Becky Mills, associate vice president of Bradley’s Office of Marketing & Communications, led a group of students in an “Interactive Bradley Brand Discussion” event hosted by Bradley’s chapter of the American Marketing Association (AMA).
Promoted on the chapter’s social media as an opportunity to “provide feedback and recommendations for the future of the Bradley brand,” the event consisted of Mills giving her audience prompts and pieces of advertising for the university to write responses to. She allowed anyone willing to share their answers; as Mills described, this created the effect of a mock focus group, with her as the moderator.
Mills opened by briefly detailing her decades of experience in business and advertising, which she stated played directly into how she formatted the event. According to her, Matthew Klein, senior management and leadership major and executive director of Bradley’s AMA chapter, got the ball rolling by asking her to speak in an interactive, non-lecture way.
“Since I’ve been a moderator for a very long time in my previous life, I said, ‘Let’s go through a mock moderation about the Bradley brand,’ because that would be something that I felt students would be able to relate to,” Mills said.
A key aspect of the event was its incorporation of different Bradley slogans, ranging from “Built to beyond” to a newer “forward” theme that Mills said has recently become prevalent in advertising for the university.
When asked about the current direction of marketing for Bradley, Mills responded, “Forward,” citing the potential of the one-word theme and its variants and stating that “Built to beyond” is planned to be in less active use due to it not being well-received.
A manifesto for the university created by an outside agency centered around its opening sentence: “There’s forward thinking and then there’s forward doing.” While students critiqued a banner with the slogans “Built to beyond” and “Boundary breaking through new model making” for the lack of clarity in both messages, a separate billboard using the slogan “Put your future forward” was better received.
Mills also showed a PSA which used the “Built to beyond” concept to communicate that Bradley’s founder Lydia Moss Bradley knew that “beyond” was a journey rather than a destination, and that Bradley is “built” to find it. While students were positive towards it, they had critiques mainly for aspects of its execution, including its use of non-Bradley-related B-roll.
The first section of prompts in the event revolved around defining aspects of Bradley, and included “People think Bradley is X, but it’s really Y” and “What contributes most to Bradley’s image locally, regionally and nationally?” From these, student responses honed in on the university’s opportunities, connections, size, student-to-faculty ratio and founder as some of its trademark characteristics.
The event then transitioned to Mills presenting students with documents of promotion for Bradley, asking them to write down any comments they had. These documents were a catalog of the university, a letter written for parents of high school students to consider the school and a pamphlet with information on financial assistance and programs.
Students critiqued the catalog based on its perceived lack of originality and fabricated feeling, but noted that the letter felt personal and compassionate to its reader, although it could have been benefited from including financial aid information.
When asked after the event, Mills listed the insightfulness, engagement and passion for the university from the students in her audience as a takeaway from the night.
“They’re our future,” Mills said of the students. “They’re the people who are gonna be leading the way for marketing in the future.”
For information on more AMA events, check out Bradley’s chapter on Instagram.
