To celebrate the last Board of Trustees marketing subcommittee meeting before the holiday season, committee chair Rachael Rice, class of ’88, brought in a cookie cake sporting the words “Have a compelling Christmas,” much to the amusement of her peers.
“Those words [compelling, considerate, uncompromising] have become a very big part of what we do in the day to day,” said Rice.
The quest for a new brand arose as a result of the need to better market the school, as well as inconsistencies in the message presented to the community at large.
Rice said, “For years, we didn’t need to tell the John Carroll story for a lot for reasons. Harford County was so much more insular, so if you were Catholic, or Christian, or wanted a private education, your child went to John Carroll, no questions asked. We’ve got competition outside the county that we didn’t use to have.”
She added, “When you’ve got a steady supply of customers, you don’t necessarily stop and say, ‘What do we need to do to keep our customers happy?’”
Recently, the committee has been attempting to determine, “What is our story? What do we stand for? Because before you can best figure out how to tell it, you have to make sure you all are giving the same narrative,” said Rice.
The committee talked to various focus groups, from current students to alumni from every decade, and found, according to Rice, that “everybody felt the same feelings of community, the same feelings of Christian family involvement, but nobody could really narrow it.”
Although the school defined itself for years based on the words “Tradition, Pride, and Excellence,” Rice noted the similarity of such a statement to that of Fallston High School’s “A Proud Tradition of Excellence.”
According to Rice, the committee aimed to find “why is John Carroll different from every other school out there” in its attempt to combat this.
“Every year, we have a different set of goals within our [Board] subcommittee, and that was the goal, create a strategic marketing plan for the school. [However], you can’t create a plan unless you assess what you’re already doing. We had to take steps backwards, and that’s when we went through the branding process,” said Rice.
The branding campaign was a “long process, an interesting process, really neat,” said Rice, with nearly a year of meetings, focus groups, and surveys, and “reams of research that went into it [the brand].
To reach the eventual goal of a new brand, Rice said the committee worked with the Peebles Creative Group. “Instead of having them come in and say, ‘This is who you are; This is what you stand for,’ they come in and they take alumni groups, donors, they take parents who decided not to send their child to John Carroll, they take parents that sent one child to John Carroll and the next child to Loyola, they take parents that sent 11 of their kids to John Carroll, they take all these stakeholders,” said Rice. “They ask what John Carroll means to you, so they’re really trying to pull it out.”
Part of the process also included pulling marketing information for various other schools in the area, in an attempt to determine what exactly sets JC apart. “Do they have fancier stuff than us? Probably yes, but did it really differentiate them? No, a lot of what these schools were promising didn’t really make them that different,” said Rice.
When looking over the information that had been gathered, “We realized that we didn’t really talk much about John Carroll the person and how his life epitomized what we are trying to achieve: scholars, patriots, people who are committed to their community,” said Rice. “It was a real ‘a-ha’ moment; it’s been here under our noses all along.”
About the reaction of the community to the branding, Rice said, “To see how the students have embraced it, it gives me chills, I get warm, I get excited because I think it’s helped us all talk about the school in a much more cohesive way.”
What has come out of the branding is “much more” than the concerns about how “we’ve spent that much time and that many resources to come up with three words” said Rice. “We learned a lot about what people are happy with, we learned a lot about what people are not happy with, we learned a lot about places we can change.”
The new tagline also has more practical applications in the operational aspect of the school.
“If you’ve got somebody that cheated on a test, not only did it hurt them, but it was not considerate of the entire community, it breaks the fabric of the entire community, so the fabric is weaker for everybody. That gives you another way to talk about it [discipline]. I hope it gives everybody a baseline for communication,” said Rice.
Now that the brand has been determined, the committee went back to assess “every single communication that goes out of John Carroll,” from “The Patriot” to athletic department press releases to Principal Paul Barker’s blog, according to Rice.
“We are now moving into the next phase. We’ve got our message; we’ve done our research to see how we’re already talking to people, now it’s time to assess if we are talking to people enough and in the right ways,” said Rice. “We’re going to really study it in terms of who do we really need to be talking to, how often, and also if things are cost effective.”
Kate Froehlich can be reached for comment at [email protected].