Marketing to Students 2009: The Guardian, Beatbullying & The Lounge Group

In April, Haymarket staged their annual student marketing conference. I have given a condensed report of what each speaker said. This post concerns the speeches of Marc Sands (The Guardian), Richard Piggin (Beatbullying) and James Layfield (The Lounge group). In a separate post I have reported on others speakers from the conference.

Marc Sands summarised The Guardian’s current approach to student marketing (it doesn’t do much of it nowadays) and looked back on the paper’s recent student marketing history (it used to do a lot more). For The Guardian, students are different to ten years ago. Being a student is no longer distinctive – students blend into the mainstream. Universities are not so polarised (eg red brick verses Oxbridge). Students are young and old, national and international, part-time and full-time – “students are not a minority sport anymore.” As a result, The Guardian is mainly interested in students and their careers; they want to keep them as readers of their jobs pages and recruit the best of them to their offices, which is why they continue The Guardian Student Media Awards. Along with Red Bull they were the first to run a student brand manager programme, but stopped when eventually “every brand had one”. They enjoyed producing their own student newspaper for two years, but stopped that because distribution costs outweighed benefits. Marc noted that from a marketing perspective newspapers share something in common with banks: customers choose them when they are young and tend to stick with them for their whole lives.

Richard Piggin from Beatbullying spoke about how volunteer student ‘cyber mentors’ help young people through online counseling and support. He explained how they created a brand to facilitate this and the marketing issues that affect them. His advice included: let the community control and moderate itself as much as you can; be relevant at all times and meet needs; don’t use youth-speak or colloquial language when communicating; be easy to use; find appropriate corporate partners; and don’t be afraid to change. Sidenote: there is a social network for young gypsies and travelers called ‘Savvy Chavvy’!

James Layfield of The Lounge Group presented ‘A Day in the Life of Students’, featuring video voxpops and plenty of stats. The presentation led in with a timely encouragement that students are recession-proof, because their loans and access to funds are relatively unaffected by goings-on in the economy and they have a ‘spend now, pay back later’ attitude – “I always find money for what I want” was the supporting quote from a Nottingham student. Other points made were: students are very expectant and accustomed to freebies and discounts, so focus on building stronger relationships to find loyalty – River Island is a popular brand with students, despite not offering them a discount; don’t expect students to do much – enhance their existing lives and habits, rather than inviting them to step outside their comfort zones; attract influencers and you’ll save time, because students live within each others’ pockets and have a herd mentality – they go out on the same nights each week, to the same places; give them a good experience and they will share it.