McDonald’s is in the news again, as its CEO announced this week he would soon step down after just two years at the helm of the world’s biggest fast-food company.
McDonald’s is struggling to stay relevant in a world of expanding options. Why go to McDonald’s when you can pay a bit more to get better food and have a much better experience while doing it? Chains like Five Guys, Shake Shack, and Chipotle and Panera have found ways to offer fresher, (presumably) healthier, and tastier fast-food options while giving customers a more pleasurable experience from the time they walk into the restaurant. It’s not that McDonald’s hasn’t tried to stay relevant — it’s been a new-product machine. But it’s not working. The chain has become irrelevant to many of their once-loyal customers who now want something other than what McDonald’s offers.
Staying relevant is a challenge for all brands, but it can be a huge challenge for older brands. (See JCPenney, Imperial margarine, and Radio Shack.) How do you stay relevant? How do you make sure you’re like Pantene and not Pert Plus? Like Marriott and not Howard Johnson’s? (I do miss those fried clams.)
Strong branding requires that you weave a story about how your institution can uniquely meet the needs of your audiences. Staying relevant requires understanding what your audiences care about — not what you want them to care about, and not what you think they should care about. What do they actually care about?
This is as true in higher education as it is in consumer packaged goods. The list of things that prospective students and their parents care about is different today than it was a generation ago. In our work, we find that career preparation and cost are much more important than they were even five years ago, and their importance continues to rise. Institutions that don’t help prospective students and parents connect the dots are at risk of becoming irrelevant.
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Remaining relevant means having a clear understanding of your different audiences. This requires regular market research to ensure that you understand the behaviors, motivations, and needs of each audience relative to higher education, and how they change over time. That’s how you know you’re delivering programs and services that your audiences want, and that you’re delivering clear, unique, and compelling messages about those programs and services.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you just give people what they want. Seventeen-year-olds aren’t the best at determining what’s best for them. Designing courses around what they’re asking for isn’t necessarily the best strategy (and won’t make the accrediting bodies happy, either.)
Your job as a marketer is to represent the voice of your audiences in those conversations about brand positioning and brand delivery. Doing so requires ongoing conversations with those audiences to know their hopes, dreams, and fears, and what they most want from your institution.
Stay relevant. Don’t end up like Ronald.
Want to learn more? We recently published a white paper that explores the specific challenges of higher education branding and gives you strategies for clearing the most common hurdles.