We recently pinned home pages from 50 of the country’s top liberal arts college on a large work wall. Our motive? Learn something about story, content strategy and voice — favorite topics among Elliance creatives. Here is a confession — there’s nothing I avoid more than turning the art of writing on itself. Yes, I call writing art, not craft — because while you can teach all of the rules of composition, you can’t teach a great sentence, headline or billboard copy. Practice alone makes persuasion, especially in higher education branding. As for story, Elliance believes the essential building blocks of story as it applies to web site creation and higher education branding actually emerge earlier, at the site map stage. In my days writing for an award-winning university magazine, I worked alongside many fine MFA-holding writers and editors schooled in the finer points of narrative non-fiction. They talked about a writer’s motives and an article’s spine. My journalism training … Continue reading →

I attended a higher education branding session at the AMA/Higher Education conference a few years back led by Purdue University’s chief marketing officer, Teri Thompson and Elizabeth Scarborough, CEO/Partner
 at the well-known quantitative research firm Simpson/Scarborough. Toward the end of the productive hour that covered Purdue’s extensive investment in market research, staff re-structuring and process change, Elizabeth Scarborough acknowledged something profound. “Quantitative research will get you to the edge of the chasm,” she said, “but only inspiration will carry you across.” Despite these conference sessions and other consciousness-raising related to higher education branding, evidence seems lacking that colleges and universities have much of an appetite for finding their one strong-to-impenetrable differentiation or learning to speak their one true brand voice. Many stand poised at the edge of the chasm, unable or unwilling to cross. Could it be that we have lost the connection between inspiration and failure? In the high stakes game of institutional “buy-in,” are we prone to settling … Continue reading →