when most colleges at the time were not paying attention to the fundamentals, nor did they see the need to.

It didn’t take long before schools learned from each other and began promoting to a degree of new proportions. Hence, the capable sophomore or junior in high school now measures the amount of unsolicited college materials received not by the number of schools but, literally, by the box full.

In turn, the astute institutions began to recognize that marketing is more than one variable. Indeed, we know from Marketing 101 that marketing is multi-dimensional and includes Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.

Promotion gets the most play in marketing because of its visibility and the creativity involved, whether in print, radio, TV, direct mail, or otherwise. However, the hard work of marketing is acknowledging and addressing its other variables. While most schools claim to have comprehensive, integrated marketing plans, I suggest they probably have something less. What they likely have are plans that articulate the tactics of promoting the institution.

Consider the task of creating and offering a new product or service. The creation of such does not begin with a well thought-out promotional effort. Rather, it begins first and foremost with recognition of unmet needs or underserved needs in the marketplace. Thus, the exercise begins by looking outward, beyond that in which the institution is already engaged.

In our world of admission, most of us are working for institutions that are well-established or at least that have been around for a long time. So, the idea of creating anew is unrealistic. The idea, though, of looking outward remains applicable, for there is still the question of which market segment to serve. An all too common mistake is for an institution to rely on the misguided notion that if they simply promote their school properly, they will be fine.

Practical Advice: Resist the urge to articulate only your institution’s uniqueness.

The reason most colleges and universities fall short of effective marketing: To do so would require courage, honesty, and patience. An article in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago had the following equation:

Success = D x V x C > R

D = Dissatisfaction with the status quo
V = Vision for the future
C = Courage to take the first steps
R = Resistance to change

Think about your institution. In relation to the above equation, what degree of success are you having in meeting objectives of enrollment, net revenue, reducing the discount rate, and fundraising? Consider each part, study each part, and then relate it to your institutional culture.

Tori Murden, the first American and first female to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean, had this to say in 1999 shortly after her heroic feat of 81 days and nearly 3,000 miles: “Many of us lead lives that are too small, too confined, too constricted. I do not wish to do this.”

Institutions, like people, are guilty of thinking too small, too confined, and too constricted. Change — as well as success — begins with institutional self-awareness and an appropriate framework from which to operate. Setting goals is important, but so is a realistic sense of what can be accomplished.

If you are pressed to meet your institutional goals, use the fundamentals of marketing to begin the conversation on your campus about why you may be falling short. If honest discussion follows, then stay the course. Anything short of honest discussion will put you in choppy waters.

In the next issue of The Scoop, expect a continued discussion of marketing fundamentals, with a focus on Price and Place.

—
Denis M. Stokes is Director of Admission at Christ School, a traditional boarding and day school for boys, affiliated with the Episcopal Church, just south of Asheville, North Carolina.