Recently, USA Today reported on “Turkey Drop” when freshmen come home at Thanksgiving and express a desire to transfer to another college.

The article explains that the main reason for a student’s desire to transfer is a lack of belonging and provides some advice to parents (We all know it’s also due to their tightly wound and closely connected relationship with their helicopter parents).

But, this really comes down to a domino effect due to a lack of authenticity.

-Schools not being authentic about who they are, what their culture is like, and who is the best-fit student.

-Students not being authentic to themselves about what type of environment, culture, and setting they really want for their college experience.

-Parents not being authentic about the best type of college for their precious Millennial. (It might be a small, lesser-known college instead of the super-ranked or well-known brand name institution.)

Again, the root of the Turkey Drop desire to transfer is the student’s lack of belonging. College is an intimate product choice; you live there, sleep there, eat there, have body functions there, are naked there (might be naked with someone else there), get sick there, and make friends and enemies there. As one university president said, “You’re buying into a culture, ask yourself what culture you’ll best fit.” Or as I counsel my friends’ college-seeking teens, “You’ll get a good education wherever you make an effort.  You need to ask yourself with whom do I want to shower!”

Brands are mirrors and the schools that I’ve encountered that are confidently rendering who they are and who their best-fit students are (and aren’t) have emerged as leaders in recruiting and retaining students in record numbers during these challenging times.

If you need a lesson or inspiration on authenticity, take some time during the holidays to read the book Authenticity by our friends Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore. (There is a reason it’s listed by Time Magazine as one of the 10 Ideas That Are Changing the World.)

Embracing authenticity can change your campus.

Don’t be a turkey - keep it real.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Jeff Kallay
Apostle of Authenticity a.k.a Experience Evangelist

So let’s connect some experience economy dots and make them all relevant to your campus visit programs.

Disney to finally make their Disney Stores an “Experience”
Disney Stores have never really matched the Disney Magic. They’re just stores. Passive buying. Not an experience and not at all reminiscent of a Disney park.

As reported in the New York Times:

“The world does not need another place to sell Disney merchandise — this only works if it’s an experience,” said Jim Fielding, president of Disney Stores Worldwide. The company plans to unveil the new look in May in Southern California, Long Island and Madrid, and is close to signing a lease for that Times Square flagship.

Theaters will allow children to watch film clips of their own selection, participate in karaoke contests or chat live with Disney Channel stars via satellite. Computer chips embedded in packaging will activate hidden features. Walk by a “magic mirror” while holding a Princess tiara, for instance, and Cinderella might appear and say something to you.

It’s your birthday? With the push of a button, eight 13-foot-tall Lucite trees will crackle with video-projected fireworks and sound. There will be a scent component; if a clip from Disney’s coming “A Christmas Carol” is playing in the theater, the whole store might suddenly be made to smell like a Christmas tree.”

Disney will seek help from Steve Jobs and the folks at the Apple Store and spend about $1 million per store renovation.

Lesson: Welcome to the experience economy!
So many campus tours are like the old Disney Stores–They don’t represent the dynamic student experience. They’re just passive death marches of “look at our buildings.” Invest and reinvent your campus visit. The college experience is the ultimate in the experience economy but campus tours don’t incorporate experience economy principles and they should.

Speaking of Apple and it’s popular iPhone…
An entreprenueral student at Yale University has developed an app for the campus tour, uTourX, which will allow for student and student groups to create specific tours unique to their point of view.

As the Yale Daily News reports:

“Yale tour guides, beware: A new iPhone application is vying to take your place.”

“All the tour guides will have an incentive to tell people to buy their tour, because they will get a cut of the profit every time it is downloaded,” Uhlenhuth said.

Uhlenhuth said he hopes to eventually be able to provide a variety of tours for each school. He suggested the “ADPhi Drunken Stumble” and the “Whiffenpoofs Guide to Yale” as tours he’d like to see on campus.”

