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New York Times spotlights Farmer School of Business at Miami University

N.C.A.A. Wants the Young Madder About March
By STUART ELLIOTT
Published: January 11, 2010
 

Although “March Madness” is one of the best-known times of the year on the sports calendar, the National Collegiate Athletic Association is hoping to generate even more mania for its annual basketball tournament. To help accomplish that, the organization sought a campaign not from a Madison Avenue agency, a hip digital boutique or a gaggle of high-priced free-lancers but rather from 120 students of a marketing class.

The students were seniors in the fall semester at the Farmer School of Business at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, taking a class called the Strategy Works Marketing Practicum. The class is intended to be experiential—that is, giving the students a chance to present campaign ideas to actual marketers, which can use the concepts in advertising aimed at real consumers.

There were several reasons why the N.C.A.A. turned to the students. Perhaps the most important was a surprising research finding: the ardency for the tournament is not quite what the organization would like it to be among Americans ages 22 or 23 and under.

For instance, “in TV viewership, we haven’t seen the growth we think we deserve in that demographic,” says Peter Davis, director for corporate alliances at the N.C.A.A. in Indianapolis, who knew about the class because he was a marketing major at Miami who graduated from there in 1993.

He took part in a predecessor to Strategy Works, he says, working on a project about a bleach product for Procter & Gamble, and “to this day I lean on that experience.”

So when it came to divining ways to develop “programs that would create the next generation of fans and reach the under-23 audience, who better to learn from than the under-23 audience?” Mr. Davis asks.

There was also, Mr. Davis acknowledges, “a budget question” in that the timing of the initiative and the state of the economy meant “there wasn’t a lot of extra money floating around.”

“This was an opportunity to work with the demographic at a reasonable cost,” Mr. Davis says. (Clients of Strategy Works pay the Farmer School fees in the range of $20,000 to $25,000.)

And hiring the class for the campaign brought “120 minds to work on my problem,” he adds, “instead of three or four” as would be the case if he went to an agency.

Mr. Davis and a colleague visited the Miami University campaign in late August, briefing the class on the assignment. The class was divided into five sections and each section was composed of four teams, for a total of 20 teams. Each section was assigned a member of the teaching faculty with whom to work.

One of them was Gillian Oakenfull, associate professor of marketing and director for experiential learning in the marketing department at the Farmer School.

“We teach them strategy and tactics and how to work together,” Ms. Oakenfull says, “but the ideas need to come from them.”

During the briefing, Mr. Davis told the students that the N.C.A.A. “wanted to see some ideas for social networking,” she recalls, “but you don’t have to tell them about social networking because they can’t not do it.”

“Several of them are doing five things at once sometimes,” Ms. Oakenfull says of the students, among them visiting Facebook, watching streaming video and chatting.

In the weeks from late August through early December, the teams pursued the assignment in myriad ways, Ms. Oakenfull says. Some “went back to their old high schools” to interview students, she adds, some assembled focus groups, some conducted research online and “some went to college basketball games.”

As the end of the semester neared, the faculty discussed with the team members how to assemble and present their ideas and then organized a playoff tournament like the N.C.A.A.’s to select a winning campaign.

“I’m a former N.C.A.A. athlete myself,” Ms. Oakenfull says, who played tennis and ran track at Lamar University in Beaumont, Tex., “and after that was a tournament director.”

The work of each team was ranked by the faculty and they were placed in four pools, each pool composed of five teams. On Dec. 7, the first and second pools made presentations, followed two days later by the third and fourth pools.

There were 24 judges, six for each pool, among them “business people from around the state,” Ms. Oakenfull says, and “sports professionals from the Cincinnati Reds, Cleveland Cavaliers, Cincinnati Bengals and the Indy Racing League.” Mr. Davis was on hand, too.

The judges winnowed the 20 teams to 4, which of course were referred to, March Madness style, as the Final Four. In a five-hour session on Dec. 11, the process was completed, accompanied by college-sports trappings like the Miami University mascot and marching band.

To encourage the finalists further, film from the finales of the N.C.A.A. tournament, known by a song on the soundtrack, “One Shining Moment,” was screened, with shots of Miami star athletes inserted.

The four teams — named M.V.P., myN.C.A.A., The Cinderella Story and 3.2.1 Consulting — presented to Mr. Davis and four other judges, who selected two finalist teams, myN.C.A.A. and 3.2.1.

The members of those two teams underwent, head to head, a question-and-answer session with the judges, who then chose 3.2.1 as the winner.

“What surprised me right off the bat was the presentations themselves, the quality and the caliber,” Mr. Davis says. “I expected a certain level of delivery and was astonished at the actual level of delivery.”

“Going in, I said, ‘Maybe I just thought a lot of myself when I was in the program,’ ” he adds, laughing, “but I would absolutely put their work up against the work of agencies I’ve worked with.”

A motif common to the presentations was “pointing out how we’re lacking youth messaging,” Mr. Davis says, amid the mix of campaigns the N.C.A.A. runs each year to promote March Madness.

“They said, ‘You could mean more to us,’ ” he adds.

The students also shared a focus on suggesting that the association talk to younger potential fans of college basketball “as social beings,” Mr. Davis, “rather than as individuals,” and they described how the organization could promote regular-season games more to cultivate interest in the tournament.

What ultimately led to the selection of the 3.2.1 team, Mr. Davis says, is that its presentation was centered on an insight from interviews that “everyone could remember their first college basketball game and the earlier you start watching the more likely you become an avid fan.”

That led the 3.2.1 team to propose that the N.C.A.A. reach out to children ages 8 to 10, through their parents.

“The idea is to get to the parents through the social networking the parents are doing,” Mr. Davis says, “and have the parents create that ‘first time’ for their kids.”

“It’s hitting a younger demographic through an older demographic we already do pretty good with,” he adds.

Kristen Gollish, a member of the 3.2.1 team, says its approach was derived from conversations with Steve Lamping, a team member who is “a huge fan” of the Xavier University basketball team.

“We said to him, ‘Why are you a fan?’ and he talked about his first N.C.A.A. game when he was 8 and how he remembered it to this day,” says Ms. Gollish, 22, who is from Palatine, Ill.

“The things you’re into when you’re 22 you probably got into when you were very young,” she adds, so that tack “made the most sense.” The team suggested a theme, “Focus on family, a history in the making,” to be expressed through initiatives like family nights at games

The other members of the team in addition to Ms. Gollish and Mr. Lamping, who is from Cincinnati, are Kelly Hasselfeld, from St. Louis; Mia Hennessey, also from St. Louis; and Allie Sweeney, also from Cincinnati.

Other ideas proposed by the winning team include events and other promotions at warm-weather sites where students celebrate spring break and an experiential marketing effort called the Buzzer Beater Bus, which would appear games around the country throughout the regular season.

Mr. Davis says the N.C.A.A. intends to use ideas from 3.2.1 as well as from the presentations of other teams, adding that some will be shared with member universities as well.

Ms. Gollish says the Strategy Works experience “gave me an excellent idea of what the real world will be like.”

Ms. Gollish can soon find out how accurate her perceptions are. After sifting through “a few job offers,” she says, she accepted one for a position after she graduates as a sales representative for the Hershey Company.

Too bad she is not taking the Strategy Works class in the coming semester. The client, Ms. Oakenfull says, will be Nestlé USA.
 

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