Experts | University of the Sciences

USciences marketing department wins awards

USciences marketing department is proud to announce that we have won two Platinum and two Gold Awards in the MarCom 2011 Competition.  Two of the awards were received for work that the marketing department did solo:

–        Platinum: 2011-12 Roadmap Marketing Plan

–        Gold: The Bulletin, tradition and digital

And two of the awards were received for work that marketing launched, powered by vendor-partner, The Star Group. http://www.stargroup1.com/

–        Gold: Outcomes Survey & PR Effort

–        Platinum: Channel One TV Spot

“MarCom Awards is an international creative competition that recognizes outstanding achievement by marketing and communications professionals. Award entries came from corporate marketing and communication departments, ad agencies, design studios, production companies and freelancers. Over 6,000 entries from throughout the United States, Canada and several other countries were submitted for the 2011 competition.”

First and foremost, USciences marketing department works for results to increase awareness and positive perception; to drive enrollment and support fundraising; however, we are pleased to be recognized through these awards and by industry professionals for the efforts.

“The Platinum and the Gold Awards are presented to entries which exceed high standards of the industry norm. Approximately 18 percent of the entries were Platinum and were Gold Winners. A complete list of Winners can be found on the MarCom Awards website at www.marcomawards.com.”

 

 

Tag! We're It! A Tagline Embodies Tangible Benefits.

 

Quick, name the seven companies or products that go with the taglines below:

• “Just Do It.”
• “What happens here, stays here.”
• “I’m loving it.”
• “The nighttime sniffling sneezing coughing aching stuffy head fever so you can rest medicine”
• “The happiest place on earth”
• “Can you hear me now?”
• “Eat fresh.”

I’d be willing to bet you immediately came up with six or seven (Nike, Las Vegas, McDonald’s, NyQuil, Disneyland/Walt Disney World, Verizon, Subway). That’s the power of a tagline. A great one serves as a hook, reminding you not only of the product but also what that product will deliver.

In a blog a few weeks ago, we explained the evolution of our brand name and our desire to reinforce what our brand—University of the Sciences—truly represents. As we continued to refine our branding, we wanted to create a tagline that would resonate with students, parents, alumni and guidance counselors, alumni, etc., communicating what USciences is all about and what they could expect from us.

 A great tagline encapsulates our “value proposition,” the benefits that a university, company or product provides to its students or customers, what it promises to deliver, and what makes it the better choice for the consumer. It answers the following questions that a potential customer might ask:

• Who are you?
• What are you about?
• What can you promise me?

 In the case of USciences, our value proposition should give students a solid reason to believe that, when they come to USciences, we are assuring them of a certain type and standard of higher education. What is that education? What do we uniquely have to offer?

 “The culture of a university and its value set are the keys that drive it,” says USciences President Dr. Philip P. Gerbino. “For this institution it’s science and it’s healthcare, and those two values will never change.”

 

“Where science and healthcare converge”—USciences newly unveiled tagline—defines both what we are and what we are not. We are not a liberal arts school. We are a school focused on those values Dr. Gerbino identifies: healthcare and science. “We’ve taken the principles of science and health professions,” says Dr. Gerbino, “bonded those together, and [we] make sure they are integrated into all our programs.”

We have a long history of teaching science as it relates to the health professions, and we have no plans to abandon that proposition. Students who come to USciences will be immersed in scientific discovery, training to be leaders in healthcare fields that are expanding every day. That’s a promise.

It’s a promise that is represented in our students’ career paths:

• Payscale.com has ranked USciences graduates salary potential as 7th in the Northeast and 11th in the nation.
• U.S. News & World Report ranked us 2nd in the nation in student loan repayment rate, an indication of our graduates’ high earnings.
• Our acceptance rate into medical school historically has been nearly twice the national average.
• Historically, within three months of graduation, 90% of our students are employed or have been accepted into graduate school.

“Science is the basis for all the health professions,” says Dr. Gerbino. Nowhere is that better understood—and taught—than at University of the Sciences, where healthcare and science converge.

Hear more of what our president and provost have to say about our new name, logo, and tagline by watching this video.

 

 

What's in a Brand Name?

Our names are important to us. We don’t want someone calling us “Hey, you” or “Ole what’s-her-name.” We’re even happier when someone thinks our personality fits our name.                                        
         The same is true for institutions. A brand name brings to mind not just a product but also all of the attributes that product delivers. It carries with it certain emotions and, if it’s a well-chosen name, encapsulates the brand promise: what the brand will do for the consumer. So it is important that the name fit the personality of the product or, in our case, the university.

Brands can also help us narrow our choices, making sense of the dizzying array of options available. In this age of massive information at their fingertips, students need help navigating overwhelming higher education choices that offer more than 4,400 institutions to choose from and new majors and virtual classrooms being launched every day.

How can our brand here at University of the Sciences provide consumers clarity in the midst of marketplace clutter? How can we ensure our name communicates our brand promise to our potential market?

Over the past two years, the University has taken on an honest self-evaluation. Rather than clinging to our own opinions of our brand, we’ve looked at how our brand is perceived and recognized in the marketplace—with perspective students, with parents, and with guidance counselors. What did we find?

As USciences President Dr. Philip P. Gerbino expresses it in our fall issue of The Bulletin, the University’s alumni magazine: “There is an awareness gap with the acronym USP, and ‘in Philadelphia’ causes confusion or is left out entirely because it is too cumbersome.”

So what does that mean for our institution and how we choose to refer to it in our advertising and communications?

Working with The Star Group of Philadelphia we looked at how our students and alumni and their employers feel about our university. What do they believe we deliver? These are the attributes our brand—and especially our name—must communicate.

What does our organization deliver? Outstanding science education in general, as well as that geared particularly toward healthcare careers. We’ve been doing it successfully for almost two centuries, and our graduates have been and continue to be innovators in their professions.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

  

So while University of the Sciences in Philadelphia will remain our officially registered name, we will simply call ourselves University of the Sciences. And in a city where UPenn and UArts are well-known university monikers, USciences seems an appropriate way to shorten our name while differentiating ourselves and still clearly communicating what our brand promise is: superior science-focused education.

What do we hope that folks —our students and alumni, as well as the guidance counselors who recommend them and the employers who hire them—feel about USciences? That the University community delivers on the promise of an unparalleled education that launches them as leaders in the arena where healthcare and science converge.