And tour guides should be aware. Prospective families are craving authenticity and real. They are visiting campuses to find out if it’s a good fit for them. And they’ll be happy to incorporate an iPhone App if it presents campuses from an honest student point of view(s).

Lesson one: Keep it real and authentic. Ditch the spin and the tightly scripted best buildings, grass is always green campus tour.
If you don’t stage a campus visit that is authentic and real your audience will find you ordinary and bland. Millennials cherish and celebrate imperfections and they want a school that is comfortable to do the same. If you don’t show your real school and answer questions honestly, your audience will go around you (think Campus Dirt, Rate My Professor and countless other online resources) to find it. And now “there’s an app for that” when it comes to the campus tour.

iPhones, smartphones and AR - Augmented Reality (soon to be part of the campus visit)
The future is mobile marketing. Countless companies are creating applications and mobile/location based programs that enhance the in-person, in-place experience. It’s called Augmented Reality or AR and basically it layers data on top of iPhone and other smartphones. Some techies predict that “Augmented reality is going to be huge. It might even be big as the web.”

Read more about it in Fast Company Magazine, High Ed Web Marketing Blog and the Adweek Mobile Marketing Guide. It’s going to change marketing and move it all towards location based. Which means more customization and personalization.

From the AdAge Mobile Marketing Guide:

“To understand why people are so excited, look at the impact other digital innovations have had. Search, for example, solved a big part of the “what” problem — helping you find what you’re looking for. And while search didn’t know much about our social filters, social networking came in and offered up a “who” filter. Now we’re looking at the “where.” And it’s the combination of these filters that have the potential to change consumer and marketer behavior.”

“Everybody’s got a website, but nobody has a mobile experience right now,” he said. “Next year, probably the end of next year, if you pull your phone out and you’re in the Hilton hotel and it doesn’t tell you information about the Hilton, either your phone is broken or the Hilton’s broken. If you, as a business, own a location, you’ve got an interesting shot at reaching your customer.”

Lesson: We all want what we want when we want it. Embrace the iPhone and other smart phones to help add customization and personalization to your campus visit experiences.
They are a great way to stage a robust self-guided tour or to enhance your main visit experience with elements of customization. After your information session and main tour, have computers where prospectives can download self-guided tours of things they are interested in; academics and extracurricular.  Start with simple Mp3 or iTunes downloads from computers in your admissions office and then expand to more robust AR using data, images, video and more.

1. Your campus visit should be an engaging experience.

2. You can enhance that experience with location based tools and AR.

3. But remember, no technology can replace honest human interaction and dialogue. It only enhances it. So that’s why your tour guides/ambassadors should be free to be themselves and free to be conversationalists not scripted tourbots.

It’s all about the experience!

Chances are you’ve read about the Alfred University Campus Tour Conference Bike in various higher education press resources or in my colleague Ray Ulmer’s Recruitment Minute.

But let me give you the inside story.

Alfred University and their Director of Marketing, Jodi Bailey, are the kind of clients all services providers love to work with. They embrace change (even though they face internal hurdles) and are fun to work with.

Back in the winter of 2008 when I first toured Alfred’s beautiful mountainside campus in Western New York, I told them, “Your admissions office in Alumni Hall is on one far end of campus, and you’re walking tours about the full length (about 1/2 mile) to the other end campus and back. It’s a death march. And we’re not seeing all of campus including fitness center and the Village of Alfred which is part of the student experience.” So I recommended a walking/riding hybrid. Soon they purchased and decorated a van with student designed graphics and now they walk guests and then pick them up driving them to fitness center, through the village and back to admissions. Guest comment with many thanks. (Successful implementation of idea and embrace of change.)

So this late August I was back at Alfred conducting tour guide training. In the brainstorming portion I asked the tour guides, “If time or money wasn’t a barrier, how would you improve the visit experience?” Amongst the many great ideas, one student said, “Well bikes are big on campus and we’ve a loaner bike program, we should offer a bike tour.”  I showed them the conference bike video and they were hooked. They said, “That’s so Alfred!” “We should get one!” “It’s real to us, Alfred’s all about the community.” So in the wrap up meeting Jodi and I the presented the idea to Wendy Beckemeyer, VP of Enrollment and she confidently said, “Make it happen.” (Maybe it was the success with the van riding/walking tour that prompted the approval?)

