Dr. Randy Weckman
assoc. prof. ag communications
University of Kentucky

Dr. Deborah Witham
assoc. prof.ag communications
University of Kentucky

Background

The difficulty of developing a common unifying image for Colleges of Agriculture or Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences is readily apparent. Most Colleges of Agriculture are not nice, neat packages of common subject matter. Just look at what our subject specialists do: animal scientists test bulls, plant scientists study the interactions of soil, plants, and the environment, family and consumer scientists analyze food labels and insurance needs, 4-H programs are geared for campers, classroom groups, and clubs. Further complicating the issue, most colleges of agriculture are located in land-grant universities and have three primary missions: outreach, research, and teaching, with quaintly historic but possibly unfamiliar names such as Cooperative Extension Service, Agricultural Experiment Station, and Resident Instruction. (OH, BOY)
We, at University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, are no different. What unifies us? And how can we identify and describe that uni! ! fying theme in just a few words? That's the task we set for ourselves. We felt that the College didn't present a strong profile for people to respond to. Rather, we surmise, most Kentuckians would respond to the image of Extension, for example, without realizing its relationship with the College. Our goal was to establish the interconnections among the three programs within the College of Agriculture. In fact, our foremost goal was to unify the tripartite division into an image of one seamless College. The dean supported this vision, but we had to convince administrators and other key players that buying into this concept would not undercut their individual fiefdoms.
We wanted a theme that would unify the diverse subject matter and at the same time, within a few words, create a favorable image for the UK College of Agriculture. We also believed that if we devised such a theme, it would give us an anchor for a variety of media messages and marketing pieces badly needed by ! ! the college.

Method

As members of the Public Relations & Marketing section of Agricultural Communications, we approached the problem of a unifying theme by the best method we knew û brainstorming. During our session we realized what a seasoned group we were; indeed, we averaged more than 20 years of experience apiece, and we knew the College of Agriculture. But we needed the right combination of words to help everyone else know us.
We also wanted more than those few words. We wanted a concept that would launch a marketing campaign for the UK College of Agriculture, "the best kept secret in the state," according to our dean. To achieve this we had to change the way we worked.
In the past we had done piecemeal work, as if we were a factory production line. Publications were produced individually to meet client demands. This time, we wanted to be in the driver's seat, and we wanted a coordinated cluster of pieces that fit together, so that the whole was greater than the sum of! ! its parts. And we wanted to be able to build on these first pieces so that we didn't have to start from scratch each time. We knew that the Extension marketing committee was gearing up to ask for some fresh materials from our section; we knew that the administration needed to promote research and graduate studies within the College to get its share of state funds earmarked for that area; and we knew that the College's undergraduate recruitment materials were already several years old and would soon need to be updated. If ever we were to implement a theme that could cut across all of the areas of the College making demands on us, if ever we were to unify the College's image and our efforts, this was it. The time was right, ripe.
We also had the impetus to think fast: the ag alumni director, always on the lookout for novelty items, had approached us about doing a bumper sticker. Her arsenal included lapel stickers, balloons, shirts, mugs, key rings, window clings, and m! ! agnets, but she needed something new for the ag alumni summer chapter meetings and big fall alumni event. She was fresh out of ideas after 10 years on the job and suggested "borrowing" a slogan and concept from another ag college. She showed us the sample. We hesitated. Although borrowing is a tried and true Extension method, we weren't sure that the borrowed slogan sent the right message or met our needs. We already had the idea of coining a new, unified message. We certainly didn't want two messages out there at the same time, competing or perhaps conflicting with one another, certainly confusing our audiences. So we agreed to work on the bumper sticker as it was handed to us; at the same time, we knew that now was the time to come up with our own message.
So we set to work. Diligently. Methodically. Two hours and three dozen donuts later, we had two bumper stickers, ours and hers. Are you ready? Here it is: We Grow Ideas. It fit our goal, to create a slogan t! ! hat was short yet described what we did in the College.
We really liked it, but the alumni director wasn't so sure. She left hers and ours on the dean's desk to get his feedback. We held our breath, crossed our fingers, wore our lucky socks to work, and lobbied hard. Finally the word came back: ours. (P.S. The alumni director came on board once she realized the bumper stickers would be paid for from the dean's budget, not hers.)

