Bridging the Reputation Gap

Here’s a bitter pill for school marketers to swallow. What you see as the high academic quality of your school’s educational program is meaningless unless parents agree with your assessment. Likewise, your belief in the outstanding calibre of your faculty doesn’t...

Why your school needs to be like Alexa

The advent of digital assistants is having a huge impact on our culture but Google and Alexa also account for larger shifts in how we engage with brands and technology. Those shifts are influencing the way parents engage with independent schools and are shaping their...

My Stupidly Simple Explanation of Branding

–> Branding is complicated. It’s time consuming. It can be damn expensive. So, selling your boss or your board on the idea of engaging in a branding project can be a monumental task. But here’s what makes it even harder. Most people don’t know what a brand...

9 ways to get survey results that matter

You probably know that surveying stakeholders is critically important to the marketing success of your business, school or organization. That’s the easy part. The hard part is how to get started. There are consultants and firms that will develop surveys and provide...

Branding gaps and 6 ways to bridge them

Branding gaps are the most likely source of declining enrolment in an independent school. But where do you find them and what do you do about them? First, some ground rules. For the purpose of this discussion I am using Seth Godin’s definition of a brand: “A brand is...

Why Bother Branding?

Preaching to the converted is usually taken as a waste of time. The same could be said of branding. Why bother branding to those that have already bought? But I had an experience last month that ought to send a shiver down the spine of any independent school...