Another AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education is in the books. The highlight of the conference for me each year is seeing so many people I’ve come to know over the 10-ish years I’ve been attending.
As a co-chair of this year’s event, I had the opportunity to participate in shaping the program. Each year, following the proposal submission period, the committee meets in early May to discuss the proposals and set the program. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of pushing and pulling, as we seek to build a program line-up that will be interesting to the diverse group of attendees.
And then we cross our fingers and hope that the program is as great as we think it’s going to be.
Based on the feedback, it looks like it was. The informal chatter and the formal feedback suggest that attendees got what they came for.
For me, one of the most interesting things about attending the Symposium each year is seeing the themes that unfold over the four days. Several keys themes emerged for me from this year’s Symposium:
Location, location, location
As marketers, we are often reluctant to emphasize place, particularly if our “place” is perceived as less than interesting to prospective students. But two of our keynote speakers, CJ Stout from Pentagram and Ann Weaver Hart, the president of the University of Arizona, stressed (in very different ways) the importance of knowing, and communicating, where you are. Corn fields in Iowa may be cliché, but they are part of your landscape and your culture. You can’t deny your place, so you need to embrace it and find fresh ways to communicate it.
The power of emotion
This was an emerging theme last year, and was even more prominent this year. In Ann Weaver Hart’s keynote and in break-out sessions we saw examples of powerful advertising that uses music and imagery to make emotional connections with viewers. Higher ed has been slower than some other industries to embrace evocative advertising; it’s great to see more institutions using it.
It’s about them, not about you.
Several speakers stressed the importance of knowing what your audience wants and needs and delivering products and services to meet their needs – even if it means changing your business model. Emma Carrasco told us how NPR has evolved to meet the needs of its listener audience, and Jamie Merisotis from Lumina Foundation demonstrated his organization’s understanding of future college students, and laid out a future that is very different from the world of higher education today.
For blog post recaps of some of our favorite sessions, click here to visit our conference page on EDUniverse.
To those of you who attended, I hope you got some ideas, some inspiration, and some Texas barbecue. For those of you who couldn’t attend, I hope to see you next year in Chicago, when AMA returns to the Windy City.
The post And that’s a wrap: The 2014 AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education appeared first on mStoner, Inc..