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Well, my boss basically just told me that we have no budget to do marketing research this next academic year. No money to figure out the readership of our employee and community newsletters, no money to ask people why they send their kids to our schools or why they take them out to attend a 'better' school.

This past year we left some $50,000 or more unspent. This, even after I kept harping on my boss to get going on marketing research. We had plenty of money to do it this year, but we didn't.

My time here is done.

I just applied to a position at one of our feeder schools (same community, different grade levels). They have a full marketing staff there - 2 designers (hopefully I'll become one of them), a copywriter/PR/broadcasting expert, a marketing director who has expertise in video creation, and a part-time secretary. They do marketing research every year (or at least every other year) and focus on one specific thing: enrolling students.

They have a real marketing department.

To hell with the people I work for now. Let their student enrollment hemorrhage and their budget drop year after year. Will they finally learn when they realize they have to cut jobs and salaries? Will they finally learn when people drop like flies to go to other districts?

Nah. They won't learn. It's a school district. They'll just keep doing a shitty job year after year, and pat themselves on the back for doing it. And they'll keep getting money from the state.

Oh well.

I'm a graphic designer for a public high school district. I've had more than one person ask me, "Why does a school district need a graphic designer?" Some of them are designers themselves, so it is not as if these people are the kind that don't understand the impact of brand management and well-designed marketing materials.

But really, why does a school district need a full-time graphic designer? In the two years I've worked for the district I've designed a new (albeit boring) logo to replace the hideous and ugly one they've had for 30-some years; I've reorganized, updated, and redesigned the district website; and I've designed a few banners and posters and other miscellaneous items, mostly for employee recruitment.

But what impact have I had on our (supposed) number one goal: student recruitment? I don't have anything to prove it (our admin team isn't smart on data-management), but my guess would be that not one student has enrolled in our schools directly or indirectly because of the work I have done. Am I just too impatient?

Or, is brand management for an entire school district a battle I can't win? Why is it that after two years even I can't sum up our "brand" in one sentence?

I would like to just say our brand is "High expectations for every student" or something like that. But the brand is in the mind of the beholder, and just me and the marketing materials saying it won't make it so.

Another question I have is, does the district really have a brand? What is it made of? Is it a conglomerate of the individual school brands? It can't be, according to the rules of Positioning. Then what is it? And does it matter? I think it should matter if we're going to have any marketing materials at all. There is no point in having marketing materials when you don't have a unique, focused message.

Here is an analogy: the school district is Procter & Gamble, and the high schools are Tide, Bounty, Cheer, Downy, Ivory, and Era (all P&G brands, by the way). Then what is the brand message of Procter & Gamble itself? To me it is "home cleanliness & hygiene products."

However, I don't buy Gillette Venus disposable razors because they're a P&G brand (I didn't even know they were until I looked at P&G's brand list). I buy them because the product, as compared to its competitors, appeals to me the most (for whatever reason that might be: price, looks, recommendation from a trusted source, etc.). I wonder if this structure holds true for our school district as well: parents don't send their kids to our schools because they're part of this district, they send them because the individual schools appeal to them the most, as compared to the competition. Then why sell the schools under the banner of the district name?

One problem we face is that our administrators (including principals) are squeamish about our schools competing against one another. There isn't any gain if a student leaves one of our schools to attend another of our schools. We get the same amount of money for enrolling that child, no matter which campus they choose.

But I sense that there is also a resistance to marketing each school separately (positioning) because they think that it defines the "haves" from the "have-nots." It's no secret that three of our schools are in the millionaire-type neighborhood and the other three are in the lower-middle class neighborhood (if that high at all). This is a fact that has a part in defining each school's brand, whether we like it or not.

However, what else makes each school different from its other schools, including our major competition, the charter schools? Just from my desk at the main office I see that one school is about Tradition, and another is about Pride, and yet another is about Diversity. These are three unique concepts. But if you try to suggest this Positioning mentality, the principal of the Diversity school might say, "But, we're also about Pride. Can't we be about Diversity AND Pride? Oh, and we're also about Academic Achievement!" They don't understand that when you stand for everything, you stand for nothing.

So, back to my original dilemma: what is the district's brand message? Should we just make it something generic, like "Students are our first priority"? Should I give up on branding and just make everything look pretty, like a good little graphic designer?

