Rutgers football coach…brand expert?

There are a lot of random thoughts that enter one’s mind on a long drive.  As I mentioned yesterday, we’re on our way to Birmingham to see my beloved Scarlet Knights play in the Papajohn’s.com Bowl.  And in between the squeals of Wall-E on the DVD and my kids looking at the Western Virginia countryside, I pondered my next blog post.

So it is fitting that I ponder the resurrection of my alma mater’s football program in branding terms and see what lessons we can learn as we enter the next stage of marketing.

First some history.  Rutgers played Princeton in the first-ever football game in 1869.  There have been good years, bad years and just-plain awful years.  Some of the worst came about a decade ago and led to the hiring of Greg Schiano as head coach.

The program was so bad on and off the field, Schiano realized that not only did he have to build a team, he had to build the new brand of Rutgers football to excite perspective players, fans and kep influencers like state legislators whom he would need to ask for money for facility upgrades.  As we look back, the football coach used and still uses the basic tenants of successful public relations programs to build the brand from scratch.

• Do research and come in with a plan:  A “Jersey Boy” born and bred, Schiano knew he needed to market the program in the state using old fashioned grass roots tactics.  He and his coaches visited every single high school football coach in the state to reclaim connections that were lost by past coaching regimes.

• Establish your key messages and stick with them:  I’m a big believer in what I call “the mantra.”  It’s what other might call the 3-5 key messages that become the backbone of any communications plan.  For Schiano, it was that he would turn the program into a winner, that it would succeed in the classroom, that he could see a day that fans will come and that he would create a family atmosphere that kids would enjoy.  In the first few years there were more losses than wins, but Schiano stuck to those messages, even as fans and media questioned and laughed.  It was personfied by the slogan he created, “Keep Choppin,” that is now on signs and T-shirts held and worn by Rutgers fans.  Rutgers is now also among the top three in football classroom success in the country.

• Create a ‘mark”:  As the State University of New Jersey, Rutgers has had an identity crisis for as long as I could remember (insert Jersey joke here).  Feeding that crisis for many years was the lack of a brand icon.  For years, state leaders demanded that New Jersey be included in the brand icon visually either by added an “N.J.” or using the odd outline of the state.  The most laughable of these attempts resulted in an odd script “Rutgers” with a mini-NJ added almost as an afterthought.  Schiano decided early on to get back to brand basics and the “Block-R,” a scarlet R icon was born.  After many of the cutsy attempts, the basic approach has won fans over and united the Scarlet Nation.  So much so in fact, that after the Unversity spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in a new branding campaign, the branding company decided to keep the “Block-R” as the athletic logo because it had gained so much brand equity it would have been foolish to toss it.

• Expand your demographics:  One of the best example of this was the children’s book about being a Scarlet Knight distributed to newborns at New Jersey hospitals.  Talk about seeding the next generation.  Schiano also reached out to the ripe Florida recruiting territory using billboards and getting his coaches show on regional sports networks to succesfully recruit speedy players who have formed the base of subsequent successful teams.

• Seize the moment:  After years of knocking on the door (five years to be exact), and sticking to his message, Rutgers started winning.  Once that happened, especially after Rutgers started 9-0 two years ago and rose to number two in the BCS, Schiano didn’t meet an interview he didn’t like.  Everywhere you turned on TV sports shows, he was there.  The messages were the same as they were on day one, but now he had the platform and he turned the volume up all the way.  Even the PR stunts came out as before a big national game against Louisville, the Rutgers marketing machine arranged to have the lights on the Empire State Building turned scarlet.

• Use all the platforms:  Text messaging, expanded websites and streaming video, Facebook pages and yes even Twitter updates, the Schiano marketing machine continues to build the brand.  Now however, after four straight winning seasons, the next generation of New Jerey and even national high school recruits, don’t remember the old tainted brand, but only the new Block-R winners who have gone to four straight bowl games.  The sell is now easier because the brand has been elevated.

• The ultimate evolution:  The ultimate test of any successful brand is how it holds up in times of challenge.  This year in the face of a series of newspaper reports that questioned spending practices of the football program, the popular athletic director who worked with Schaino to make most of these changes, was fired.  However, two days later, the university’s Board of Governors still voted to go ahead with the $102 million expansion of Rutgers Stadium.  They cited the success of the program and its popularity.  They could not argue with the positive image the program has created for the university and the often-maligned state.

As we ponder PR 1.5 (or even 2.0) I think the campaigns of the future should be rooted in the basic tenants of the past like research, mantra, a stong mark or icon, consistency, repetition, etc.  No matter which platform of the future you use and who you are trying to reach, without following these tenants you will be hard pressed to have a winning program. 

*A personal note, an old friend of mine, Kevin MacConnell, has been Schiano’s marketing sidekick as the number two person in the athletic department.  If he is not hired for the number one job, the president of the university should have his head examined. Go RU!