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Ex'pression College

Connection to eBay

The Leadership Challenge

Intrax English Institute

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The Company
Ex'pression College for Digital Arts is a highly innovative digital arts school located in Emeryville, California. Founded in 1998 by recording engineer and producer Gary Platt and Dutch software tycoon Eckart Wintzen, Ex'pression offers accelerated degrees in sound arts, media design, and animation/fx. Its 65,000 square foot campus is "fully loaded" with state-of-the-art media technology and equipment. It also enjoys excellent relations with local digital arts industry leaders, such as Pixar, Lucasfilm, ILM, Electronic Arts, and Tippet Studios.

The Business Challenge
Ex'pression had been surprisingly successful in building strong brand equity in the five years since it was founded, and found itself at a crucial point in its growth. Despite its successes, it suffered from low awareness, lack of consistency in messaging, lack of competitive intelligence, and needed to articulate a shared vision and a compelling positioning. They also needed to do all this within a relatively modest marketing budget.

The Solution
Our work with Ex'pression included the full range of our Research, Strategy and Management Solutions. Brand Interviews were conducted with 100 interviewees over a period of six weeks. The Incognito Sequence was performed with six Shoppers and measured comparative customer service at Ex'pression and six competing schools. BrandSequence worked jointly with Ex'pression marketing and admissions staff to design the research, selecting the appropriate customer groups, developing incentives, and reviewing the interview components and interviewer scripts. We delivered an extensive analysis of our findings and made strategic recommendations.

"Before we did this research, we had no validated data on how we were seen or thought of by prospective students, parents, or the world at large. We never would have been able to get this kind of data and testimonials from traditional surveys or internal sources. The research has been invaluable to us in formulating a compelling competitive positioning and brand strategy. BrandSequence has provided fresh perspective, keen insight, and great value for our investment."

-Karen Wertman
Marketing Director
Ex'pression College: Professional Grade
The Admissions Process
The research, especially the Incognito research, gave us an unprecedented view of how prospective students experience college admissions in general. Most schools were found to have customer service processes that made it very difficult for students to get all information they needed in order to make an informed decision about which school to attend. Findings from this research allowed us to give Ex'pression admissions staff a series of recommendations aimed at improving their overall admissions process.

Positioning
As described by interviewees, the obvious differentiation that Ex'pression enjoyed against identified competitors is that it was easily seen as the most professional school. All Brandscape groups strongly identified Ex'pression with attributes and constructs that pointed to, or revolved around the construct of "Professional." This positioning needed very little refinement in order to become a compelling and sustainable target positioning.

Key Findings
• Ex'pression was very strongly identified with cutting-edge technology and facilities.

• There was widespread acceptance of the value proposition of Ex'pression's accelerated program.

• Interviewees were surprisingly confused and misinformed about the details of comparative accelerated programs offered by Ex'pression and competitors.

• Ex'pression has created high expectations from the market, and must continue to deliver upon these expectations in order to maintain credibility.

• There was some ambivalence about the merits of accelerated programs over the traditional liberal arts curriculum.

• Ex'pression suffers from low awareness, locally and nationally - many interviewees had not heard of Ex'pression before the research, or had only learned of it very recently.

• There is considerable "brand pollution," or negative credibility with two main competitors - interviewees expressed few negative impressions of Ex'pression by comparison.

• Interviewees rated competitors relatively highly in comparative attributes, but gave Ex'pression a small but consistent advantage in all attribute categories

• Ex'pression enjoys an unusually strong brand equity and loyalty for such a new institution, also, interviewees expressed optimism and high expectations for Ex'pression's future.

Strategy
Our strategic recommendations centered around simplifying brand architecture and strengthening the current positioning. We worked closely with Ex'pression staff to build a BrandBook, which formulated guidelines for executing marketing communications that reinforce the positioning over the next few years.