PS&L Blog

One of my favorite books, Selling the Invisible talks about ‘death in the middle, ‘ as in, if you are not selling at the cheapest price or at the top of the line today’s market will squeeze you out of business.  All of us working in higher ed are always selling the invisible.   The Ivy League and maybe two dozen other schools are the top of the line with community colleges operating as the Walmarts of education.  That leaves the rest of us somewhere in the middle, which is nowhere in author, Harry Beckwith’s world.

Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow, All Marketer Are Liars and Tribes, recently had a blog post titled, The Paradox of the Middle that explains the following; you invent a product that appeals to the nerds and the geeks, a product that is flashy and new.  You bring them on board and generate lots of buzz. THEN you direct your marketing to the middle.  You tell the mass market, those people who want the tried and true, that all these experts have tested your product and love it.  You convince that middle that what you have it not so avant-garde after all. It is just what they have been looking for all along.  He acknowledges that this tactic disses the forward thinkers who brought you initial success but to be economically successful you must eventually appeal and sell to the biggest part of the market  -  the middle.

The book and the post point to the uniqueness of the higher ed space. Neither strategy suits a school’s reality. It is a decades long chore to raise your brand to the level of the top schools in the country and it is nearly impossible to package your curriculum in a way to satisfy Godin’s strategy and survive.

So, as higher education marketing professionals, what do we do?

A common theme in Selling the Invisible and The Paradox of the Middle is that of relating to the needs of your market.  Selling top of the line appeals to one group – the high achievers – and selling on price to another – those who can only afford to pay a specific dollar amount for higher ed. Selling to the middle is about getting endorsements that substantiate the value of the product; i.e. your institution.

What that means for you in the middle is the very difficult task of finding stories that illustrate how your ‘features’ benefit your students  Your stories must show prospective students and their parents that when they attend they will fit in.  Your stories must show that by fitting in they will be successful, just like so many people who graduated before (your endorsers).  It is learning how to tell those stories convincingly, over and over because the ’middle’ is made up of people who will respond when you help them understand how they can grow and fit in to your institution.