So less then two months later Trent Gilbert TargetX’s Experience Evaluator and I were at Alfred this past week on a lovely fall day for the inaugural run of their bike! That’s how fast it happened from idea, to procurement, to figuring out route and logistics to planning a launch event complete with photo opps, more videos and a dedication run with the bike driven by Alfred’s President, Dr. Charlie Edmonson. Alfred’s enrollment folks don’t just talk about change - they make it happen.

The morning of the dedication, Jodi and the admissions crew picked Trent and me up at the Saxon Inn and took the bike on the designated route. It’s fun! Riding the bike makes you smile. Along the way, we picked up a faculty member and two students one from China and another from Tennessee. (If there is a seat on the optional bike tour, the community is encouraged to hop on and peddle about with prospective families.) The student from Tennessee said, “This is so communal.” That’s what the bike is all about and that’s why it’s so authentic to Alfred.

So now every Friday and Monday prospective parents and students have the option to enhance their regular walking tour with a conference bike one. They’ll sit in a circle, chat with each other and peddle they’re way across Alfred’s scenic campus.

On launch day a visiting family was the first prospective family to ride the bike, Logan, an AlFriends Tour Guide who was on this first prospective family bike tour wrote me an email that said, “We laughed the whole way.” (When you ride the bike you just smile.) Prospective students who ride get a “I Toured Hard” t-shirt and families sign a special bike guest registry. (In the brainstorming session Logan came up with the “Tour Hard” theme.”)

Alfred’s conference bike is communal, quarky and fun. And it’s “Very Alfred.” It’s united and excited the student tour guides and is a experience families will remember. It’s also a lesson in authenticity and embracing change.

Well done Alfred!

Last week some 125+ Admissions VP’s, Deans, Directors and Senior Associates gathered at TargetX’s second annual iThink during NACAC in Baltimore.  Last year’s event was held at the Seattle Public Library’s Washington Mutual Foundation Room (the day WaMu was “Seized and Sold!” as the city’s newspaper headline proclaimed).

This year’s venue was the historic Oriole Park at Camden Yards.  The setting itself was a lesson on change. Once an industrial powerhouse, Baltimore lost 100,000 manufacturing jobs. Now it is a $5 billion dollar a year tourist destination, and its three “firsts” of the Inner Harbor Festival Marketplace, National Aquarium, and retro/heritage ball park have become the standard blueprint for other cities to copy as they try urban renewal.

Four of higher education’s thought leaders: Kathy Kurz of Scannell & Kurz, Bill Royall of Royal & Company, Bob Sevier of Stamats, and Brian Niles of TargetX, each gave their “declaration” followed by questions and discussions led by yours truly as moderator.

The challenge was to keep the event from turning into a huge gripe session about the economy and its impact on admissions. Our goal instead was to focus on the future of both admissions and enrollment marketing in the midst of economic turmoil (and what colleges can do about it).

Sure, a changing economic landscape could be a crisis — but it’s also an opportunity. What is that opportunity? Some said, “Be authentic to who you are!” “Articulate value!” “Don’t discount the residential experience!” “Educate the entire campus to recruit” and “Leadership isn’t about getting the team on the same bus, it’s getting them in a rowing/crew scull and getting them to work together!”

There was also intense conversation about the best practices used by proprietary schools (things like quick turnaround of applicants to admits and faster responses to inquiries).  Of course, the comment “Admissions is sales” caused a stir as well. But all agreed that financial aid and career services (outcomes) need to have stronger relationships with admissions.

At the end, each participant was asked, “Based upon our discussion today, what’s one thing you’re not doing today that you can implement or change in the office tomorrow?”

