BrandED

Tell Your Story, Build Relationships, and Empower Learning

Eric Sheninger, Trish Rubin

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781119244561
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119244578
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Praise for BrandED

"A great resource for educators who want to strengthen their connections with students, teachers, parents, and the wider community. These two innovative leaders don't just capture how to tell the story of a school—they show how to create it."
—Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take

"Every day in every one of your schools, great things happen. How does your community know? Schools that are Future Ready boldly engage their community to build relationships and empower both students and families. Powerful yet practical, BrandED is the perfect resource to help your school share its story with the world."
—Thomas C. Murray, Director of Innovation, Future Ready Schools

"Eric and Trish demystify what it means to brand one's school by providing eight compelling conversations that not only lead to a deeper understanding of branding, but provide relevant ways for school leaders to frame their work… . In the vast sea of information in which we currently reside, using the BrandED Leadership methods described in this book will help school leaders reach their audiences in ways that create trusting relationships and loyalty."
—Dwight Carter, Principal, New Albany High School

"Disruption is the new normal. And the great disruptors of our time are shaping the culture itself in innovative ways. Eric and Trish's book BrandED sends a very compelling message to school leaders that developing and executing a smart, innovative brand strategy can disrupt the best practices' conventions of the existing school system. Like great disruptive brands from Apple to Uber, educators now have the ability to get the community engaged and immersed in the school's brand equity—and BrandED provides the roadmap for getting there."
—Scott Kerr, Executive Director of Strategy and Insights, Time Inc.

A brand is built around three key elements: image, promise, and result. The power of a brand to communicate all three elements is undeniable, and in today's digitally connected, social society, schools and school districts have a lot to gain by developing and promoting their own brand identities. BrandED is the groundbreaking guidebook for educators who want to enhance communication with students, parents, and stakeholders to create a transparent record of value.

You know great achievements happen at your school. Unfortunately, many of those stories stop at the school doors. This hands-on guide from two rising stars in the education field, Eric Sheninger and Trish Rubin, empowers educators at all levels to take control of how the mission, values, and vision of their schools is communicated. An engaging collection of transformative conversations lead you to discover the opportunities and benefits of designing a brand for your school and sustaining a BrandED community to evangelize it. Even if you have no marketing experience, the easy-to-use framework takes you step by step through the nuances of spreading good news about your school and building relationships around those actions. Timesaving, practical advice prepares you to begin innovating at your school right away, and convenient tips and reflections at the end of each chapter make it easy to integrate the BrandED mindset and practices into your everyday routine. Become a driving force behind your school getting the recognition it deserves by:

• Branding yourself as your school's storyteller-in-chief and amplifier through a variety of traditional and digital tools and platforms
• Improving relationships with key stakeholders, developing strategic partnerships, and attracting more resources and opportunities
• Fostering a positive culture extending and influencing beyond the school grounds

BrandED is your one-stop resource for designing and sustaining your individual brand as a leader and the brand of your school or district. Join the conversation on Twitter using #brandEDU.

Conversation 1
From Brand to BrandED

Conversation 1 launches the journey to brandED. Leaders learn why the tenets of business brand and marketing, standards in the commercial marketplace, can be comfortably adapted in the 21st century to an educational framework. We will touch on a short history of business branding and understand the marketing discipline that shapes leaders' educational work. Readers learn about the foundational difference between business brand and the educator's adaptation, brandED, which focuses on communicating through showcasing, celebrating, and building powerful relationships that benefit the school community. Businesses focus their brand communication efforts on sales goals; a few select elements that commercial brands employ in brand campaigns can inform educators about reaching their own brandED goals. As educators, we can appreciate brand history as a starting point for our journey, but we keep the foundational difference in mind: This leadership mindset isn't about a bottom-line return. The goal of brandED is the sharing of clear and consistent messages that define our mission to educate our children.

In this ever-changing society, the most powerful and enduring brands are built from the heart. Their foundations are stronger because they are built with the strength of the human spirit, not an ad campaign.

—Howard Schultz, CEO, Starbucks

Part One: In Brand We Trust

The brand buzz is everywhere.

We live in a digital and social media world where everything and everyone is branded. What does brand mean? In order to move into brandED leadership, one must start at the beginning, with the word brand. Is there a “just right” definition of brand that can inform your own brandED professional leadership journey?

There are as many interpretations of the word brand as there are voices in the business community (Cohen, 2011a). A class of graduate marketing students can provide multiple versions of the meaning of brand. Those definitions might be pretty good ones because our Millennial generation gets the concept. One of the most interesting ideas about what brand is today comes from Marian Goodell, CEO of a distinctive nonprofit with a unique brand, the Burning Man Festival. Goodell claims that brand these days isn't just created, it's cocreated and celebrated by those who align with and promote its purpose and value (Solis, 2011ab). This description of a dedicated brand process is a rallying point for brandED educators, and a place to start our journey toward a collaborative, cocreated educational brand mission.

