Shelly and I cut our teeth at Texas Wesleyan University, where we worked on that university’s award-winning Smaller. Smarter. campaign. This year we’re celebrating 10 years of Smaller. Smarter. We thought it was a good time to dissect what made the university’s brand so successful this past decade.

As we reviewed each step in the process, I am more convinced than ever that marketing and communications VPs must become educator/advocates who train everyone to deliver their university’s brand promise. These leaders must communicate not just that marketing is everyone’s job. They must also communicate the ways in which marketing is everyone’s job. How can we do it? How does it all connect?

And, at the end of the day, good creative will only take you so far. Bold and budgeted resource management can help your brand to own its space – even if resources are limited.

Problem

Texas Wesleyan University is a small, private university located in Fort Worth’s Polytechnic Heights neighborhood. The university is well-loved by a small but fervent community, but nine of its 10 competitors are large, comprehensive universities priced affordably. Private universities with proud football legacies, like TCU in the city’s University Place neighborhood, outspend Texas Wesleyan’s in every category. How does a private liberal arts school grow enrollment with a limited budget, limited programming and big competitors casting a large shadow?

Approach

Know your market

The Dallas-Fort Worth media market is one of the nation’s largest. It currently ranks as the No. 5 Nielsen media market. Major university brands in the area include the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of North Texas, Southern Methodist University, Texas Christian University, Dallas Baptist University, University of Texas – Dallas, Texas Woman’s University and Tarleton State University. State brands like University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, Texas Tech University and Baylor also have a major recruiting presence in the region. These are truly some of the most media-savvy and heavily recruited students in the nation.

The most common rising first-year student is a Texas public school graduate. They are Hispanic and, most likely, identify as female. They work one to two jobs – including in retail food service and hourly jobs like Amazon fulfillment. They often pursue health, education and business degrees, as well as criminal justice degrees.

Just as likely to attend is an adult student. This person may resemble the rising first-year student, but is closer to Texas Wesleyan’s average student age, which ranges from 25 to 27. This student already has a career and a family but does not have a four-year or graduate degree that will allow them to rise above their peers and earn more money. They are heavy commuters. Most Dallas-Fort Worth residents leave their home and travel to another city or town to work. Average commutes are close to 25 minutes, but often are much longer.

These large competitor universities often launch national advertising campaigns that show their role in driving the local economy. Texas Wesleyan had done little marketing before 2012-2013 and had previously used taglines including “A special place for special people” and “Get a new degree of confidence.”

Know your student

Texas Wesleyan could not avoid its small size because it could not equal the reach or budget of its elite and large neighbors. This meant Texas Wesleyan needed to understand and embrace its own personal strengths to identify its audience in a large, competitive market. Some professors fretted over the connotations of being “small,” worrying the conversational branding would cost the institution students. However, it was agreed that retaining the right students was more important than casting the widest net possible.

Who was the right-fit Texas Wesleyan student? Research from Stamats and Noel Levitz offered clues. The students were bright and talented, and often attended large Dallas-Fort Worth high schools. These skilled students were used to fighting for a limited number of spots. They were motivated workers. They commuted but were also very community minded. They were digital natives who understood media and could consume it in a sophisticated, user-friendly way. They were usually not the elite students in these large schools.

These students were looking for a someone to invest in them. Cost – perhaps a better word is value – was never far from their mind. Most students were new to the world of scholarships, grants and loans and, if they were first-generation college students, were also explaining the process to parents. They wanted to know that they would get quality time with professors that could help them learn and get jobs. They valued trust and relationships and appreciated a little extra time to understand the ways of higher ed.

 As we continued in our research process, our empathy for the students we were recruiting only deepened. We understood that time and money were incredibly important resources to our students. We saw our shared identity and felt comfortable not only growing our brand to meet these students – confident that market demand was there in Dallas-Fort Worth – but to truly own the idea that these students were among the most important to the metroplex because of their courage, intelligence and skills.

Test your message

We felt confident cutting through the noise and speaking directly to our audience in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. To do that, we cut the corny photos and videos of students studying under trees and tipping beakers in lab class. We had a limited budget and opportunity to get noticed. Simple, block text with strong brand colors ruled the look and feel.

This decision meant the messages would have to stand on their own – that meant they needed to be tested extensively. Funny is hard – you don’t get to explain your punchline to the audience because they are busy flipping channels or hurtling down I-30 at 90 mph. We regularly drafted dozens, sometimes hundreds of messages, only to pare back the best with an internal- and external-user testing process that included focus groups and informal surveys.

Testing made a subtle but important tweak to our message. First, it cut the corny puns and trendy slang we thought would perform well. Instead, it revealed simple messages that both set up the problem – schools are big, industrial nightmares – and the solution – you will feel accepted and succeed at Texas Wesleyan.

Over time, we boiled that message into a basic brand promise, “You will thrive here.” We were explicit about this promise. While we did share it publicly at times, we focused on working with team members who could best help us make that promise a reality for students.

