Within the mother organization we have another organization which provides services for U.S. military members. The story that we communicate to these clients is a shared understanding of their sacrifice, hard work and their right to achieve their academic goals. In the sister campus, our brand promise is that whatever obligations and commitments they have to their country, work, family or bank accounts, there is a guaranteed way for them to complete their degrees. I believe that the brand narrative of our organization triggers what Whalen calls “felt sense” (Whalen, 2007) because our story is the accumulation of the narrative of many others who have walked the same path. For example, our military brochure has pull out cards with the names, pictures and biographies of some of our students. Here is an excerpt from a student from one of the pull out cards:
“I worried about being in a foreign country when I was supposed
to be sitting in a class. But once I
realized that (organization name) really does accommodate the military
lifestyle, I felt relieved. A lot of
colleges wouldn’t do that. There were
numerous instances where I was on the road while taking classes”.
Whalen
explains, “the felt sense feeling tells them that what you’re saying is the
truth” (2007, p. 10). So why is this? It is because you are narrating a real live
story of a real live person with the same kind of life experience.
I believe that our story promotes the goals and ideals of the
organization. I have been to many local
and non-local graduations as well as conferences where I have met many of my
fellow colleagues, directors, deans, and faculty and I feel that the
organization’s common story has permeated the culture of the organization and
its employees. Much of the success of
the storytelling is because most of us have direct contact with our
students. We see with our own eyes the
parallelism between the story that the organization conveys and the real life
characters who are our students. One of
our strongest marketing strategies is telling the stories of the men and women
who battled through their life situations to get their degrees. One of the ongoing marketing research
projects that we carry out involves student interviews. Our marketing group currently visits
different campuses worldwide and conducts
interviews with the local students.
These interviews are used to collect first hand ‘student stories’ to be
used as marketing strategies. Much of
our staff is also either ex-military, dependent, ex-dependent or has been
exposed enough to the military culture to empathize with the challenges of this
type of lifestyle. In essence, our
organization stands with the students through all their challenges because we
as an organization live them too.
References
Whalen, J. D. (2007). The professional communications toolkit. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
