Mastering the present, but keeping a keen eye for the future has kept Brian Miller on his toes for 13 years.
“We like to be on the edge, we really do. We want to be leading,” said Miller, creative director of Integrating Marketing Communications, Biola’s marketing division.
As overseer of Biola’s marketing content, Miller has witnessed an overhaul of his department since his Biola debut in the late 90s. Then, there were no Biola blogs to promote, nor were there Biola fan pages to maintain on MySpace or Facebook. In fact, it was not until three years after he arrived that Biola even had a Web site.
IMC has inflated with the growth of the university. To illustrate, Miller said when he arrived the department would do around 300 different promotional projects per year for departments around Biola — all of these forms of print marketing, such as mass mailings or magazine ads. Now it does around 3,000 of these projects, and the media are vast. Biola is appearing on video, on the radio, on YouTube, on Facebook, on Flickr and, yes, still in the mailbox.
Getting prospective students onto Biola’s Web site is now the principal ambition behind most of IMC’s marketing campaigns, Miller said. Magazine or mail ads often include unique codes that can be input on the Web site, telling IMC to which specific ad visitors to the site are responding. This allows IMC not only to measure the effectiveness of an ad, but also to tailor a Web page based on a person’s interests.
The new approach is to meet prospective students where they already are — in Miller’s terms, to “get in front of them.” This involves not only following trends and delving into well-established social networking sites, but also innovating, Miller said.
“Generally I prefer not to watch other universities and go, ‘Man I want to do what they’re doing,’ ” he said. “I tend to want to be different.”
“Different” for IMC has taken forms such as a video campus tour accessible from Biola’s Web site. Also, more recently, it means personalized sections of the site for prospective students who respond to the university’s mailed ads.
Future projects include using iTunes for chapels and other university videos and revamping the Biola Web site’s news section. IMC also has filed a request with Apple to make a Biola iPhone application, though Miller said a lack of resources is stalling the project.
Change rarely comes without resistance, however, and Irene Neller, senior director of IMC, has seen this play out firsthand in Biola’s ranks. While she said the administration seems content now, she admitted it wasn’t always so.
The idea of a “Biola brand,” a concept IMC began formulating four years ago, initially struck sour among some administrators, who thought it degrading to speak of a Christian institution in such corporate terms.
Indeed, Neller admitted that applying corporate terms to education has been resisted in many higher education circles — not just Christian. She defended the use of such language, however, saying higher education is its own kind of product, and schools must learn to differentiate themselves from their peer institutions.
Biola’s brand is something “solid” that defines what the university stands for, Neller said. The message is timeless, but the medium for communicating it should always be fluctuating. It’s important to always stay relevant to prospective students, she said, but Biola must be discerning in where it advertises.
“No, we’re not trying to take God out of the picture. This is just a practice of understanding psychologically where our consumers, where our students, are,” Neller said. “We always have to be very careful that we’re not commercializing Biola in any way.”
An awareness of the college-aged generation’s desire for “authenticity” has led IMC to take a more student-oriented approach to marketing, Neller said. Recent marketing and recruitment efforts, including “Biola Bloggers,” have featured students sharing their own feelings about Biola. The current “100%” campaign highlights how specific Biola students and alumni are spreading the gospel through their work, a core element of Biola’s brand, she said.
“We don’t want to paint something that’s not true,” she said. “If [a student’s] experience doesn’t match what we communicated to them that’s not right — that’s not ethical.”
IMC’s strides in Web development have earned Biola national recognition. In 2008 the university received a Webby award in the education category for its undergraduate Web site. Webby awards are considered among the highest honors for Internet enterprises. Universities such as Ball State and Notre Dame were among schools competing in the same category.
Biola also was chosen to host in June the annual communications conference for the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, an umbrella organization of over 100 Christian institutions of higher education, Neller said.
Mike Bower, a public relations professor who has run his own public relations company, commends IMC for staying relevant. He credits the department’s inclusion of “younger, hipper” employees for its ability to keep pace in the rapidly evolving marketing industry.
“It’s a changing world and an evolving world, and if you don’t keep pace, you miss the train,” Bower said.
Miller confessed that he is no techie, and learning new media has been a very gradual process for him. Adaptability, however, is at least one thing he has learned in his 13 years as creative director for IMC.
“I’ve learned that you just can’t stop investigating these things. You can’t stop pursuing it. It’s not like you can just say ‘OK, I’ve got it now,’ ” he said. “You have to be at least guessing what the trends are going to be in the future.”
He reminisced to earlier in his career, when the big push in university marketing was to send videos to students via CD-ROM. No one imagined the Web would be able to handle such a sizable media anytime soon, he said.
Needless to say, iPhone apps were also off the radar.
