Marketing in a Barrel

For those who don’t know much about University of Phoenix marketing, if you haven’t run across a banner or pop-up, let me bring you up to speed. Organization’s like UOP are cost per lead shops; advertising has only as much value to the company as can be assigned each individual new prospect on a volume basis. For example, if we do 20,000 blow-in inserts in a market that costs us $10,000 and see a return on that of 50 new leads, our cost per lead is $200. If we do a direct mail drop to 75,000 that costs us $30,000 and we see 200 leads, our cost per lead is $150. Internet? I’ll spare you the volume, but shooting for a cost per lead between $45 and $80 is pretty darned good. These are all just broad strokes examples.

This is what I like to call “marketing in a vacuum.” The whole plan might make perfect sense in combination with a sound communication campaign. But if all you’re doing with your total market of potential customers is mining for leads to sell toward, valuing them as nothing more than hot qualified voices or wet signatures on an information request form, you’re doing far more damage to your brand than you are developing your business in the long term.

Take, for example, radio advertising. In the case of UOP, radio was stock in trade for many, many years. What radio delivered to our campaigns is the broad air support that allows our marketing audience permission to think about us as an option for their future success. Slate radio against a cost per lead model and you have yourself a great big joke. In our case, CPL radio measures in at 10-15 times the next best CPL channel. That’s right: it really is a joke. It’s not fair; not fair to the product, to the channel, and the the broad audience you reach in the air. That is to completely discount what radio delivered in terms of leads to our other channels; hear us on the radio, find us on the net.

In the end, radio was canned. It didn’t deliver enough at the right cost per lead. It was a business decision.

You have a choice when you advertise. You can go for the volume win, for clicks and call center fodder, and you can drive traction through brawn. The challenge with the vacuum business decision is that you are, by choice, building a wall around your product.

In our case, all the value is in the classroom. It’s the small classroom environment, the student-teacher ratio, the technology and curricular advances, the faculty, and the list goes on. But as we’ve reigned in all but the most strict cost per lead programs, we’ve found the overall quality of our leads has declined more than a commensurate percentage. The quality student can no longer see through the wall to the product, and we’re giving our customers this new job: get through the wall of misperception, of pop-ups and poor communication, and you too can have take advantage of the value of the classroom experience we create. But you have to want it something awful, because getting through the wall of cost per lead advertising and sales is a pain in the ass.

Instead of going for the volume play, you could go for the education play. It’s something we lost track of long ago through conservative leadership in our messaging, and we’re trying to bring back consciously right now through the voices that really matter in our world: students.

Our PR folks are working on a blog, something that will undoubtedly be corporate and staid, edited for content and clarity, but still offering up the voices of select students. I’m trying to go one step further internally: I’d like to create a network of UOP bloggers: students, faculty, and employees that are all driven to success, all clear-headed and approachable, all honest in their take on the world of education. I’d like to see us offer up this network as the unedited face of what we do behind the wall of advertising we’ve built up around us. I’d like to see comments and trackbacks on and active, writers engaged in the dialog with fellow students in a public forum.

See, for me as a marketer, there’s nothing better, nothing more powerful than the conversation itself. Instead of being terrified of critique, we can embrace it. Instead of being defensive of attack on our processes and problems, we can evaluate and fix them. And in fact, as Jeff Jarvis already said, this is where the people are — this new community — and it wouldn’t hurt to be advertising in this space, too.

Six weeks ago, University of Phoenix ground campus president Bob Barker resigned from the organization. In his place, UOP Online president Brian Mueller was moved over as COO of both the online and ground operations. Last week, Brian’s boss Todd Nelson resigned as CEO of Apollo Group, and Brian took his place at that top. That’s a lot of change for any organization inside of 60 days. People are scared. Most are excited about the changes, feeling that this is the right thing to do for the University at large, but with great change comes great trepidation. No one wants to be downsized.

And still, we focus on the product. We focus on our students. We focus on the classroom experience. We focus on what has given us the gift of organization, employment, and position in the academic marketplace in the shared voice of our greatest proponents.