Remember those alcohol education/awareness programs back in high school and college?  I remember two things about them.  The first was an overwhelming feeling that the people involved in the programs were frightfully disconnected from me.  The second was an amusing “beer goggle” activity designed to simulate a certain blood alcohol level.  It was memorable, but it didn’t change my behavior.

College campuses across the country struggle mightily with alcohol and drug abuse on campus, and their challenges remind me of an all important question.  “How does one create a message and offer a service that breaks through the clutter?”

The answers aren’t always obvious, but we can glean valuable insights from the process a university uses to face these challenges.

For starters, when you analyze university outreach efforts, you quickly realize just how critical it is to know your target market.  I’m not talking about “thinking” you know your audience.  I mean understanding them at a core level.  What are their fears, desires, frustrations?  What keeps them awake at night tossing and turning?   If college students are the target market in this scenario universities must understand them from a social, psychological, and developmental level or risk becoming irrelevant.

Consider, for a moment, this alcohol awareness ad campaign.

The campaign focuses on consequences in an effort to connect with their audience on an emotional level.  Will this work with college age students?  I doubt it!  In fact, I’d argue it does more harm than good.  It doesn’t take into account the fact that college students find these kind of messages controlling and insulting.

This is where understanding your market becomes critical to success.  When we examine college students in terms of their psychological development, we realize that independence is a critical element.  It’s an important factor in their identity formation as they struggle with integrating the person they hope to become with what society “expects” them to become.  When you consider these developmental challenges it’s easy to see why college students place such importance and value on anything that validates their  independence.  As a result, when you talk to them about consequences and offer mind numbing statistics, their guard goes up, and they feel misunderstood.

If we understand college students on this deeper level we might create a marketing message that looks something like this.

This ad engages students by speaking to the duplicity of big business.  If we did our research, we’d come to find that many of these beverage companies use manipulative tactics to get college students to drink their products (big surprise!).   They fund prevention programs, while at the same time hiring “shot girls” and offering Spring Break promotions.   They plaster sex filled marketing messages everywhere, believing the tie in with their product will play to the stereotypical hormone crazed 19-year old student.  Now that’s an interesting and genuine take on alcohol prevention!  You create emotional intrigue and follow it up with information and initiatives that help “fill the gaps”.

Take a moment and look at your business at a macro level.  Who is your target audience, and how are you communicating to them? Is your message compelling?  If you answer “yes”, stop…and dig deeper.