In the business world, the concept of brand is made up of three foundational business elements:

1. An image
2. A promise
3. A result

These descriptors fit into the selling proposition for products and services that are offered to the marketplace. For example, in the case of the growth of the Burning Man Festival brand (Solis, 2011b), the image of an accepting society offers a promise of an engaged, fair “gifting economy” and delivers the result of a self-reliant, creative, and fulfilling city that appears and disappears each year during the waning days of summer in a remote desert area. The loyal followers of this distinctive brand savor their experience and, year after year, show repeated brand loyalty to the festival, which is the goal of any provider of a product or service.

Educators are not selling a product or service. But brand is a fit for us in a modern, digital view of professional learning and progressive school thinking. This brand is made up of three foundational school elements:

1. An image
2. A promise
3. A result

The concepts of image, promise, and result can powerfully frame a school's brand-building communication effort, but with a distinct difference from the way these terms are used in the business world (see Figure 1.1). BrandED thinking around these terms is a frame for developing your own school story: The concepts of image, promise, and result create a frame on which to build a cohesive school brand communication presence, one that leads to stakeholder engagement that brings school improvement. In schools, brand is a personification of a community. A strategically marketed brand message about the valuable work of the school is now a necessity for effective school leadership in our digital world because educators now live in a world of increasing school choice options for parents. Offering a strong institutional persona across various channels through a clear brand presence is not an option in our age of visibility. “Define before being defined” is part of the leadership agenda of visibility in a digital and social age.

Figure 1.1 Brand and BrandED Tenets Contrasted

TODAY'S ICONS

Brand is about visibility. Companies spend millions of dollars to get the attention needed to secure the consumer buy. There is a science to achieving that moment of brand victory, the winning over of the audience, that is focused on the first seconds of recognizing a brand, known as the FMOT, the “first moment of truth” (originally coined by Proctor & Gamble). It's the traditional face-to-face decision buyers make that leads to a product purchase (Armstrong & Kotler, 2015). As many of us know from our own buying habits, brand is a powerful part of connecting us to the products and services we love to purchase. It's the repeated exchange that leads to loyalty. Brand use is part of our daily rituals.

As more and more decisions are made online, the FMOT has now morphed into the ZMOT, the zero moment of truth (a term coined by Google in 2011). This is human decision making on steroids. In spite of powerful data platforms and algorithms, it's often anybody's guess when, where, and why “we the people” will buy. In today's exchange, the consumer has the power. In a global competition for the heart, mind, and wallet of customers, there are big winners who know how to woo and win fans. The brand champions affect us in our day-to-day lives—and the communities we lead. Think about how image, promise, and result got these iconic brands to the top in 2016. Each brand lives a powerful, clear image; makes a relevant and genuine promise; and dedicates itself to continued tangible result that keeps an audience loyal (Interbrand, 2016):

1. Apple
2. Google
3. Coca-Cola
4. Microsoft
5. Toyota
6. IBM
7. Samsung
8. Amazon
9. Mercedes-Benz
10. GE

In the “always open for business” world of online content marketing, these powerhouses are never more than a connecting click or a pop-up away on our devices. We face the deluge of visual content around these and thousands of other brands in daily life. Simon Clift, former chief marketing officer of Unilever, a powerful, iconic global company, believes that brands, even billion-dollar brands at the highest level of success, know they aren't just about what we see. Clift believes brand to be a contract between a company and consumers (De Swaan Arons, 2011). Every brand on this top 10 list knows about turning an exchange into customer loyalty. Clift's thinking about a contract implies the feeling of trust that exists in any exchange with the consumer. This same feeling should resonate with educators because schools also work to make contracts with their stakeholders that are built on exchanges leading to trust and loyalty.

Now, equating business brand with trust is a relatively new concept. The traditional world of business sales evokes a classic negative image when it comes to trustworthiness. Schools today struggle with trust issues as well and need to adapt as business has done. How did things change for business? Today's world of sales is now different because of “positioning”: the perception of a brand as unique and set apart from the competition. Positioning a product on the basis of consumer trust didn't emerge in the marketplace until the middle of the last century. Suddenly, products needed to become more than things if they were to compete for the buy. Products needed personality. They needed to be unique and different. They needed to have a story.

Products that created stories and connected with their customers through those tales were on the way to becoming trusted “brands.” Digging into brand history is the first step in making brand a part of our own educational brand development.