At the end of the two-hour discussion, the annual TargetX “X Awards” were given to Christopher Lydon from Providence College and to California Lutheran University for embracing change and for representing the TargetX motto of “Overthrowing Dead Culture.”

After all, change is what the iThink discussion is all about.

On the flight home from Baltimore, I was reading the September 28 BusinessWeek and found two articles relevant to the iThink discussions about authenticity and change. I hope they get you thinking:

The Great Trust Offensive
Companies are revamping their marketing to earn your trust
“Consumers are telling companies in a thousand ways, that ‘if you aren’t open with me, then I won’t trust you.’ It gets to be counterproductive to fight that.” Randall Beard, former CMO at UBS

UPMC The “New Steel” in Pittsburgh
“Eds and Meds” revitalize the city’s economy
“Pittsburgh offers lessons for other communities. Its leaders didn’t spend a lot of energy trying to save troubled steel companies, suggesting it may be more valuable to look at new opportunities than old standbys. The city’s experience also shows that persistence with new ventures is critical.”

Keep thinking! And remember, as my colleague Adrienne Bartlett says, “The Mandarin symbol for change incorporates both the symbols for opportunity and crisis.”

Under which one is your school and its leadership operating?

While the goal of the experience economy is to make advertising obsolete (it’s going that way) I am a fan of great advertising - that which sells products or services and makes emotional connections.

Click this link to cast your vote for your favorite advertising icon and slogan to be inducted to the Advertising Walk of Fame on Madison Avenue.

Since August 19 Trent Gilbert, TargetX’s Experience Evaluator and I have been on some 18 client campuses. And while many of our clients are really staging great experiences it’s important to remember and review the basics.

1. Take a tour - all admissions staffers must take a current campus tour

2. Get in sync - admissions and student guides need to know what each other are saying and not repeat it. Admissions should handle stats, programs and processes and students should tell their stories. Here’s a chart we’ve created to help you understand this:

3. Set the Expectation - you’ve got to set the expectation (time for each segment and such) on your website, in confirmation and again when the family arrives on your campus. Tell them what their time on campus will hold.

Nobody likes being lost - so train tour guides to set the expectation of the route using a campus map on the wall, in your folder, in a handout on as the last slide on your info-session. Tours just begin. It’s critical to tell families what they will see and explain the route. Meaning, don’t just begin walking. I was just at the University of Tampa and they started doing it based upon Trent’s recommendation and the students are reporting that it’s time well spent and really makes for a better tour. You’ve got maps - use them!

4. Turn off the tourbots - no scripts, students should be telling their stories not repeating a litany of facts!

5. Have fun!

6. Watch our “Five Fixes for the Fall - Free on Friday Webcast”
Recorded on Friday, August 7, this 1/2 hour webcast features Trent and I explaining quick fixes for this fall. It’s Free to watch and only requires 1/2 hour of your time. (Nearly 500 schools watched and you should too!)

Click this link to watch the free webcast recording and slide presentation
Password: byebyebye (you’ll get the joke when you watch)

Remember the basics matter!

One of the best parts of my job is visiting college campuses and college towns.

MSN Travel recently listed their best 13 College Towns and I agree with most - I have been to all but Boulder, CO.

Some are expected; Boston, Athens and Austin.  And some might surprise you; San Diego and Seattle.

Check out the slideshow by clicking this link.

Thanks to Gerri Kallay, my very cool and very well traveled Aunt, for sending me this link.

Seems like National Taiwan University has developed a robot to conduct tours. Yes, an actual “Tourbot!”

As reported in PC World, The Wired Campus and more, the “Tourbot” named Hsiao Mei;

“…also uses CCDs (charge-coupled device), which are electronic light sensors used in digital cameras, in its eyes to determine where people are so it can raise or lower its head in response to the height of a person and speak more directly to them.

The students also put mechanics inside the robots head to create facial expressions ranging from happy and surprised to sad and angry.

The robot is around three feet tall and moves around on wheels. An LCD touchscreen on its back shows the maps the robot has made and can display other data as well.

