This post is based on an email from Erik, a UMass Lowell Strategic Management student. Erik wrote:"Thank you very much for taking time out of your day to to help us work on our myspace projects for admissions. Though your responses were not exactly what i was hoping for your insight on our dorm life video and its inability to create an intimate experience for the viewer will be very helpful in the final weeks of this project. Once these projects are ready for final submission it would be great, if you have the opportunity, to come back again and see our progress."
First, glad to be of help (I hope).
Second, what Erik is writing about is that his team produced a great video, but not a great video for their target audience. I suggested that his group keep the video they did produce on the back burner because (I'm sure) someday it'll come in handy.
What this deals with is Place Brand and Operational Branding.
A Place Brand is traditionally "...tied to a geographic location. It uses classic marketing practices to establish a presence that reflects the values, language, ways of thinking and responding to information, etc., to create economic value. The ideal place brand reflects a geographic location's cultural identity while separating itself from competitive products. This often goes beyond traditional branding concepts of logo and slogan."
Whether Erik and the other students realize it or not, they're doing place branding. The "place" their branding is the age-demographic of the UMass Lowell target audience.
Just so we're clear on the concept, I'm not using "Place Brand" to mean branding UMass Lowell, I'm talking about the psychological place the age-specific demographic lives in. Recognizing conceptual spaces and psychological places as having meaning and (near) physical reality to a given audience is something NextStage often does for clients and I was happy to provide that insight to the UML students.
The other element (and here's where Erik's group was a little weak) was the operational branding elements of their video.
Operational branding is defined as "the process of consistently and accurately branding in the language and culture of the target audience while maintaining corporate strategy. Operational branding is the method of creating successful place brands."
Operational branding often makes use of three elements:
- Know your audience (really well)
- Synchronize your place brand to what you know really well about your audience
- Engage alternate channels to create value in the place brand
Again, it was a good video, I just questioned whether it was the best video for operational branding purposes.
More from this class to follow...
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
Links for this post:
- Gender Specific Marketing Discoveries podcast
- Media Strategies blog posts
- Social Network blog posts
- UMass Lowell blog posts
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