Shattering stereotypes (a research project)

4,000,000 young people aged 16-24 are not enrolled in, or failed to complete high school. That’s a lot of kids. And while many suffer from learning disorders or are facing impossibly challenging circumstances, there are plenty that drop out simply because the traditional education system failed to capture their attention.

The Kellogg Foundation created the New Option Initiative, a long term project committed to developing an alternative career path for those high-school drop-outs, intercepting talented at risk youth before they hit rock bottom.

They assembled an elite team of consultants, including professors Vijay Kumar and Chris Conley from the Institute of Design. They in turn hired several students, including myself. We spent the summer of 2008 meeting with young adults, business owners and other stakeholders, and developed a first prototype.

PRIMARY RESEARCH – BUSINESS OWNERS

We first conducted interviews with owners and managers in businesses that typically hire at entry level. The goal of these interviews was mainly to identify hiring and training practices.

Insights:

All business owners were looking for the same qualities in an ideal hire:

- responsible
- resourceful
- enthusiastic

Overwhelmingly, employers saw a high-school diploma as a sign that a youth might posses these qualities. The stereotype of the dead-beat, no energy high-school drop-out was brought-up over and over and over.


PRIMARY RESEARCH – YOUTH

However, here is the reality of what we found:



Insights:

The key insights revolve around these themes:
- self-discovery: they don’t want to be told what they should do.
- strength + interests: they have to find something they are genuinely interested in. They can’t fake it.
- tangibility: they don’t do well in the abstract.


EXPOSURE ACADEMY



We developed an event designed to allow youth to explore those 3 insights. Over 2 days, we took 6 youths to visit 4 businesses.

We visited an ad agency, a photographer’s studio, a real estate agent and a major theatre company. We asked each businesses to:

- introduce employees with unusual career paths
- engage the youth in hands-on activities



Insights - youths

- casual tone allowed youth to relate to businesses
- personal stories revealed how people go from a to b
- jobs seemed more attainable
- experience helped hem identify their own skills

Insights - businesses

- de-mystified the “drop-out” stereotype
- employees discovered things they didn’t know about each other


NEXT STEPS

Both youth and businesses responded positively to the experiment to such an extent that The Kellogg Foundation agreed to repeat the experience several times over the next six months. The following will be address in the next iteration:
- can we get even more genuine interactions by involving the youths in the organization of the visits?
- how can we make it more meaningful for the business

New business success (a branding project)

OVERVIEW

Cramer Krasselt is a mid-size Chicago advertising agency. They have a small office in Phoenix which focuses on PR and has University of Phoenix as their account

In 2007, UofP invited them to pitch for the advertising portion of the account.

TEAM

I was hired as a freelancer by the Chicago office (taking a full-time position later) to join a team that consisted of a copywriter, an account person with a good relationship with the client, a planner, a media buyer and myself, an art director.

As is usual in a new business pitch situation, the client didn’t participate directly in the development of the marketing strategy and the advertising campaign.

PRODUCT

University of Phoenix is the largest institution of higher learning in the U.S. It has been around for over 30 years, educated more than 300,000 students a year, maintained a 90% satisfaction rate while
serving the largest student population in the nation.

In an environment where it’s clear to those familiar with the state of higher education, including the U.S. Department of Education, that traditional higher ed has not kept up with the pace of change related to the needs of today’s students and the modern workplace (US Dept. of Ed, Future of Higher Ed Reports, September 2006), they see themselves as the pioneer of non-traditional higher education

Yet they are being judged as an inferior school conferring inferior degrees. Many think that University of Phoenix is an online-only school, and that it’s a “diploma mill.” The founders of University of Phoenix would say that this misconception is born from an outdated and elitist view of higher education, propagated by traditional academics that say for-profit schools and schools that serve non traditional students (who comprise almost 70% of total students enrolled in higher ed) are inferior to the typical 4-year public college that most people are familiar with.



In reality, University of Phoenix is one of the few institutions of higher learning – public or private – completely devoted to providing access to higher education for working (non-traditional) students.
In 1989, the school became the first to offer classes and programs online. And it has continued to pioneer innovations to make access to education possible, like virtual simulations of real-world workplaces, collaborative learning teams that mirror how students would need to perform in the workplace, and an entire curriculum and resources completely accessible online.

CHALLENGE

The brand had high name recognition but little brand understanding.

GOAL

Re-frame non-traditional education as innovative rather than inferior.

RESEARCH

Internal research showed that the school achieved a 90% satisfaction rate, so we decided to find out that the brand meant to the people who attended the university. We visited the Phoenix Campus to mingle with the student. We boldly invited ourselves to some of their homes. We connected via e-mail and followed up with phone conversations with several students, including some who were following courses while stationed in Irak and Afghanistan.

What we found was a group of very driven students, determined to better their lives and that of their families. All of them had busy schedules, sometimes difficult circumstances. The flexibility UofP
offered was a key enabler to many.

SOLUTION

Hearing all this first hand, we saw how each student would design a program and a pace that suited their needs. But we also saw how emotional they are about it. This is their own personal ticket to a
brighter future.

From this, a campaign idea emerged:

this is not really the “University of Phoenix,”

it’s the “University of you”.

We added to this an overall theme line that linked the University’s ethics to the target’s core values.

“Thinking ahead”

We planned to use the line as a rallying cry for internal audiences as well.

After being awarded the assignment, I produced 60 and 15 second commercial to air on high-involvement shows (think 24), a significant percentage of prime-time, and shows whose themes are related to innovation and accomplishment (think TLC and Discovery Channel).











Print ads to run in trade magazines and out-of-home to take over entire trains.


RESULTS

- POSITIVE PERCEPTUAL CHANGE



After only 10 weeks of advertising, results of the 1st wave of the tracking study reflected positive changes in key attitudinal measures among those who had seen the advertising.

- LIFT IN LEADS



The web-site experienced a dramatic and sustained lift in leads coinciding with the same week that the advertising launched.

- STAFF MORALE

To the question:

Does the launch of the new brand affect how you feel about working at University of Phoenix?

93% responded positively.

(Source: UofP internal brand launch research - March 2007)

- ANALYSTS TAKE NOTICE

“...(University of Phoenix) advertising push yield good results...the
creative content of the company’s television commercials is quite
appealing, in our view, and the company’s music is cutting edge.”

- Sun Trust Robinson Humphrey


CONCLUSION

We collectively made an unintentionally smart decision early on: because we had less than two weeks to prepare, and because all but one of us was completely new to the brand, and the other one new to advertising, we decided to stick together through all the phases. This decision positively affected everything, from the core idea (university of you) to the media buy (“this idea would be even better if we had :15’s !”) to our the choice of director (documentary style).

And in the end, consumers recognized themselves in the spots because we had seen the bowl of cereal next to the computer and the sleepy kid on the bus. They recognized it because it was real.