Don’t Believe What They Say (Part 1)

As an advertiser, I care deeply about what the consumer thinks.  They see my ads. They buy my products.  They pay the bills.  However, if I want to see how advertising impacts the consumer’s decision to buy a product or more importantly tap into the reasons why they buy a product, I need to be careful not to draw wrong conclusions from survey responses. 

Dr. Clotaire Rapaille, psychologist and market researcher who has worked on campaigns for Fortune 100 companies, suggests that the only effective way to understand what people mean is to actually ignore what consumers say.  Rapaille explains that direct questions about interests and preferences are processed and answered in the cortex of the brain.  This part of the brain is not responsible for instinct and emotion, factors that heavily influence purchasing.   Answers are given to sound intelligent or to impress the questioner but don’t reveal the unconscious forces that precondition our feelings.  This is why polls and surveys are so often misleading and useless. They simply reflect what people say, rather than what they mean.

Rapaille suggests performing lengthy, involved interviews to glean the “codes” from the customers.  Unfortunately, as a university marketer, I have little time, energy, and resources to do exactly what Rapaille is suggesting.  While it would be ideal to get students in situations where we can tap into their subconscious, you may need to gather research quickly and cheaply. 

Instead, our university decided to add new types of questions on existing university perception surveys.  These questions were geared to help students to think outside their cortexes.  We asked our usual demographic and perception questions but also included open-ended questions similar to what Rapaille asks in his sessions. We asked questions that would get the students to remember what it was like to first experience our university.  We asked them to describe their first and most recent memories of the university. The responses were enlightening.

We begin to see common themes in the students’ responses. In the likert scale responses, students found the reputation of our school to be most important.  They considered the university’s values to be important.  They strongly agreed with statements about convenience and academic rigor being important. 

But then we got to the open-ended answers, a different story began to surface.  Students talked about the supportive and helpful staff and faculty.  Many brought up being very “nervous” and “anxious” and that things were “scary” before entering our program. Most importantly, because of the “encouragement”, the negative feelings melted away and students found themselves “put at ease”, “surprised”, and many reported being “excited”.   This was all information we would have missed if we had only looked at the quantitative data.  In fact, few of the factors that students reported as important in the likert scale questions were mentioned in the open-ended responses. 

The stories that we began to see were very helpful and will be used in our upcoming advertising campaign.  Yes, it is important to mention academic excellence.  And if students are saying that your facilities are top-notch, I do not assume that they are lying, so it would be important to mention these features in ads and other marketing material.  But I do think that if we focus too much on what they are saying, we can miss what they really mean.  You will end up with ads that don’t resonate on a deeper level.  And the deeper a student can connect with the universities brand through an ad, the more likely they will buy.  (See this Ubrander article for an example of why you can’t always trust what the students say)

Advertising is Selling

I do not have the typical business background.  I did not study business in college.  I did not have a formal education in advertising.  I was, however, very fortunate to work a few sales jobs during and after college.   I have worked in retail, where good “numbers” were rewarded with more hours.  I have worked a job that was commission based.  While I probably enjoy commercials and take more notice of billboards and print ads more than the average person, I have come to understand that advertising, is also a business of selling.   

I picked up the book Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins.  David Ogilvy says that nobody at any level should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times.  He also claims you will never write another bad advertisement.  I have read it twice and am reading it my third time.  Let’s hope what I have read so far has rubbed off on me. 

In his book, Hopkin’s consistently reminds the advertiser that ad effectiveness should not be measured by how amusing the ad is.  It should be measured by how well they sold the product.  If the advertiser is unsure what color to use in his or her ad, if he or she is unsure what direct mail ad is the most successful, if he or she wants to know what online ad impacted the audience the most and which should be ran again next month, the advertiser can find clarity by measuring which ad resulted in most sales.   Whatever ad sells the most, should be run again.  And if you can improve it to make more money, then do it. 

In the higher education world, this idea is not so easily understood.   A marketing team usually exists and they know they are supposed to do advertising, but many times it is done for the wrong reasons.  Ads are run because that’s what companies (universities) are supposed to do.  Competitors have placed ads in university magazines and on TV and no one wants to fall behind.  Ads are sometimes run because the marketing team has dreams to win awards.  Ads are created by designers who want to create inspiring art.  Ads are created to generate inquiries (We need more inquiries!!).  Ads are created to promote info sessions and school launches and events and declare to the world that they have raised up a tier in U.S. News and World Report rankings.  Now these are all great reasons to advertise but they are not the most important reason. 

At the end of the day, if the marketing department is not helping enrollment they are not doing what they should be doing.  I hate to bring up the bad economy in my first post, but it is clear that marketing and advertising dollars are getting slashed all across the U.S.   Are awards going to save your budget? Is fancy art going to stop your president from reducing your ad spending?  No.  Evidence that your ads bring in money is going to save you. 

When I first came to work in the higher education field, my former boss and mentor told me that I was in the business of dollars and students. With this clear objective, I was able to focus on benefiting my company, not my own agenda.  I was forced to be more concerned about the people who would see my ads, the paying customers. 

So take a look at the last ad campaign you created, worked on, approved, etc.  Is the tagline in the ad catchy? Is it well designed? Is it a guaranteed CASE award winner?  These are important questions.  But…Are you sure that that thing is going to sell your university? If you are not certain, I hope the answers that I will be sharing with you will help you to become more sure.