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University Marketing
 Rowan University featured in the Princeton Review's "The Best 301 Business Schools: 2010 Edition" | MoreRowan University 2007-08 Branding Campaign Branding StrategyThe current branding campaign is designed to establish the image (brand) of the University as a high-quality moderately priced alternative to the existing options currently available to New Jersey's students and a viable option to private colleges. The target audience should view Rowan University as a place to get an excellent education and associate these attributes with Rowan University: highly ranked by outside agencies, small class size, quality teaching, graduates get good jobs and reasonable price.
AudienceThe target for the campaign consists of two audiences: direct users and those who influence them. The audience for print and radio is “influentials”—highly educated, affluent adults, especially opinion leaders (business leaders, guidance counselors, teachers, elected officials and community leaders). We have found through our research that students think a college is good because someone whose opinion they respect tells them it is. High achievers tend to come from professional families whose parents have professional friends. Students often seek out these “friends” for college advice. It is important to have a strong image with this group. For direct users we employ search engines that are targeted to individuals who are actively searching for higher education opportunities, which improves the click-through rate. We chose this strategy rather than banner ads on Web sites because those ads are not targeted to particular users. Budget The current advertising budget is $170,000. To put this amount in perspective, our sister colleges and universities have advertising budgets ranging from $200,000 to $1 million. TacticsImage is best built through a combination of promotional tools, including media coverage, special events and advertising. Most experts agree that while advertising has its shortcomings, it is key to raising awareness and reinforcing a product’s message. Given the goals, the audience and budget, we adopted the following strategies: Magazine Ads We are running a series of ads in the NJEA Review, New Jersey Business and selected New Jersey zones of the Media Network (Time, Newsweek, Sport’s Illustrated and U.S. News & World Report). Because the budget is limited and the awareness of Rowan was very high in the immediate area, we decided to concentrate most of the ads on areas where the awareness was lower - Central and Northern New Jersey. We chose magazines because of the audience, the high reproduction quality, the prestige factor and the ability to include high information content. Radio Ads For the local market, we partnered with CPCE and ran ads on the local NPR stations—WHYY and NJN. These were chosen based on the audience and the nature of the programming. Accolades Ads For the next few months we will be running an ad campaign in the Philadelphia Inquirer that uses the accolades that Rowan University students, faculty and alumni receive throughout the year to brand the university to potential out-of-state students. These achievements will be used as supporting evidence of the strength of the University overall. Web Advertising We recently put resources into targeted Internet advertising with banner ads on USNews.com, Collegeboard.com and a key word search program on Google. ResultsWhile advertising is an effective method of getting a message out, so many variables contribute to the overall image of the University that there is no surefire way to test the effectiveness of the campaign. However, based on several metrics, Rowan’s image and awareness has improved over the last several years. For example:
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