Be bold and own your space

Great creative is not enough to drive enrollment at colleges and universities. The budget must be managed boldly – but tightly – to ensure that creative reaches its intended audience and makes its maximum impact. Owning our space began with our bold, catchy creative – simple ideas that brought a punk rock edge to boring higher ed advertising – but the battle was truly won and lost in making powerful media buys.

Dallas-Fort Worth has a large footprint amid the Blackland Prairie of North Texas. It is as much a system of highways as it is a collection of cities. This meant our broadcast efforts, particularly on cable and broadcast television, were important, especially when bought strategically to coincide with Dallas-Fort Worth’s morning routine. Likewise, more than 35 billboards reinforced the message along our audience’s commute. Digital and over-the-top advertising, where audiences can be highly segmented, became an important addition to the marketing mix and it drives conversions – applications, visits and enrollments, as well as requests for information.

Owning these spaces meant saying “no” to many other spaces. We cut print advertising except for in key PR seasons. Specialty magazines and one-off advertising projects decreased as we worked with partners to deliver the promise through web training and other brand resources. We embraced the idea that “real position requires sacrifice.”

Building this culture remains a continual process at Texas Wesleyan, as it does at other institutions. But the simplicity and focus of the campaign allowed the small university to own its strengths and help evolve the brand. We held regular education sessions and elicited feedback from our audience in a way that helped them understand their role in the brand.  

Train your campus

“Deliver the promise” became an important mantra for our internal marketing and communications teams as we helped our community develop new digital skills, helped them improve their social media performance and, most importantly, by finding and sharing the stories that proved our point that smaller in fact was smarter.

Over time we organized these efforts into a curriculum called “Living Smaller. Smarter.” Each team member agreed to become an expert in a key area in their field and help train our community in it. The collective impact of these efforts was something like a Brand University on our campus.

We also recruited key allies in our efforts – first, the university president, who was a savvy communicator with a good understanding of marketing’s value. With the help of his megaphone, we were able to recruit other key strategic partners – first admissions, then advancement and, slowly but surely, our academic community. At times this meant holding listening sessions so opinions could be shared, rumors addressed or ideas floated. We saw ourselves as information conductors with a responsibility to model the behavior we were promoting through our marketing messages.

Buy-in is often uneven and solving one problem seems to only unlock more issues to manage. These could seem complex and miniscule – like timing financial aid and scholarship information – but were just as important as having a great headline in our overall success. The anxious, “magic bullet” method of advertising began to give way to an integrated brand management system that helped explore new markets, position new programs, and drive the overall awareness and perception of Texas Wesleyan University.

Results

Texas Wesleyan’s Smaller. Smarter. campaign is celebrating its 10th season in the Dallas-Fort Worth market. This year, the institution also celebrated its largest first-year class in history, and it has expanded the brand framework into targeted campaigns for graduate and online programs.

The campaign immediately moved the needle. The institution received about 900 first-year applications before 2012. The number jumped to more than 5,000 after Smaller. Smarter. launched. These initial campaigns look dated today – MTV-style montage cuts with punchy music – but they were effective in announcing that Texas Wesleyan was a different kind of small, liberal arts university.

The campaign was retooled with the help of Dallas agency Firehouse in 2015. These ads, which included cute dogs and cats in a way that foretold the TikTok era of quick, human video cuts, became instant classics in the Dallas-Fort Worth market and helped cement the university in a generation of students who grew up watching these ads.

Rather than rethinking its entire brand, the university has smartly evolved it over time, making tweaks and changes that preserve its overall message and voice while staying true to the times. This data-driven approach has helped the university grow its awareness and perception from a “bottom-of-the-pack” position to a competitive spot in the middle amid peers like Dallas Baptist University.

The Smaller. Smarter. brand claims more than 100 marketing and communications awards at nearly every level of competition. The university successfully completed its 2020 Vision strategic plan and launched Engage 2025, its new plan, amid the COVID pandemic. Texas Wesleyan has seen significant turnover after the Great Resignation and is in the process of retooling its Smaller. Smarter. brand to tell the stories and communicate the ideas in its Engage 2025 plan, with a focus on illuminating the benefit of Smarter. 

Conclusion

Texas Wesleyan avoided the dual traps of uninformed, hunch-based marketing and data paralysis to create its award-winning Smaller. Smarter. brand. It researched its position and took the findings under real review. It decided to boldly claim its message, and the marketing team received support from communications, leadership and key university allies to deliver the brand promise in a way that helped drive word of mouth marketing about the university.

Its seemingly lighthearted and carefree creative is the result of a strong understanding of its core student, and how living in the Dallas-Fort Worth market drives those key needs and the ways in which it motivates the student. This focus-group-forward, user-testing-friendly culture allowed the university to create messaging that could stand up to marketing committees and eventually drive buy-in across the institution. In short, the brand was cool. The brand must be cool.

Lastly, Texas Wesleyan moved quickly and aggressively, but was also willing to be patient with its brand-building efforts. By measuring perception and awareness over the long term it was able to avoid the brand upheaval that troubles so many university brands. In short, Texas Wesleyan played to its strengths. For an important segment of the Dallas-Fort Worth audience, smaller really is smarter.