Kelly McMurray: In 2021, you led a wildly successful campaign for Texas State. I’m curious about the research that went into understanding the prospective audience in order to authentically connect with them.

Elias Martinez: I think the thing to start out with is that I have a much broader view of what research is than what is traditional for our industry. I really love that Steve Jobs quote about people not knowing what they want until you show them. So, you know what you have, and that’s where building intuition comes in and understanding your target as a human being—that goes beyond the numbers and from that comes a big research project.

Prior to my arrival, they had done an image and awareness survey, but it was statewide, to understand Texas State’s market position and how it existed within the minds of consumers. And what they found was that those under the age of 40 have a positive perception of the university. And those 40 and above think of it poorly, as a party school that is not that great academically. Part of that is because we had the same president for 20 years, and she really grew the school during that period. So now those graduates are going into the market, they’re becoming alums, and they have a much different perspective of Texas State.

We also produce the most teachers of any school in Texas. So those teachers go out into the communities where they are from, and they are able to talk about their time there, which has started to shift our perception among perspectives and their parents. That was really foundational in the new brand—we’re a young university, we have a future-oriented personality. Whereas, you look at UT (which I’m an alum of), you look at Texas A&M, and they’re very steeped and rooted in tradition. We wanted to stand up. We have our own traditions, we have our own heritage, but we also wanted to stand for the future, and that was really instructive in the campaign.

As far as research is concerned, I do a lot of intuition-building through observation. Like sometimes just going out on the campus and watching and being thoughtful about what you’re seeing, paying attention to what’s happening in pop culture, trying to consume some of the same content and see the same media that your target is. TexasNext was very much an enrollment campaign when it was conceived that became a brand campaign. I’m talking mainly about prospective students and young alumni.

Social listening is a big one, too, right? What are the conversations that are happening online about our brand, about our university among that target? We do a lot of co-creation with students, and we also act as clients for some of the classes that are offered. It’s always interesting for me to see some of the ideas that come from our interns and some of the ideas that come from these classes that we’ll collaborate with. Even things like talking to my kids about “What’s the newest meme?” “What do you think about Drake and Kendrick Lamar and their beef?” It’s having conversations and building intuition about your target audience.

It goes beyond the “Hey, I’m gonna hire ‘insert agency name here’ and their perception survey, and then we’re gonna go to the cabinet.” We’re going to say 40 percent of students think we’re really great, but what and why? What values do we embody? Or what is it about us that makes us really great in their minds? And I think it requires getting beyond the prefrontal cortex, which makes all of our logical and rational decisions, and trying to get to the first-order thinking, which happens in your limbic system, your lizard brain, which makes all of our emotional decisions for us. I think you really need to get to that deeper level in order to do really great work.

Kelly McMurray: That’s so insightful. I’m thinking about, from my personal experience, having my older son go through the college application process and all the materials he received and going on campus visits. One weekend, we went to two different schools, and going into that weekend, his No. 1 goal was “I need to graduate with no debt.” After we walked away and out of that weekend, he picked the school that was going to leave him with a lot of debt. And he said, “I gotta figure this out. I gotta figure out how to go to that school.” And all of that was out of the whole experience of being there that day.

Elias Martinez: Because he felt it was right; he felt it was the place for him. He probably felt it was the community for him—it was home for him, right? Then that sort of logical thing of graduating without debt takes more of a backseat to his emotions and wanting to feel like he’s part of that community. That’s what we’re always trying to do, build that emotional connection.

Kelly McMurray: That’s so true what you’re saying about intuition-based research. I haven’t heard that term, but I think about it when we’re creating or branding a university, you’re branding a place. I wrote an article about branding a university. You’re talking about this place, so how do you capture it? It isn’t as much through the sort of quantitative research, it’s that qualitative research of your listening tours. When we do magazine redesigns, we always — when we can — do a site visit, and just the vibe that we take away from being there influences our design directions.

Elias Martinez: Yes. It’s funny, because being on [the board of] AMA and having a greater breadth of experience background, I talk a lot about vibe and energy. What is the energy this brand exudes? I do think universities can lean in that direction more because we’re not a consumer-packaged good. People are choosing us based on emotional resonance. People look at me like I’m crazy, but I think you need that mix of looking at marketing less as science and more as art. We’re about empathy and human connection as opposed to metrics and engagement rate or some of those more hard marketing management things.

Kelly McMurray: I totally agree. We talked about this a little bit, but what was the approach for the Texas State campaign, Texas State Next? Now you have that research and then what do you do with it?

Elias Martinez: We decided higher education in Texas is wildly competitive. It is superduper competitive here. There are tons of institutions. We’re a state that’s still growing. Other states are dealing with population declines and declines in the number of students that they can possibly enroll and recruit. They’re looking to states like Texas that are still growing to make their numbers.

