The Ice Bucket Challenge and Other Phenomena: Four Ways Higher Ed Marketers Can Leverage Different Disciplines (Part 1)

Just over a month ago, as you checked your Facebook account to see what your friends and family had been doing over the course of the previous hour/day/weekend/week — depending on your “Facebook frequency” — you couldn’t help noticing you or someone you knew was tagged to take the “Ice Bucket Challenge.” You saw them take the challenge, and then you saw them tag more people. The rest is history; the proof is in the pudding, as the results show.

On August 29, a press release reported that the ALS Association had surpassed the $100 million mark in donations.[1] As of September 12, this figure stood at a whopping $112.4 million, a significant amount given that the full year revenue for ALSA in 2013, as reported by Wikipedia, was $24 million.[2]

There’s no question this is the power of social media as a campaign vehicle, but what’s the innate characteristic that made Ice Bucket Challenge so powerful and successful? Perhaps more importantly, what can higher education marketers learn from this?

The Ice Bucket Challenge isn’t the only example; innovation blockbusters occur regularly, whether it was creating network effects such as Gillette giving out razors as freebies to increase the sale of blades, or using logistics and supply chain management to develop small markets (e.g. Sam Walton establishing Wal-Mart stores in small towns as opposed to big cities). How about using mathematics and statistics to transform a simple act of searching into a $56 billion business called Google or creating the era of digital marketing?[3]

When phenomena like these occur, they pave the way for the enrichment of the marketing body of knowledge by cross-pollinating it with other disciplines. In its responsibilities as a key constituent for success, marketing has evolved from a basic grassroots approach to a much more complex and intricately involved discipline and such increasing demand cannot be serviced by merely relying on the core body of marketing knowledge.[4] Are higher education marketers using this interdisciplinary knowledge to build specialized campaigns? I consider the following things important in this respect.

The Heart: Understanding Customer Behavior and Motivations

Linked Disciplines: Psychology and Sociology

Practitioners and psychologists are already at work trying to break down the Ice Bucket Challenge in an attempt to understand what may have caused this viral propagation.[5] One reason is peer pressure — psychologists call these “descriptive norms” where people look at others to follow what’s being done, as opposed to “prescriptive norms” where you’re expected to do something when told to do so. Another is guilt; yet another is public exposure and personal “image” management due to being called out in the open.

Regardless of the reasons, the underlying factors in the example above demonstrate some key attributes rooted in psychology and sociology. While this does not imply that marketers should expect to become social scientists, it emphasizes the importance of understanding the target customer not just in terms of demographic data, but also in terms of explicit psychographics (what they do and how they behave) and non-explicit motivations.

A good segment profile should cover as many of these attributes as possible. Depending on budget and other considerations, one method would be to have varied degrees of profile information that gets more specific toward the core response channels; the implicit motivations determine the messaging and the call to action.

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References

[1] Munk, C. (2014). Individuals, Organizations and Corporations Respond With Immense Generosity to Ice Bucket Challenge [Press release]. Retrieved from http://www.alsa.org/news/media/press-releases/ice-bucket-challenge-generosity.html

[2] ALS Association. (2014, September 12, 2014). from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALS_Association

[3] Google’s Income Statement Information (2014). From https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html

[4] Bartels, R. (1976). The History of Marketing Thought (2nd ed.) and Singh, R. (2014). Demystifying Data-Driven Approaches: Three Facts. https://evolllution.com/opinions/demystifying-data-driven-approaches-facts/

[5] Bershidsky, L. (2014). Why the Ice Bucket Challenge Worked.  Retrieved from http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-08-29/why-the-ice-bucket-challenge-worked

This is the first of a two-part series by Ramendra Singh discussing four areas of understanding that higher education marketers could leverage to improve the success of their marketing efforts. In the second part, Singh shares the last three strategies.