"The no-cost branding model, in my opinion, is like a farmer that tries to grow corn without planting any seeds."

David Mammano

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David Mammano

To Brand or not to Brand

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PEOPLE WITH IMPACT INTERVIEW - David Mammano, CEO, president, and founder of Next Step Publishing, Inc., is the driving force behind The Next Step Magazine, a publication designed to help students with college, career and life planning. In the following interview, David candidly discusses the rise in popularity of cost-per-lead advertising, as well as the state of today’s brand advertising.

Q: Is brand advertising dead?
David Mammano: I don’t think it is dead at all, but rather in a state of evaluation. My mother said to worry when you start to act like everyone else. People are now aimlessly flocking toward cost per lead advertising in droves—after the dust settles, people will step back to assess in hindsight. Right now, the whole of the marketing world is fixated on cost-per-lead, and they are not recognizing the significance of traditional advertising. A good ad will pull on its own, making people call, email, visit a website, becoming a part of a bigger marketing picture that will ultimately affect the decision to purchase the product. We are currently in a quick-fix era wherein company executives want leads yesterday, but coasting on previous brand advertising will only work for so long. Eventually, those leads will run dry because the companies have not laid the groundwork of effective branding and marketing—people will not recognize their name or respond to its market position. A lot of advertisers get it—realizing they must brand advertise to establish their position in the market and make a case for why people should be interested in their product. Why do Coke, Kodak, Nike continue to advertise? We all know who they are, but the companies realize the need to continue to establish their brand to hold their market position. A lot of educational categories are going for the quick-fix through the quick lead, but this cannot be effective in the long-term. There are 4,000+ colleges in this country, and tier two and three schools have a hard time differentiating themselves. While most are great schools, the key to attracting prospective students is how they separate themselves from the others through branding.

Q: When should institutions utilize cost-per-lead advertising to bolster recruitment efforts?
David Mammano: There is a place for cost-per-lead advertising. Brand advertising is your strategy to get as many people to know your school as possible. The next step is tactic, which is the cost-per-lead; in other words, once they’ve heard about your institution, how can you snag their attention? Cost-per-lead is very effective in this stage for many schools, especially with the University of Phoenixes of the world. When it comes down to the college collecting leads, it does work, but step one—brand advertising—needs to be done first. Cost-per-lead should serve as the follow-up.

Q: Compare eLearners.com zero cost branding with Educational Directories Unlimited model.
David Mammano: The no-cost branding model, in my opinion, is like a farmer that tries to grow corn without planting any seeds. Basically, with no-cost branding, institutions are trying to get leads without qualifying and educating the prospect. It’s like throwing mud against the wall and hoping it sticks, if you will. This approach is a short-term, myopic view of advertising. The other model, the EDU model, utilizes long-term brand building, introducing a product to potential prospects and gives them the option to pursue more information if interest exists. No-cost branding is a shot in the dark, whereas the EDU model produces a qualified prospect.

Q: As founder and CEO of Next Step Magazine, what’s new with the magazine and the industry as a whole?
David Mammano: We have two products—our printed magazine and our online product www.nextSTEPmag.com . We are certainly bucking all the trends as far as print and magazines go these days—a lot of them are performing poorly—but interestingly, our printed magazine continues to be our most popular and profitable product. It is doing phenomenally well because, as I’ve said before, youth will still read if you are feeding them information they cannot get anywhere else. That’s what we do at The Next Step Magazine—we provide in-depth college, career, and life planning with personality. In our space, a lot of the competitors present hard information, and in a sterile way, likely appealing more to parents than teenage students. The Next Step Magazine offers a wealth of information, but makes it fun as well in order to appeal to the target audience—the students.

Our online product is also growing tremendously, and I attribute this success to the unique competitive advantage of our printed magazine. Most publications reaching out to youth are now solely online, and while we offer an online magazine as well, we have another product that drives students to our online product. Most online products cannot boast a printed marketing tool that reaches 900,000 students every month to drive web traffic, but we can, and I think our products play off of one another very effectively.

We continue to expand the site and make it increasingly more fun and student-friendly. Our features include a social networking community where students can chat with one another about college and career planning, a 2,000-article searchable database, a college match tool that students can use to search for the right school for them, a scholarship tool partnering with FastWeb, and more. We have become a must-have resource for students looking to the future.

David Mammano, CEO, president and founder of Next Step Publishing, Inc.

See an index of all the "People with Impact" Interviews

Additional sections of this journal address student recruiting and student retention. We have also placed all articles with a common theme of online education and distance education programs in a separate portal. New articles will be posted each Monday, please check back by bookmarking this site or placing a link to this Innovative Practices in Communicating with Students portal.