How understanding your brand’s purpose leads to success

Laura Morris, Associate Vice Chancellor of Marketing and Communications at Lone Star College Systems, discusses with Robin how the Lone Star College System's distinct brand purpose has helped them better serve thousands of students and become a leader in the higher education field.

Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I’m Robin Tooms, VP of Strategy at Savage, and I’m here today with Laura Morris, Associate Vice Chancellor of Marketing and Communications at Lone Star College Systems. So Laura, welcome.

Laura: Thank you, Robin. It’s good to be here.

Robin: Well wonderful. Well, Lone Star College System has a very distinct purpose. I wanted to talk about the purpose being supporting the success of the students. So I wanna know, why did you create that brand purpose, and how are you communicating that message?

Laura: Well it really informs everything that we communicate and in some ways, it’s really marketing and communications 101. We’re a non-profit organization. Our mission is very lofty: to educate people, which touches everyone’s life, but community colleges for a long time have been very focused on access and were very much part of the pathway to higher education from an access standpoint because we accept all students. That has transitioned and Lone Star College has really been one of the leaders in this area to transition from access to success and everything we do is filtered by asking the question how does this improve our students’ success and credential completion mission, which is our fundamental purpose.

Robin: Well that purpose is wonderful, supporting that student’s success. Tell me how do you measure that? How do you know if you’re even moving the needle on it?

Laura: Well sometimes that’s very difficult because the data and the metrics are very, very complicated and it would be easy to say that it’s just based on graduation rates, but many people come to us for many different reasons and lots of our students, the majority of our students are transferring into bachelor’s programs at four-year institutions. So a lot of our measurement is based on the student’s definition of what they came to Lone Star for, what their purpose was and helping them achieve that goal. So we’re becoming much more focused on tracking that part of the data, which is a little bit more than just hard numbers and being able to look at how our students are achieving their goals.

Robin: I love it. Thank you. That’s a great purpose story and a great way to measure it, too.

Laura: Thank you.

Robin: Thank you. Well this has been another edition of Brandonomics. Join us next week for another inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.

 

Lone Star College System, the largest institution of higher education in the Houston area, is the fastest-growing community college in the nation. Its mission is to provide comprehensive educational opportunities and programs to enrich lives, focusing on establishing students in careers, not just jobs. https://lonestar.edu/

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Robin Tooms is a consultant for brand, marketing and communications strategies for B2B and service companies. Expertise includes corporate branding, investor communications, employee communications, social media, and marketing with emphasis on effective online marketing and use of technology.

Contact her at rtooms@savagebrands.com or reach her by phone at 713-522-1555.