Al and Laura Ries... help! Branding is much harder than you make it out to be!

I'm sitting here trying to write and design an advertisement for our school district to be placed in a local business directory. What should the headline be? Who is the audience and what are they looking for in a school?

The answer is that I have no idea. Why? Because we've never done any research. I don't know what the parents and students think about our district. In other words, I don't know what our brand is.

Why do parents send their kids to our schools? Is it because of good SAT or AIMS scores? Is it because the parents know and trust the teachers? Or is it because they don't have the money to send them to private or charter schools? If they take their kids out of our schools, why and to what schools are they moving?

I've been at this district for almost 2 years and to still not know the district brand is frightening. I've been pushing to do market research since I got here, and still it has not been done. Why? I have no idea. We have $75,000 of marketing funds that will go unused this year. Luckily, we're still getting $120,000 again next year to start with. I'm amazed that the teachers haven't rioted since seeing that we get that much funding for marketing & recruitment.

One would think that the lack of good school marketing and PR is due to lack of funding. Not in our case. In our district it is because of a lack of marketing brains and a lack of good leadership and overall communication. Data-driven decision-making? Hah!

::sigh:: I guess I'll just make something up.

Check out this new ad from MSNBC, featured in Newsweek. I think the ad communicates very well. And yet I also wonder if MSNBC is going in the wrong direction by positioning itself as "all kinds of news for all kinds of people." As if it wasn't bad enough that they've line-extended not just one brand (MSN) but two (NBC)! Think of Fox News. What one word do you think of? Conservative. What about CNN? I think of Cable News. What about MSNBC? I'm not sure what others would think. I think Olberman or Peacock or NBC. The bottom line is I think MSNBC would be better off picking one color of the spectrum rather than all of them. Although the ad is pretty. ;D On a side note, I'm a sucker for colorful information design and branding:

So it just came across my attention that the Arizona Diamondbacks (baseball) changed their logo and official colors. I probably should have known months ago when the announced it, but I could care less about the sports teams here in AZ and baseball in particular is uber boring IMHO. Anyway, I got a glimpse of the new duds while browsing the Arizona Republic website: Now, if you ask me, those new colors look butt ugly. Don't get me wrong, red is my favorite color. But compared to the purple and teal they had last season (and 10 or 11 seasons before that), this new color scheme is boring and unoriginal. Old Diamondbacks logo Besides the sad demise of the purple and teal, this story got me thinking about another thing: aren't all the sports teams in a city supposed to wear the same colors? Isn't that what makes the support for all the teams stronger? In Phoenix, apparently they don't think so. It looks like they're getting closer to all going black and red. That's nice, but, how unoriginal! Arizona is too pretty and too colorful for such a bland, me-too color scheme. Why not a purple and teal, or purple and orange (like the Suns) or even a maroon and gold (like ASU)? And why not stick with the same color scheme for all teams? I grew up in Pittsburgh where it was black and gold everywhere, all the time. You can go to a Steeler game and see someone with a Penguins jersey on. Or you can go to a Pirates game and see a lot of people with Steelers jerseys on. It's interchagable. It's Pittsburgh. It's part of the city's brand itself. But here we have the Phoenix Suns and Coyotes, and the Arizona Cardinals and Diamondbacks. They can't even get the choice of city or state consistent! What do I care, I don't care for teams other than the black and gold ones anyway.

So I was gathering news for my weekly news trivia game and saw MSNBC's new logo, and apparently their new website "look." Here are their old logos: The one with "MSNBC" all in a line (the last one) has always made me cringe. Look how wide that N is! And the thickness of the S totally doesnt match visually with the other letters. The M is much too narrow. I think they just took the letters from the first logo and just put them in a line without any care for trying a new (and better designed) typeface. BUT... so here's the new logo: Which "usual trend" did they follow in this redesign? I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count. Give up? The letters are all lowercase. A lot of companies fall for this one. It looks so much better, to be sure, but it comes off as "weak." This might be ok for a children's-themed company perhaps, but the third-largest cable news channel in the U.S.? Some other companies that have gone lowercase: I'm sure there are a zillion more than I can't think of off the top of my head.