Results

DISCUSSION
So now we had not only a bumper sticker, but also a theme and concept to market the college. In addition, we had a deadline. It was now late spring, and our first big rollout would be at our State Fair in August. (Our State Fair is a big deal. Some 750,000 people attend it in Louisville; the catalogue is 1 " thick with tiny type; and there's even a state law that school children are exempt from classes to attend.) We would have to compete for fair goers' attention against cotton candy, the midway rides, and the Wild Girl of Borneo as well as commercial exhibits that range from glass carving knives to aluminum window replacements to baby chicks hatching to cars and glossy farm equipment.
Against this cacophony of sight and sound, we had to make the College of Agriculture come alive visually and aurally. Each year we faced this challenge; each year we tried hard but had never truly succeeded before. We were determined that this year would be different.! !
Given our short time horizon we enlisted the support of our entire team: exhibit designer, graphic designer, videographer, photographers, writer, editor, carpenter. Everyone contributed ideas, energy, time and more ideas and time to produce the overall exhibit. We crossed function lines (the editor wrote copy, the photographers suggested design elements, the writer became the team cheerleader) in an all-out effort to succeed.
We decided the exhibit would feature a video as its centerpiece. That video had to be visually stimulating so fair goers would stop. We didn't want a standard university, institutional approach (preppy students, administration buildings with Ionic columns), but despite a generous budget we couldn't afford the high-tech techniques of an MTV video. Nonetheless, our exhibit
had to grab the fair goers by the throat and pull them in. (Remember, we are competing with the likes of the Wild Girl of Borneo.) And ours still had to communicate the tri! ! partite mission of the UK College of Agriculture. Finally, we need these pieces to work after the fair for other venues.
The exhibit we created in our minds would satisfy all of these demands. It would fill a space 20 feet by 40 feet, would include a few large, dramatic, backlit photographic transparencies on the outside grid, and a video with sound to keep people's interest. We reviewed our 1997 State Fair exhibit (which also included a video) and found the whole to be very busy, so we opted for simple and sophisticated. But we knew the power of freebies, so we decided to give away bumper stickers.
Sustaining fair goers' interest for very long would be difficult, if not impossible. After all, the nearby baby chicks are adorably cute, the irresistible aroma of popping corn is wafting through the air, and the midway rides and blue ribbon quilts are calling. We assumed that our audience was in tune with commercial television and might be "hardwired" for t! ! he 30 to 60 second commercial. With that in mind we set up the following conceptual model for the video: Four segments, each about 60 seconds long, with a beginning, middle, and close. The four segments would be an overview of the College, outreach, teaching and research. The beginning would be the theme, "We Grow Ideas: UK College of Agriculture," and the end, if possible, would repeat the theme. The segments would be butted against each other, so that even if a viewer saw only one "commercial" he or she would have a sense of the image of the College and would have heard our message.
Once this video was produced, we could take the overview segment and match it up with any other segment for a particular audience. We could also produce additional detailed segments in support of the particular area, such as teaching, to create a tiered piece: overview, general land-grant mission area, particular program successes and highlights. In this way, we could ha! ! ve a concatenation, a series of interconnected videos that contained a common theme and message.
We took our exhibit team through its paces, designing and building the actual display, selecting images, crafting text and captions, expanding our bumper sticker phrase into key components that would work as the shooting script for the video, the content for the exhibit, and the foundation for our future marketing efforts.
We met our deadline: the exhibit, with its video centerpiece, was installed by opening day of the fair. Before we explain what happened next, we'll let you see the video.
What happened next? The president of the university received an e-mail message from a university employee in another sector complimenting us on the exhibit and video, and in particular singling out a line of copy û "we grow ideas in the fertile minds of our students" û as capturing the university's mission. The Dean quoted from the text for an entire week in September a! ! t events leading up to our big fall alumni Roundup. He repeated his theme to a variety of audiences "under the tents," including Farm Bureau, Rotary, the mayor, prospective students, alumni and faculty, and a group of outstanding ag College staff members. (In fact, he seemed so fond of our phrases that Dr. Witham jokingly asked him for royalty payments instead of a pay increase this year.) Several months later, in November, the associate dean for instruction was still quoting from our words during his opening remarks at the College's Scholarship Banquet (850 in attendance, including students, parents, faculty, and donors). And the College's fleet of motor pool cars now sport our bumper stickers; at the statewide Extension conference in January 1999 the parking lot was filled with university and private cars carrying our message.
Also at that same Kentucky Extension conference several marketing pieces for Extension were rolled out based on "We Grow Ideas:&qu! ! ot; a video (with a coordinating jacket), a 4-color brochure as well as a black and white version in PDF on the web for counties to print out as needed, and 14 copies of the same tabletop display available for use statewide. And just this past week we learned of a presentation based on our theme that counties will be able to individualize with their own accomplishments when they talk with their Extension advisory councils or other local groups.
In the works are car window clings (the geriatric alumni set isn't as fond of bumper stickers as the alumni director had predicted), a brochure to attract students to our summer positions as Extension interns in the county offices using the bumper sticker as the front panel, and our own public relations and marketing section web page. So we feel good about our accomplishments in the past nine months.

Conclusions

In a more perfect world, we would have used surveys and/or focus groups to determine the current image of the College of Agriculture before we actually produced any materials. And we would have set in motion the machinery to track and evaluate the impact of our campaign before the first bumper sticker was handed out. However, exigencies of the situation precluded those. First, we were under time pressure. We had to act fast with the best knowledge we had on hand. Second, because the tradition of marketing the College of Agriculture had been scattershot and often focused on only one of the three major mission areas, rather than the College per se, we were entering new territory for us, without a roadmap. We successfully navigated the terrain, but we don't recommend the experience. In the best of all possible worlds, there would always be time for research and planning. We intend to start in on these areas before we add more pieces to our campaign to grow ideas.