Held hostage

Holman Jenkins had a recent column in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) describing the symbiotic relationship between junk-food brands like Pepsi and McDonald's, and the activists that protest those brands' products and marketing. It includes this gem of a line: "To build a brand is to create a hostage."

In context, Jenkins refers to the fact that activists who protest a brand rely on the brand's value to help them promote their cause. But I find the line a useful reminder that as organizations, we do not truly own our brands. We build them, we cultivate them, we are their caretakers; but our brands actually belong to the constituents we serve, whether they are customers, donors, members, etc. The corollary to this is something that my boss has said time and again: Your brand is not what you think it is. It is what the public thinks it is.

This helps to explain, in marketing and PR terms, the reaction of Penn State alumni to the firing and recent death of legendary coach Joe Paterno, who lost his job in the wake of the Sandusky child sex abuse scandal. Whatever you think of Penn State's decision to Paterno (unfortunate but necessary) or the manner in which its board went about it (graceless and unprofessional) there is something startling -- and troubling -- to those of us outside the Penn State bubble in the rabid manner in which the loyalists have defended Paterno to the very last.

And it's not just surprising to me. I think it caught the current administration, including the board, off guard as well. It's become clear to me that, despite the great education that Penn State appears to provide, alumni of all stripes clearly believe that Penn State's brand was Joe Paterno. Not just football, which was what the institution was clearly trying to protect in its failure to address the accusations against Jerry Sandusky, but JoePa himself. When the board quickly and bloodlessly fired Paterno, they trashed the brand in the eyes of the faithful.

Pennsylvania State University, in other words, did not own Paterno, so to speak, nor did they own the football program he led for so long. Paterno belonged to everyone who considered themselves a Penn Stater. When they say, with such tremendous pride, "We Are Penn State" they mean it quite literally, in ways that the people now charged with leading the institution seem scarcely able to comprehend.

Brand journalism 101

When my colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, where I used to work, would fret over newsrooms slashing coverage of science and technology, I would tell them that the university needed to become its own source of news about these subjects. Why rely on a middleman when you can give your stories directly to the public? The catch was that the content couldn't be merely promotional, but truly informative.

Now, there's a name for this: brand journalism, and this article captures the opportunities it presents for organizations:

Organizations need to shift their media thinking from collateral (designed to support the immediate sale of product) to journalism (telling a story people are actually interested in). Consider Intel's Free Press. Most of the stories there are not about Intel. They're about topics a technology or business publication would cover and, in the course of their reporting, would interview someone from Intel or discover that Intel played a part in the story.

This accomplishes two things: It keeps your customers' eyeballs focused on you, and away from your competitors, and it enhances your credibility. If you appear to be an honest broker when it comes to discussing the trends in your industry, then customers will be more willing to believe that the good things you say about your own brand are true.

For colleges and universities, this means that our publications -- particularly those aimed at alumni and donors -- should not merely focus on what's happening at the institution, but on topics of interest to the audience in their professional and personal lives. So for example, your business school magazine could feature an article with an overview of changes in the tax code aimed at accounting grads. The article could be written by the head of the accounting department, or else quote her length. Either way, you've reinforced in the reader's mind the reputation of faculty as experts in their field, and by extension the degree that reader earned from your university. And they'll be that much more likely to hear everything else you want to tell them.