College Ad Campaigns Lack a Certain Oomph

“Finish what you started” is no “Got milk?,” but California Coast University in Santa Ana is banking on the slogan to draw dropouts back to the classroom.

As more colleges promote themselves with catch phrases and mottoes they hope will boost enrollment and donations, marketing wizards and students say the campaigns have a long way to go before they win any Clio Awards, the ad equivalent of the film industry’s Oscar.

A new Cal State Northridge drive featuring comic book-style superheroes promotes its extension program with the call to action, “Change your mind. Change your world.”

They only get lamer, critics say: Berkeley College in New Jersey proclaims “A better education means a better career,” Grove City College in Pennsylvania brags “Academic excellence. Traditional values. Affordable price.”

The campaigns are becoming more important in the competition to attract dollars and scholars, especially among regional colleges and universities that lack the brand name of a Harvard or Stanford, campus communications specialists say.

“There are thousands of corporations and nonprofits clamoring for attention,” said Dick Tyler, associate vice president for public relations and communications at Cal State Northridge. “It’s hard to be heard over all that noise.”

A slick sell may be lost on students like Dan Hoek of Van Nuys, who was at Northridge last week to sign up for a summer class.

“I saw the ads,” the 32-year-old Hoek said, “but I thought they were for a children’s program like ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ or a movie or something. Maybe I didn’t get it.”

Others question whether corporate-style advertising is an appropriate endeavor for institutions of higher learning--and whether the phrasemakers are up to the task in the first place. There is also scant evidence so far that the campaigns have had much of an effect, although schools such as Arizona State University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst report promising results.

“Academics are opposed to the notion that advertising people can take this on themselves and market us like you’d market soap,” said Marvin A. Kaiser, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Portland State University, whose motto is “Let knowledge serve the city.”

To George Felton, a marketing professor at Columbus College of Art Design in Ohio, nothing is served by proclamations such as that. “I’m not so much upset about sloganeering as I am about bad sloganeering,” Felton said.

He offered Mary Baldwin College’s “Leadership. Character. Intellect” and Prairie View A&M; University’s “Prairie View produces productive people” as examples of the uninspired and uninspiring. The former is in Virginia, the latter in Texas.

Felton, whose criticism of branding campaigns has appeared in education and marketing journals, said faculty members should be asked what distinguishes their schools, but they should not be allowed to write the slogans.

“The saving grace is that so many of these slogans are so bad that we know our academics have not become too commercially focused,” he said.

The professor said Northridge missed a prime marketing opportunity when it opted for “Not just back, but better” as the slogan for its recovery from the 1994 earthquake.

“It seems it should have been, ‘Cal State Northridge: The epicenter of higher education,’ ” Felton joked.

In university culture, where each academic department tends to believe it is the anchor of the school’s reputation, coming up with a single phrase or image to promote figures to be tough. More than 400 people helped choose Mount Holyoke College’s second logo in five years, a stylized version of its name against a blue backdrop.

A press release describing the two-word graphic suggests the college had a lot riding on the design. It says the image reinforces the message that Mount Holyoke is “uniquely positioned to graduate independent critical thinkers who speak and write powerfully, who are technologically savvy, and who are distinguished by their ability to lead in a complex, pluralistic world,” and so on.

The difficulty in crafting a snappy slogan lies in describing something as multifarious as a university in a few words, said Robert Sevier, vice president and general manager of the marketing firm Stamats Communications.

A school may have an outstanding engineering curriculum as well as a renowned creative writing program. Which do you sell? Sevier asked.

He said broad changes in the student demographics and role of colleges is behind the dramatic increase in the number of schools engaged in aggressive marketing campaigns.

“Schools that served traditional students are now recruiting part-time students,” he said. “If they served white kids, they’re having to learn how to attract students of color. They’re pitching their messages to target markets who have never heard of them.”