Walking home from a morning shoot, listening to Fabian Geyrhalter and Rob Meyerson discuss branding – you can never learn enough – when the idea for this post strikes me.
(Seth Godin says you become a good blogger by writing a post every day. I’m afraid of writing; I don’t know why, maybe because it leaves a trace. I know, old school.)
Another June has begun, and once again, I’m coordinating university admission campaigns. That’s when it hits me that I’ve been doing this for ten years. For ten years, I’ve been putting my communication skills to the test, working with the most critical target audience: university applicants.
So, it’s been ten years that every year, as the new year starts, the hustle begins, and it’s admission campaign season again. A new generation of applicants arrives, using new communication channels, consuming different content than their predecessors, and finding last year’s trends outdated.
The question arises: okay, but how can we create relevant campaigns for them? You can’t execute a university admission campaign from an armchair. You have to be there. You must constantly surround yourself with colleagues who, even if not the same age as the target group, are very close to them in age. You must stay up-to-date, know the channels they communicate on, the content they consume, and speak their language. There are plenty of challenges.
In these ten years, we’ve reached the point where we don’t only create admission campaigns in Hungarian. At the end of last year, the leadership of the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work at BBTE approached us—knowing our years of professional experience and seeing the quality of our work—to handle their faculty admission campaign in Romanian, Hungarian, and English. Well, I wasn’t exactly calm. 🙂
What does the collaboration entail? Lots of workshops, strategic planning, content creation, copywriting, visual material production, etc. But perhaps most importantly: mapping out the target group, understanding consumer behavior, and then testing. We’ve been working on the materials for almost six months, and they went public yesterday. Our knowledge is being tested again, but that’s just how it should be.
I owe gratitude to our partners for trusting my professional knowledge, our knowledge—there’s a reason I use the plural. At DBA, I work with colleagues I would confidently entrust with any of our partners’ campaigns. Thank you for trusting me and for working together. And thank you to the newcomers for pulling me back into the consumer reality; I learn a lot from them.
So, it’s June, we’ve rejuvenated once again, we’re testing our knowledge again, for the tenth year now, and I hope we pass with flying colors.
Who knows?!
Thank you, BBTE, thank you, DBA!
