D16 really liked the funny letter Macalester sent to S in 2011 and also the student created newsletter from Grinnell with line drawings she colored in (but she was 13 years old, neither caught S’s attention.)
No advertising line shouts “Apply Here!” louder than: need-blind and meets full need.
Saint Lawrence University, upstate NY, send D a post card indicating that if the card was filled in and returned, they would send her a school ball cap. Sent back the card, received NO hat!!
I thought the Univ. of Chicago was very clever with their postcard describing how they loved (mostly) all things Swedish, like Ikea and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”… and ended the list with Nobel Prizes.
The Univ. of Oregon Duck always made me smile. I congratulate their marketing dept. for making me feel as if they have the friendliest campus of all.
Butler keeps sending me emails with endless pointless emojis. No, Bulldogs, that does not appeal to the youth market.
My DD loved the schools who sent puzzles or something to put together. Unlike an earlier poster, GTech sent her several mailings and each had some sort of trinket - stickers, an origami ramblin’ wreck, etc. Pitt also sent trinkets including a card that if folded properly formed the silhouette of the Cathedral of Learning.
We thought the Chicago Ikea brochure was awful. It wasn’t clear at all at first what the point was.
IUP (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) Cook Honors school has been sending a sequence of puzzles, lat/long coordinates, and web links with problems to solve. I don’t know if many take the time to decipher each puzzle and move on, but the mailing caught my DDs attention when most unsolicited snail mail goes right into the recycling bin.
There’s a thread about this here on CC:
@stencils I saw that thread! I wish I had gotten those mailing, I love those kind of puzzles.
The worst kind of marketing is none. Actually the worst kind of marketing is too much–so that you know the school is gaming the numbers by trying to get everyone and her grandmother to apply. The next bad marketing is a web page that looks like it’s from a decade ago. Mills looks like that. Great school! Columbia. Smith. Emory. NYU.
My son applied to Columbia University and we requested a brochure from the website. After nothing came in the mail I called the school and was promised they would be sending him a few things that week. We waited and still no literature came. I called again in the spring, and a woman reluctantly told me she would look for something to send, but didn’t know if they had anything in her department or in another department. She acted like she couldn’t be bothered. The only literature my son ever received was a rejection form letter.
Pratt sent me a 378-page book from the architecture school…I’m majoring in finance…
I loved the cute pink box of candy hearts with a message of love that Northeastern sent to son for Valentine’s Day. Techie son gave no reaction though. Maybe that was a girl thing.
The repeated mailings of Univ of Chicago postcards about Swedish stuff like IKEA were clever, but I may have just been intrigued because I have Swedish family. U of C definitely comes across as interesting and quirky in their mailings and application essays. Son was not excited and did not apply, mostly because they don’t offer engineering.
USC brochures were the most beautiful of all. Happy students in sunshine, surrounded by beautiful gardens and architecture. I want to go there.
One college I had never heard of sent a large movie-style poster featuring my son’s full name. I liked that, because it was different and personalized.
Stanford sent an expensive, gorgeous book around the first week of January this senior year. Was that supposed to convince son to apply at the last minute? As wonderful as Stanford is, we knew that it would be a waste of an application fee.
GA Tech does a great job with their fairly simple but sometimes clever marketing emails. Same with MIT. Son read those.
I almost feel sorry for colleges trying to market to teenagers in this online world. where they are bombarded with information. Teen trends change with the wind, and it is hard to capture their attention when they are so busy.
And, families complain if they get too many emails and postal mailings. But then some feel unwanted if they don’t get as many as others. I remember one year when friends were saying that their kids had received emails offering free applications to places like Tulane, Clemson, and Rice. I was feeling slightly insulted that my son hadn’t gotten the freebies. But then, after asking him to search his email, he found them. He was just receiving so many college marketing emails that he wasn’t reading most of them.
I think it’s interesting (as a retired marketing professional) that you all define “marketing” as “direct mail” when that is only one small aspect of marketing.
Honestly, my DD’s favorite marketing from a school wasn’t even really marketing - or maybe it was. She appreciated the handwritten thank you notes she received from the admissions counselors at Drake University and Hastings College. She still has the Drake thank you card pinned to her whiteboard.
As far as glossy brochures, etc. - for some reason, she really liked the one from Louisiana State. She likes tigers, though.
Central College, Macalester, and Beloit have reached stalker status with us - she’s tired of all the postcards.
Brandeis had warm from the oven chocolate chip cookies at the admissions office for students / families to take with them on tour. That is every bit as much “marketing” as their direct mail pieces.
The choice of what to see / showcase on a tour (and what to skip) is marketing. The language the tour guides are trained to use is marketing. The extent to which the campus is “branded” with colors and signage is marketing. if a college coordinates with other colleges in putting on a local program, that is marketing.
@Pizzagirl - it’s amazing the influence food can have on a student. Hastings College also had a custom-decorated, oversized chocolate chip cookie for DD after her tour as well as a free t-shirt. The whole drive back to her grandparents, she kept looking at the cookie and saying, “These guys made me a cookie…”
It had an effect on her, even though HC is not one of her top three choices now (it’s in the top five, though, as a fallback.)
Looking at recruitment videos on YouTube for several colleges I have noticed a trend. Five years ago the videos were 8-12 minutes long and included faculty and students talking about the school and what they are doing. Now videos from the same schools are 1 minute long and are rapid fire images of the campus and its people with brief captions. Are they trying to appeal to evolving teenage tastes?
@TomSrOfBoston I read somewhere that the average movie cut length is 2.5 seconds. I couldn’t believe it, so I tested by watching a recently made movie. Its true. Crazy, but true. Cut lengths used to be 12-15 seconds long. Its our evolving attention span, I guess.
When discussing my daughter’s summer job as a counselor for her school’s precollege program, one of the things I emphasized was that her job was basically a marketing position.