Diary of a marketing maverick

January 6, 2012 • 3:34 pm • POSTED BY lhendler

For close to a decade we have had the distinct pleasure of working with one of the most strategic and innovative marketers in the world of higher education. His name, like his risk tolerance is uncommon: Sundar Kumarasamy. He is the Vice President for Enrollment Management and Marketing at the University of Dayton, and in addition to being a long-time friend and client of 160over90, he is constantly going against the grain in an industry often riddled with clichés.

But don’t take our word for it.

In addition to being featured in a Forbes article alongside Steve Cannon, vice president of marketing for Mercedes-Benz USA, Sundar, in collaboration with the agency, was also featured by Adobe, discussing our development of the first fully interactive university viewbook iPad application, which utilized Adobe’s digital publishing suite software. And now, The Chronicle of Higher Education has written a feature article documenting his unique and sometimes controversial approach to higher education marketing.

Published on New Year’s Day, highlights from the article include:

The mesmerizing “mission wall” sprang from Mr. Kumarasamy’s head, which may or may not contain humming wires and hot circuits. He’s a fast-thinking marketer who seeks a precious share of teenagers’ attention even as he tries to distinguish his university’s mission, its intangible heart, in a world immersed in shallow slogans.

Case Study UD from Flightphase on Vimeo.

“This could have been a six-figure mistake,” says Sundar Kumarasamy of the custom-built “mission wall” he designed for the U. of Dayton’s welcome center. The wall is meant to convey the importance of community—and to grab teenagers’ famously fleeting attention.

———————————————————————————————–

Imagining a New Brand

Early on, Mr. Kumarasamy hired a Philadelphia-based marketing firm, called 160over90, to help redesign the university’s viewbook, in which photographs of the campus chapel’s ivy-covered walls had long figured prominently. The new version, unveiled in the fall of 2007, was fresh and edgy, full of questions (“Where do you find faith?”), and images striking and strange. Perhaps none was as memorable as the photograph of two bare-shouldered blonde women emblazoned with the question: “Do you know more about Lindsay Lohan than Darfur?”

To say the least, some faculty members and students hated each of the viewbook’s 84 pages. The campus newspaper, the Flyer News, dubbed the publication a “glossy orgy” that reflected poorly on Dayton.

Although the viewbook marked a break with tradition, Mr. Kumarasamy believed that it also expressed—in fresh, bright colors—the university’s Marianist values, which he had studied carefully. A Marianist maxim says “New times call for new methods,” and that has become his own mantra.

—————————————————————————————————

A Changing Campus

As another week begins at Dayton, the fall recruitment cycle is in full swing. On this Monday morning, applications are up by 1,000 over the same date last year.

Since 2002, applications have increased to 11,567 from 7,496. Enrollment of out-of-state students has increased to 48 percent from 35 percent. Average ACT scores are up, and so are retention rates.

All those numbers, Mr. Curran believes, reflect Dayton’s inherent strengths, but he credits Mr. Kumarasamy with finding clever answers to a million-dollar question: “How do you get people to look at you?”

‘We Compete for Memory’

Enrollment management is often described as the balance between marketing and mission. At religious institutions, where morality and social justice are typically everyday concerns, that tension is especially pronounced. Mr. Kumarasamy takes seriously the framed copy of the pledge on his bookshelf; in it, he vowed to remain “spiritually present, alive and open to the call [of] the Marianist charism and mission.”

Still, he is blunt about the necessity of market¬ing muscle. “If you have 10 shops on the same street selling Chinese food,” he says, “how do you think each shop should behave? Unfortunately, it’s an over¬crowded marketplace in this noble industry. If we shouldn’t compete, we should be prepared to go out of business one day.”

Dayton, he believes, owes visitors a unique experience, a feeling they can take with them. “We are living in a time when we compete for memory,” he says of colleges. “If their journey doesn’t begin the moment they first arrive on the campus, when does it begin?”

In Mr. Kumarasamy’s own story lies the enigma of the right fit. He says: “It’s more of a feeling, a silent voice that says, ‘This is where I belong.’ It’s not easily quantifiable. How do you give evidence about falling in love?”

————————–