The robot was finished last year at a cost of NT$300,000 (US$9,100)…”

Only $9000 for a tour guide that shows up, reads body language and is interactive.

Now the question we’re all wondering does it walk forwards with the group or backwards? (But either way it won’t loose a flip flop!)

Seriously, all the more reason why students should be empowered to tell stories, ask opened questions and be human - real and authentic - not scripted tourbots!

Thanks to Jennifer McKenzie of Hendrix College for sending me this story.

Planes are my library. They are where I do my reading. And since I’ll be visiting some 18 campus visit consult clients between this week and NACAC you might expect to see a fair amount of posts sharing my thoughts and observations.

“It’s not marketing, research, consultants, it’s just the experience.”
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz on their plans to refresh and renew their experience.
From the 8/3 Businessweek

From a August 2009 Fast Company article about Hot Topic - a $763 million dollar retailer that teens with apparel, music and more. (And does so without any advertising!) “The chain’s target demographic is notoriously fickle and hyperalert for any whiff of the inauthentic.” and “It doesn’t feel forced.”

“Up and Coming”
While I’m not a big fan of the USN&WR rankings, I do find their “Up and Coming” category fun and of note. Congrats to the many TargetX clients listed including our very first XAward Winner (2007) Hendrix College who earned the #1 National Liberal Arts Up and Coming spot! Kudos to other campus visit consult clients who are listed in their category Up and Coming lists; The Ohio State University, University of North Texas, Agnes Scott College, Furman University, Bellarmine University, Kennesaw State University, University of Tampa, Lipscomb University, Winthrop University, and St. Edward’s University.

Chances are many of you have already read Jacques Steinberg’s insightful article in the New York Times about the campus tour and his companion posting on his The Choice Blog. Both highlight the successes of Hendrix College’s program and tell of the concept of not walking backwards and training student guides to walk forwards. Join the debate and post your comments on The Choice.

For years the walking backwards issue has been a soapbox of mine. I talk about it at every presentation, with clients and when working with their tour guides. Forwards, backwards, on stilts or rollerblades — as long as tour guides are being genuine students, telling great stories and rendering an authentic sense of their campus, we should all be happy.

I’ve taken hundreds of tours and it’s stressful to watch a tour guide walk backwards. Will they fall? Will they hit a sign or tree limb? And it keeps the eyes focused mainly on the tour guide, not on your campus. It also doesn’t promote dialogue with the tour guide or within the group of prospective families. Tour guides tell me that when they have more than 15 guests its hard for them to be heard, regardless of which direction they walk. You have to set your student guides up for success. If your school has record numbers of visitors, hire and train more tour guides to keep the tour guide to guest ratio low. The largest school in the country, The Ohio State University, insures that it’s one tour guide per 15 guests. This represents their student-teacher ratio and debunks the myth that at OSU you’re a number when in fact you’re a name.

It’s easy to walk backwards. But as a VP, dean or director or as someone in charge of your campus tour, you just can’t make an overall decree that “Tour Guides are not to walk backwards.” You have to work harder at the reasons why and train your ambassadors or tour guides beyond just not walking backwards.

Here are the “steps” you should be training them on:

-set the expectation before the tour (explain the route, time and such),

-when possible, walk with the group directing them to their next stop,

-stop and gather up the group and talk en masse and move on,

-and, while walking, they should attempt to engage each family one-on-one along the way.

It’s a well-honed skill to learn. It isn’t easy, but it makes for a great experience for your guests. Many schools like UT Austin, OSU, WVU, Albright, Trinity, KSU, UNT, CalLu, Hendrix, Ursuline, Baldwin-Wallace, Albion, Delaware, and so many others have realized that it’s not about herding cattle but about having conversations.

Don’t take the walking backwards literally. But know that walking backwards often is the symptom of what we need to improve in all admissions marketing efforts. It symbolizes a mass marketing monologue, talking at instead of talking with, and a mandated script  and route that may show the newest and sexiest buildings on campus but doesn’t reveal the authentic soul of a campus.

Walk on!