In my over 13 years of schooling, I have never heard anyone get excited over a D+ on their report card- for a very good reason. Seeing a college make it the center of their new marketing campaign, therefore, is… puzzling. Actually, forget the pleasantries: it’s the worst higher education campaign idea possible short of Virginia Tech advertising its massacre. It’s terrible, and obviously so.

But it’s apparently not so obvious to the people behind the campaign. When helpfully alerted that their logo might present the brand image of, well, a D+ education, they amazingly stood behind their stroke of genius. In that letter, they described their campaign as “edgy and intriguing” and insisted that it "was designed to catch the attention of high school students who are bombarded with college and university materials to the point that they are often in information overload and unable to differentiate among the many institutions that have contacted them."

Well, consider their mission accomplished. Thousands of diligent, hard-working high school students will certainly have their attention captured by this imaginative one-letter ad by now. And they would have proceeded to add three more letters: LOL.

And there’s the problem for Drake’s marketing team. They don’t realize that only the brand perception of their customers- the students- matters. And according to the Huffington Post, students who currently attend Drake consider the marketing campaign “a tarnish on the university’s reputation.”  Say all you want about how “edgy” your campaign is, but if current students cannot stand behind your ad idea, you don’t stand a chance with prospective high school students.

To justify their ad, Drake officials noted a focus group of 921 high school students that gave the campaign a positive rating. While we cannot dismiss these results out of hand, I harbor my doubts about how the study was conducted. For example, how many of these high school students already had a strong interest in attending Drake regardless of their marketing strategies? If they did, and a Drake official asked them about the ad, they might have approved of it in fear of offending the official. Since most of these students were from the same region as Drake (the Midwest), it’s entirely possible that Drake picked these students out of a mailing list or an information session- kids that would want to make a positive impression on Drake and therefore not say anything bad about them.

So what lesson can we draw from Drake’s facepalm moment? In marketing, always look at your advertisement from your customers’ point of view instead of patting yourself on the back for having made something “different.” Innovation for innovation’s sake to make your marketing team appear competent is useless. Instead, think of what students would look for in your college, and come up with an original way to demonstrate that to students. For example, prospective students are drawn to UC Berkeley’s stellar research opportunities and discoveries, so Berkeley prominently displays any groundbreaking research results done by its faculty on its front page (under NewsCenter). On the other hand, Pomona College wants to demonstrate its famed close relationships between faculty and students, so its front page headlines announce “How Pomona Professors Spent their Summer Vacations” (as of Sept 5, 2010). What on earth does putting a giant D+ on your admissions page show? Drake either needs to more convincingly answer that question or scrap the campaign.