Today at the eduWeb Conference in Boston, I had the pleasure to present with my colleague and Babson College Chief Marketing Officer Sarah Sykora on "Crowdsourcing a Brand Campaign".
Redefining a word can be overwhelming as can be facilitating an institutional branding campaign. Combine them both with a crowdsourcing microsite at its core and you have Babson College’s Redefining Entrepreneurship campaign. From strategy and implementation to feedback and results, our presentation showcased an institutional branding campaign integrating multiple channels to increase brand awareness, engagement, adoption and advocacy with our target constituencies.
Crowdsourcing certainly has its benefits, but it also has to be used for the right objective. In our case, we wanted to engage the marketplace in redefining the word entrepreneurship to be a more inclusive term and activity. Historically, and even to this day, the traditional definition of entrepreneurship to many people equals a traditional small business start-up.
The strategic goal behind both the campaign and the presentation is to get individuals to understand that the emotional connection is about "the Cause, not the College". The brand campaign promotes the cause and effect of entrepreneurship, not Babson College. Rallying advocates, old and new, around a cause is much more impactul than simply rallying people around a brand. Starting with the internal community, and especially when expand to our alumni, tactics were aimed at using advocacy marketing as the fuel to engine the campaign. In addition to the definition submissions, social sharing and engagement energized all activity around the campaign.
The presentation shared our constituency map, a new look at the higher ed consumer decision journey, an overview of our brand campaign channels and creative, and a deeper dive into the microsite engagement hub that served as the core of the campaign, define.babson.edu. Its analysis, impact and transition into V2 of our campaign was shared as well.
View a slideshare of our presentation »
View a slideshare of our presentation »
