Kate Tippin has been providing strategic communications solutions in the post-secondary education sector for two decades. She has expertise creating comprehensive communications programs to engage alumni and key stakeholders, prospective donors, employees, prospective undergraduate students, parents, and guidance counselors, peer faculty at competitor institutions, prospective graduate students, and current students. She has received several awards for her work.
She is currently the Director of Marketing & Communications at Lazaridis School of Business & Economics.
At its best, what role does competitive analysis play in your school's plans?
Competitive Analysis is really a routine part of our marketing plan and all of our planning and it’s something that we monitor on an ongoing basis. I can't see doing any planning without competitive analysis.
“So we knew that a competitive analysis would help us succeed in meeting our goals and using a limited budget to really effectively market to our target audiences. “
What made you take the first step towards undertaking a competitive analysis study?
When we were tasked with undertaking a marketing plan for our undergraduate portfolio, we knew we needed some data to inform our decisions and to really help us convince our academic leadership that we were pursuing the appropriate path. Our marketing project is conservative compared to our competitors (although I think everyone says that), and we knew we'd need to be really smart with our marketing. So we knew that a competitive analysis would help us succeed in meeting our goals and using a limited budget to really effectively market to our target audiences.
Without giving away any secrets, have you done any other kind of competitive scanning?
Yeah, of course! And I won’t be giving away any secrets; everybody reading this will know what they are because we all do the same things. So just on a really surface level, we regularly scan our competitors. We scan their social media and their websites, trying to monitor their marketing materials as best as possible.
I know that’s a very surface-level answer but that's all you're getting *laughs*.
So when you participated in the CRI study, did it meet your expectations?
Yes, absolutely. It was both high-level and in-depth. It validated a lot of our perceptions and helped us to make a case for what we needed to focus on first as well as what our key messaging gaps were. So it really met our expectations.
“It’s both gratifying and sometimes heartbreaking to review the data, but in the end it helped us shore up everything that we do – all of our communications, all of our messaging – so we could move forward more strategically.”
Did you see any advantage in taking part in a syndicated study in terms of cost advantages or terms of range of data and analysis?
In cost advantages, absolutely. When you don't have a huge budget, a syndicated study is absolutely the way to go. It provides real data in an analysis of your competitors. It doesn't give us their secrets and doesn't share our secrets with them, but it stacks us up against one another and I love that.
What were the elements of the analysis that stood out for you?
We really got to analyze the consumer behavior of our target audience. I particularly liked analyzing and reviewing the top drivers for why one might apply to a business school and seeing how we're perceived in each of those categories stacked up against our competitors.
It’s both gratifying and sometimes heartbreaking to review the data, but in the end it helped us shore up everything that we do – all of our communications, all of our messaging – so we could move forward more strategically.
Without revealing anything too strategic, what was the biggest takeaway for your school?
That we finally have really good, sound data to guide our strategy in our decision-making whenever we disagree or when opinions come into play. Let’s say we are discussing one student’s opinion that holds very strong. Instead of that lone voice guiding some of the communications and marketing, we can say, “Thank you so much, that's great information but let's go back to the survey and take a look.” Remember, it's the top drivers that we need to pay attention to or these data points that we need to look at.
The survey really helped us to hold firm on the opinions of thousands of students, not just one.
“we finally have really good, sound data to guide our strategy in our decision-making whenever we disagree or when opinions come into play.“
How were the results received by your team and colleagues? Do you think they found them actionable or were they simply more fodder for discussion?
For the most part, for others, the results were fodder for discussion but we made them actionable. We continue to point to the results in our marketing plans, in our reports; we point back to those data points constantly. We made them actionable, so there's no chance that the results can ever only be fodder for discussion.
Do you have any recommendations to someone considering a competitive analysis?
Yes. My first recommendation would be to hire experts to do it. Don't try to do it yourself. There’s only so much that marketers can do on their own and especially if it's just the surface-level scans that everyone does.
Second, I would also say to consider a syndicated research study in order to better know the behaviors of your target audience, then how to stack them in comparison to your competitors. Because even if there's five factors you've been focusing on for numerous years – those still are important but maybe they're not as important when stacked up against your competitors – so I think that’s really important to consider and we wouldn't have received that data without this syndicated study.
My final recommendation is to be open-minded. If you're going to participate in a study like this, or any kind of analysis, sometimes it shows you things that you might not want to see. And sometimes it tells you that the things you've been doing for years that are always successful might not be where you need to focus, moving forward. That can impact operational decisions and budget decisions and strategies, so you really need to be open to the fact that this might change what you do, and that that's okay.
Is there anything else that you would want to highlight about the experience?
All I would say is that this has been so rewarding. It has been a good use of our budget to have sound data like this to point back to. The academic leadership responded very positively and that doesn't always happen with surveys, especially because they've built their own careers by conducting surveys and doing research and analyzing data! I really think that with the CRI study we’ve participated in, it showed us that, on our own, we had really only just scratched the surface of what there is to discover.