Hogwarts are to Millennials as Pink is to Women
But they’re trying too hard. They’re selling the wrong thing. And my friends and I won’t be fooled. – Lauren Edelson, in The New York Times, December 6, 2009
This young woman was not writing about a pink, “for women” ad campaign, but she so well could have been. Instead, Edelson was expressing her wonder at why so many of the colleges she toured this fall seemed to so desperately be leveraging Harry Potter “insider-ism” in “selling” their campuses. From schools like Harvard and Boston College to Dartmouth and Middlebury, Edelson noticed that there was always some reference to Hogwarts or Quidditch.
Why would that be the case? From what Edelson writes, it sounds to me like these colleges (as with most) are feeling the heat of the economic downturn. They’ve got to differentiate, and in immediately visible ways, so that it is clear through web sites and two-hour tours that their campus and programs are relevant to young people; that they are hip and “get” what today’s high school juniors and seniors are looking for from higher education. Except, by being so obvious in their approach (naming buildings after Hogwart houses?), they come off as a bit silly and irrelevant.
Some of the prospective students coming to tour campuses may well be huge Harry Potter fans and buy out the stores of those branded goods, but that doesn’t mean they’d buy a car because it had Harry Potter stickers on it or a broom for a steering wheel. The passion for the Harry Potter fiction and a safe, quality car are in no way connected. So, why would they think more of a college that names dorms after fictional Hogwart buildings? The two are not connected, so trying to connect them is plain weird. Let me remind you of Edelson’s quote:
But they’re trying too hard. They’re selling the wrong thing. And my friends and I won’t be fooled.
Those words could well be coming from the mouths of 42-year old women in your market. That would be exactly how they felt when faced with a brand inappropriately and misguidedly leveraging “pink” or stereotypical “girly” activities in an attempt to show them just how much it “got” them and understood how they live their lives. As with Hogwarts and college campuses, it smacks of desperation and disconnects women from the brand. Oops.
What really mattered to Edelson on her college tour, as she wrote, were things like this: that one college offered “two-student classes called tutorials,” and another college “let students weigh in on almost every big decision made by its administration.” No Hogwarts necessary.
So, here’s an exercise: read Edelson’s editorial, and switch out her references to college names with brands, and her references to Hogwarts or Harry Potter with “pink” or “for women.” One example:
“Why are America’s best schools comparing themselves to Hogwarts?”
becomes
“Why are America’s best brands turning themselves pink?”
***
Run your business, and make the products or deliver the services that themselves differentiate your brand in the minds of women. Then, you won’t have to try too hard and you won’t be selling the wrong thing.
