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April 12, 2007
Confessions of a B-school citizen marketer
Positioning is a marketing facade that paints a picture idealized by the marketer, not necessarily the customer.
OwenBloggers.com is one of the antidotes to positioning. It has the inside scoop on Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management. Isaac Rogers sent us this note about the site's founding; we thought it was so great that it's practically its own case study of why content and media created by the experiences of customers, or in this case students, can easily trump the stories dreamed up a marketing group.
The idea of customer evangelism is one that business schools in general just don’t get. Before my classmates and I were admitted to Owen, we stood on one side of a vast curtain; on the other side was the actual experience of business school. On the side where we stood, we were afforded only peeks at what would transpire once we were actual in the program. The glossy brochures the Admissions department sent out gave many of us the same impression; they were pre-packaged, made-for-public-consumption marketing vehicles that only told a very small fraction of the actual story.
About a week after being at Owen, a group of three first-year students were talking about how different the experience was from what we had imagined. Even though all three of us had done our research on schools, talked to current students, and met with admissions staff, we were still shocked by what we’d eventually be doing in business school. Our experience was that we were shocked in a good way; Owen was so much more than we had anticipated, we were being challenged so much more, we were having altogether unexpected and better experiences.
Owen exceeded all our expectations--- why? Why didn’t we know this?
Why didn’t admissions paint the right picture? Why did they leave so much of “the good stuff” out of the equation?
We realized the answer immediately; it was impossible for the admissions staff to tell that story -- only current students could. Only current students could capture all the emotion, the hardships, the challenges and the achievements you experience in business school.
We knew that if more prospective students saw the whole picture, they would be able to make more informed decisions about their 2-year investment. We knew if more people knew the depth of the Owen experience, more people would put Owen on their list than had done so previously.
Within a week of this revelation, OwenBloggers.com was born. We’re now a group of 17 current students, 3 admitted incoming students, and alumni, all writing constantly about our experiences here at Vanderbilt. We’re not an official club, we’re not in any way officially tied to Owen. We are just die-hard, dedicated Owen evangelists. We work hours and hours each week (on top of our hectic MBA course load) to write, update, and syndicate our pages to thousands of viewers per week.
Our idea is simple: Tell it all. Tell the good. Tell the bad. Tell the unexpected. Let every prospective student know EXACTLY what they’re in for. We feel better information makes better informed consumers.
The response so far has been overwhelming. Very overwhelming. Every prospective student I’ve talked to said OwenBloggers has made a difference in their decision. We receive emails every week from people all over the map: recruiters, students, faculty and alumni telling us how much more they’ve learned about Owen because of our site.
Jackie, you’re right on target. Customer Evangelists are the volunteer sales force every organization has, but few have the guts to mobilize them.
Hey universities and alumni groups, here are your new storytellers.
Other blogs that reference Confessions of a B-school citizen marketer:
» How 1 school harnessed the power of its biggest fans from Learfield InterAction
[Read More]
» Owenbloggers - Talk about Evangelism! from The Employee Factor
First of all thank you to the Church of the Customer blog for finding Owenbloggers.com. What is Owenbloggers? Owenbloggers was founded by 17 current students, 3 admitted incoming students, and alumni, all writing constantly about their experiences at V... [Read More]
» Leave before the gospel from ThinkingSparks
According to the Church of the Customer ‘positioning is a marketing facade that paints a picture idealized by the marketer, not necessarily the customer’. The power of customer evangelism is, according to the author, many times greater then anything dr... [Read More]
» Colleges and the Social Web from College Marketing 4.0
Church of the Customer posted an interesting link the other day: students in the Vanderbuilt MBA program, literally evangelists for the school, have started a blog on their program: This is an uncensored, unedited look at lives of a group [Read More]
Every school - business or otherwise - should be doing this. In 2002, I started a student blog with a friend of mine at Wharton. Today, Wharton has 50+ students blogging on a school-sponsored, but uncensored, site.
For those interested in the unvarnished truth about MBA life, my first blog entry appears here:
http://diaries.wharton.upenn.edu/PostDetails.asp?RecordID=357
I continued the practice when I returned to the working world, blogging about my adventures at McKinsey and my current role in romance novel publishing. The continuing saga appears at http://tamarapaton.blogspot.com.
Tamara I completely agree with you. Thanks for posting this Jackie. I graduated from the Smith School at Maryland about 1 year and a few months ago. I did not start blogging until I was a few months out. I wish I had sooner.
When I chose Smith I never took the test drive or really delved into the student experience. I recently started a networking group outside of the Smith centered around a monthly breakfast www.smithbreakfastclub.com. It has been a slow start, but this has got my juices going.
Smith has 'student' blogs, but nothing like this.