We realized that we had to do something really distinctive; we had to stand apart on our own and be a clear choice between—I’m gonna use the word number three in applications—UT and Texas A&M. They very much have their own distinct identities that have been brought up over time. We’re a younger university, in terms of our growth, but we grew so much in the last 20 years, that we really had to say, “Okay. What is it about Texas State that makes us truly unique and distinctive, that people could just see and know it was us?” Or hear about something and know that it’s us. Everybody has the beautiful campus and the award-winning faculty, and a really great engineering building, which are all like product differentiators. So what we’ve talked about is the idea of building a brand based on distinction over differentiation. That was really the guiding principle for us. Those points of distinction became very tactical things, like we have an acronym that nobody else in the world has. You could go to an acronym finder, and if you look up TXST, Texas State is the only institution that comes up.

So that was a tactical distinctive piece of identity or equity that we built upon. Even things that were underneath the surface and not readily apparent, like 40 percent, almost half of our students, are the first in their families to go to college. So this idea of upward social mobility was key in the brand campaign. We tried to bring that throughout the work as a distinctive part of this university. The thing that I would tell any marketer, any brand builder, is in building a brand campaign, your differentiators, I believe, are the reason to validate your decision, or the consumer used to validate the decision. The distinctiveness of the brand is what you need to build and express because your brand should be distinctive anyway. You just have to figure out what’s distinctive about it—this is how people are going to make the upfront big decision. I may go buy a new iPhone over an Android because of all the cachet that the brand has and how it’s truly distinctive. Then I’ll use things like the megapixels in the camera, how great the processor is, and all the apps I can access as differentiated points to tell myself I made a good decision.

Kelly McMurray: That’s interesting—another good distinction for me. I love the idea of instinctual versus distinction. I’ve heard you refer to creating marketing for higher ed in the same way we do for lifestyle or youth. I don’t think I have that term exactly right, but I thought that was really interesting. Could you talk a little bit about that approach?

Elias Martinez: In my opinion, all of the best higher-end branding and marketing is approached like it’s a lifestyle brand. You have lifestyle brands like Patagonia and how they stand for being outdoors and part of the natural world, and Nike, which is about championing the athlete inside all of us. Here in Texas, we have this grocery store chain called H-E-B that celebrates all things Texas, so they have T-bone steaks that are the Shape of Texas that you can buy, and they carry all Texas products in addition to national goods. They have a lifestyle that they built around their brands that people gravitate to because they view themselves as being part of that lifestyle or they view themselves as being part of that culture.

The cool thing about higher ed is that you’re marketing to young people on the enrollment side. I think that subcultures come up quickly through teens and young people as well as new perspectives. Think about Gen Z and how they view gender identity—it is completely different from my generation as a millennial. I think you should be in tune with some of that, and maybe it’s not gender identity specifically, but just this idea of being inclusive. Universities have talked about being inclusive for a long time, but what does that mean within the context of this current generation? They have a broader, more expansive view of what inclusion looks like, versus past generations. When I’m talking about that, I’m really talking about values—putting your values forward. What is it that you stand for? How do you encase a lifestyle around it? The people that share those values and want that to be their lifestyle, want that to be their culture, their community, ultimately are drawn to that institution. It’s more about the energy you put out into the world and less about the messaging that you can put out.

When you move into that lifestyle values piece, it allows you to do other things—instead of just putting a logo on a bunch of T-shirts, we’re actually going to design apparel that people or our community who share these beliefs will want to wear. When we do a podcast, we’re not going to do a podcast about some research topic that we have that not a lot of people are interested in; we’re gonna do a podcast about the things that our community wants to hear. Because again, you’re building a lifestyle around your brand.

Kelly McMurray: When I think about the work that I’ve done—and what are some parallel markets we can move into, I’ve thought about travel. In higher ed, we’re getting to know a place and capture that place through communications to get people to go there. When we’re creating admissions materials, the goal is to get somebody to go to the school because once they set foot on campus, that’s the game changer. So this is something that came up on the “How the F, Did You Get That Job?” [podcast], that there are alternative pathways to upward mobility and prosperity. I’ve been thinking about my work, working with independent schools, working with higher ed, how can we create communications and legitimize other pathways for people? How can we destigmatize going to vocational school or going to a community college? How can we as an industry work to help people find what’s the right path for them?

Elias Martinez: Mmhmm. That was interesting to me because it’s something that I believe personally. That and more universities are coming to terms with whether it’s about mission fit students, or it’s about finding the right students. That’s where that idea of lifestyle building, culture building, and community building comes through, right?

I really do believe that a four-year college degree is the best thing that a student could do, particularly to create social mobility in their life. That’s my story, for sure. I mean, what the data shows is that your bachelor’s degree–holding student will earn more than a million dollars more over the course of their lifetime than their classmate who only has an associate’s or a high school diploma, and when recessions happen, the people with the four-year degree are going to be there late. It hits them less hard; they’re laid off less at a lesser rate than those without the education. And then when the economy comes back, they’re hired more quickly. So, you know, it’s super duper powerful. And I don’t mean to downplay it at all.

