The 21 year old chief brand officer
While higher ed works harder than ever to market itself, Iowa’s Caitlin Clark showed student-athletes still do a lot of the heavy lifting.
In higher education we’re experts at a lot of things, including self-aggrandizement; and one of the stories we tell ourselves as marketers is that if we line up the right strategy, audience, message, medium, and metrics, we can attract the students and resources the institution needs to survive in this age of angst over cost and competition. So now colleges of every shape and size are going all-in on marketing and branding amidst demographic, economic, and political headwinds.
For universities at certain scale this means the promotional value of big-time college sports is more important than ever–and while football has historically reigned supreme in that role, this year women’s basketball captured the spotlight like never before.
At the center of this show were the Iowa Hawkeyes and their astonishing point guard Caitlin Clark, who took their program to new heights and marketed their university as effectively as any marketing ever could.
Since the earliest days of what is now the modern American system of higher education, universities have leveraged the populist appeal of collegiate athletics to attract resources and students.
In his 2017 article ‘Nobel prizes are great, but college football is why American universities dominate the globe’, Stanford education historian David Labaree describes how the economic insecurity of the earliest American colleges created the conditions which led to sports as a key public engagement tool:
“Often adopting the name of the town where they were located, these colleges could only survive, much less thrive, if they were able to attract and retain students from nearby towns and draw donations from alumni and local citizens.”
Labaree could have been describing Grinnell, which today is a small, selective liberal arts college, but in 1889 soundly defeated the University of Iowa 24–0 in their first sanctioned football game.
That inauspicious start only whetted Iowa’s appetite for athletics though, as evidenced by this 1890 quote from the university president Charles Schaeffer in John C. Gerber’s Pictorial History of the University of Iowa:
“Nothing can do us more good in so short a time and at such little expense as a winning game of football; as a means of advertisement, athletic success cannot be equaled.”
Schaeffer‘s wisdom readily applies to the Iowa women’s ‘22-’23 basketball team. After a 24–8 regular season, Iowa won the Big Ten conference championship before making a celebrated run in the NCAA tournament that saw them return to the Final Four for the first time in thirty years and knock off defending champs South Carolina in the semifinal before losing to LSU in what would be a must-see championship game.
Along the way, starting point guard Caitlin Clark’s magnificent play transformed her from star to superstar status and garnered praise from opposing team’s coaches, sports titans like Steph Curry, LeBron James, Magic Johnson, and Patrick Mahomes, and celebrities like John Cena.
If a primary job of marketing is building awareness, consider the stats ESPN published showing that this year’s women’s tournament attracted more viewers than ever with an average of nearly 10 million for the title game.
And this awareness matters because as higher ed gets more competitive than ever, schools that stay top of mind by winning sports championships and trophies can leverage that fame to their recruiting advantage, as Alabama has most notably done.
In 2013, research from Harvard showed how colleges that go from good to great in terms of athletics see close to a 20% rise in applications, have to discount their tuition less, and even attract more academically qualified students:
So Clark and her fellow Hawkeyes brought Iowa new fame and new fans, but in the process they also helped create impressions and build associations about their university.
I’ve said before that likable leaders build strong brands, and the qualities that Clark exemplified this season- innovation and creativity, creating opportunities for teammates, deflecting praise to others, and signing autographs before and after games (often for opposing team fans), all reflected similar attributes to what the University of Iowa uses in their own brand positioning. So it turned out to be prescient then in 2022 for the university to feature Clark in their :30 national TV spot:
Even Google trends data from January through March shows the clear spike in share of search, a fashionable brand health metric, for the University of Iowa relative to peer institutions.
Time will tell if all this attention will give Iowa a bump in applications and enrollments, but you can’t put a price tag on the exposure this season brought the university.
It’s hard enough to recruit students in this day and age and nearly impossible if they don’t know you; but thanks to Caitlin Clark and her teammates, it’s safe to assume more people know about Iowa now.
It may just be coincidence that Clark, a junior, is a marketing major with a minor in communication studies; but the way things are going she may be able graduate with ‘chief brand officer’ on her resume.
Editorial note: this article reflects my own individual opinions and not those of the University of Iowa.