A SHORT BRAND HISTORY FOR BRANDED EDUCATORS

Go back a hundred years or so when all that it took to sell was to make something of good quality, package it cleanly, and offer it to people with a folksy sales pitch. Saying that your product was “the best soap” or “the best salt” got it sold. But brand has been developing on the fast track since that time.

Long before the early 20th century, clever humans were branding. Product leaders like Morton Salt and Quaker Oats heralded the birth of mass brand presence, complete with simple but powerful icons that are still around today in the modern grocery aisle. These time-tested iconic brands share the stage today with the top 100 brands of 2016 (Interbrand, 2016), including both present-day heavy hitters like BMW, Disney, and the NFL, and newcomers like Uber. All these brands have their loyal followings, but the Pillsbury Doughboy and other time-tested brands are different. They still pack a historical and emotional punch for modern customers: We trust them.

In the 1960s, brand moved beyond simple packaging. Madison Avenue executives (think Mad Men) created product “personalities.” The Marlboro Man and Maytag Repairman began to build relationships with the consumer through the new “social media” driver of the day: the color television. Innovative communication and a new way of telling product stories gave birth to the science of brand building and the need for brand management. The golden era of TV and print advertising pushed the growth of brands that delivered new services and products to consumers, who “liked” them way before a social media thumbs-up appeared. Madison Avenue boldly tackled social issues and created campaigns to unify 1960s society, such as the Pepsi Generation campaign. Creatives successfully sold tiny Volkswagens in a time of big sedans (some with tail fins!), succeeding with a counterintuitive campaign that called the VW Beetle what most people thought it was: ugly (“History: 1960s,” 2003).

Today, brand experience—the powerful concept that advances lasting emotional connection with a consumer—shapes our personal buying habits, and in this world, customer engagement through brand experience is king. Creating an experience is a continuing challenge for any brand because of today's competition. How can brands continue to keep the attention of their audience? How can a brand position itself, offer an experience, and be noticed amid all the noise? The concept of “story” is a big part of brand experience. The successful brands of today are masters of storytelling. A brand's narrative power in the exchange with its loyal fans separates the winners from the losers. Once in possession of a unique, authentic story that distinguishes it from the competition, the successful brand grows through its consistent, targeted, deliberate messaging. This is as true for classic brands like Coca-Cola as it is for newer players like Google. Each has a story that explains its reason for existence, and each brand tells the story in compelling ways to attract and keep attention.

Connecting through a unique, emotional story is why Nordstrom's department store soars as JC Penney continues to underperform. The narrative of a successful company is consistent and continually refreshed in exchange with a new social community of fans who want their own distinct stories to be heard. Today's consumers want to belong to the community. Top brands are not shouting at the consumer as they were in the heyday of advertising. They are listening and acting on what they hear, making the story fresh and relevant across many communication landscapes. The McDonald's golden arches logo is known in 119 countries, and its successful “I'm Lovin' It” slogan is a differentiator in the fast-food world on a global scale. The success of the company's I'm Lovin' It campaign is based on the connection the brand makes across cultures as it reaches diverse audiences with a simple shared message. McDonald's integrates its brand message from Japan to Brazil to London through shared human stories, which become the key to satisfying fast-food “wants and behaviors” in any culture. (Kotler & Armstrong, 1996). This brand has ranked consistently on Interbrand's list of top global brands. Mc Donald's gets there by telling its story of the brand in traditional and new-age media messages to children and parents that promote McDonald's consistent, affordable, and reliable delivery of a fast-food product. The company now shows its connection to the changing tastes of its community by expanding its offer to a more health-minded consumer. Millennial parents who played in the McDona...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the Authors
• Introduction: Our BrandED Short Story
• Conversation 1: From Brand to BrandED
• Conversation 2: In the Zone for BrandED Innovation
• Conversation 3: Developing a BrandED Leadership Presence
• Conversation 4: Developing Your BrandED Strategic Plan
• Conversation 5: Sustaining BrandED Innovation
• Conversation 6: Communicating With BrandED Leadership Tools
• Conversation 7: Keeping Up With the Digital Joneses
• Conversation 8: Return on Investment in the BrandED School Community
• Appendix A: Developing a Mission Statement
• Appendix B: Crafting Positioning Statements
• Appendix C: Stewardship Model of BrandED Development
• Appendix D: Suggested BrandED Digital Tools
• Appendix E: Media Advisory Template
• Appendix F: A BrandED Leadership Timeline
• Appendix G: Online Marketing and Brand Resources for Educator BrandED Adaptation
• Glossary
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• End User License Agreement