But there’s also the idea of aspirations, right? And I think there’s a careful balance between understanding their aspirations and other past prosperity, and maybe having students think that college is not right for them because it’s too aspirational. And that’s where the battle around standardized testing comes in. You know some students maybe don’t test well, or maybe some students don’t have the same resources and they’re from disadvantaged backgrounds. They don’t do as well on the LSAT or the ACT, and they don’t get into the institution that they want to get into but maybe are clearly capable of succeeding and thriving with a little bit of support. So I do think that we have to be careful around that stuff. And we do have to maintain aspirations and not lock students in early. I guess it’s like the pendulum swinging the other way, right? We tried to lock students into college. And now we realize it’s not for everyone. I just want to make sure that we’re not going too far the other way.

At Texas State, we have a transfer program with all community colleges in the area where students can start at Austin Community College, get their associate’s degree, and then transfer into Texas State as a junior and finish up their major. So, I really love programs like that that help students. I don’t know if it’s the responsibility of higher education or the education industry per se to destigmatize alternative paths. But I do think in culture with parents and with teachers and community members just getting kids to understand that maybe there are other pathways, right? So that’s something that I believe, but I think that there’s a lot of nuances that need to be considered and it’s complicated, right?

Kelly McMurray: It is complicated, and I agree with you. You don’t want to swing too far. I think right now, the United States is at a place of just such criticism over higher ed. We have a lot of liberal arts college clients, and they are addressing the value of still going into college and exploring different things. I was talking to a friend last week about her daughter, who scored almost a perfect score on the ACT. She is taking a gap year, because she felt that the school she was applying to demanded for her to claim her major right away and know what she wanted to do. But she’s like, I don’t know, I just want to go to college and learn and grow.

Elias Martinez: I really do believe, and this may seem counterintuitive, but I really do believe that the liberal arts are going to make a big comeback. And I really, really am here for it. And I hope that it happens, because as we look at technology, right? And AI, right? So, AI is supposedly a much better coder than your average person, and it doesn’t need to eat, it doesn’t need to sleep, it’s always on. And you saw, as ChatGPT and AI became more prevalent, a lot of the tech companies, Meta and Google, they all started laying people off, because they were going to rely on automation and AI to do a lot of those tasks, and their stock value shot through the roof, because they maintain their profits while cutting their overhead, their costs of employees, right?

But the thing that AI cannot do is what the liberal arts teach us, the humanities teach us, which is how to connect with other people and how to think critically about some of these topics. Our country is super duper polarized right now, and it’s because we’re not doing the humanities and the liberal arts. So I think that, if liberal arts institutions can get their minds around how to tell that story and how to carve out that position, I think a lot of people are going to be, well, yes, of course. You know, for my kids, my wife and I were talking about it, we don’t even know how to steer our kids, in what direction to go. Before it would be, well, go be an engineer, go be a lawyer, go be a doctor. But AI has completely changed all of that, right? We’ve been talking to our kids more about what is it that you’re interested in? And then how can you apply that in a very humanistic kind of way? I think that AI is changing a lot of that, and liberal arts universities can capitalize on it.

Kelly McMurray: I love that. So, right here, in Albany, the College of Saint Rose just closed—my husband taught there, my two designers went there. Since 2011, I’ve hired 10 or 11 graduates and other interns from there, and it just had an amazing program. But I think the school really failed to tell that story. I think it tried to be everything like, oh, wait, we need a nursing program. Oh, wait, we need, you know, cybersecurity, while there were schools in the regions already doing these things really well.

So this kind of leads to my next question: Who is your target audience? When my husband was applying for a position at Saint Rose, I was like, “Well, who goes to art school in Albany, New York, when you’ve got New York City and Boston?” Once you are here, you really get to understand who that demographic is. If Saint Rose had really focused on that, and marketed to the demographic instead of trying to split the school, maybe they would still be in business.

Elias Martinez: Or even like, what makes the College of Saint Rose different? So, I think that’s where brand distinction comes in. And if you don’t have a lot of brand distinction within your brand, how do you build it? There’s a school—I’m going to look it up now—that has this program called Flightpath, which allows students to design their own degree, which is really interesting and cool. And not a lot of schools are doing that. So liberal arts school.

But I thought it was really amazing, because it was clearly a differentiated thing that they could build a brand around. It is this idea of college is like choosing your own adventure and ultimately getting it. It’s not built to put you into a box around what degrees we offer, but rather, how can we, with our available resources, curate and get you the best experience possible, so you get the skills and the knowledge that you want when you get out of college, which takes universities back to a place of building knowledge and building life skills as opposed to just like credentialing, right?

So, I would say, the university should start by knowing itself before you even know who your target audience is, or thinking about your target audience. You know, what is it that makes you distinctive? What is it that makes you unique? Why do students choose you? Beyond “It just felt like home,” you know? I think if you understand who you are, you’ll understand who your students are.