Happy Easter to all!

Elizabeth Scarborough

Click here to follow me on Twitter

I just finished reading an interesting article by Andrea Baxter, owner of Bratface Marketing and co-founder of Smart Cookies, that provides an overview on the difference between PR and Marketing.

Baxter notes that she receives a lot of questions asking about the difference between PR and marketing and notes that people often think they are the same and that the two go hand-in-hand, when really, they have fewer similarities than meets the eye.

SimpsonScarborough, a market research firm that works exclusively with colleges and universities, seeks a Project Manager for its Old Town Alexandria, VA headquarters office. Candidates should have at least three years of project management experience. Interest in market research and higher education is preferred.

The Project Manager is responsible for start-to-finish project management including maintaining effective communication with clients, establishing and maintaining timelines, preparing client correspondence, drafting moderator guides and survey instruments for qualitative and quantitative research, working with external data collection vendors, coordinating and conducting focus groups, writing reports, and presenting to clients.

The Project Manager will be expected to travel to client campuses. Travel time is estimated at 10% of the position’s time.  Salary range is $40,000-$50,000, commensurate with experience.

Please submit cover letters and resumes to Renee Kart, Director of Project Strategy at rk@simpsonscarborough.com by Friday, April 29. For additional information about SimpsonScarborough, please visit our website at www.simpsonscarborough.com.

I spent all day Tuesday with my new friends at Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) in Calgary, Canada. Someone asked me if I had my necklace made to match our company’s visual identity. I didn’t…..but wouldn’t that be so cool?

Elizabeth Scarborough

Click here to follow me on Twitter

SimpsonScarborough, a higher education market research firm headquartered in Old Town Alexandria, is seeking two summer interns with significant academic background in marketing. Candidates should be rising seniors or have completed at least three quarters of their marketing studies. SimpsonScarborough summer interns will have the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with market research projects.

Interns will:

- Help with the creation and formatting of client presentations and reports
- Learn how to recruit for focus groups
- Learn how to program surveys
- Participate in proposal preparation
- Travel to at least one client meeting with SimpsonScarborough staff

 Interns are asked to work 25 hours a week; stipends are available. For greater detail about the firm, please visit our website at www.simpsonscarborough.com.

For more information or to submit your resume for consideration, please contact:

Renee Kart
Director of Project Strategy
703.566.1255
rk@SimpsonScarborough.com
1403 King Street
Alexandria, Virginia 22314

……don’t threaten, TRAIN! Do it the Rutgers way and develop an official certificate program that trains your institution’s employees how to reinforce your brand strategy. Beth DeMauro, Director of Strategic Communications and Brand Manager at Rutgers, wrote a great article for the April 2011 edition of CASE Currents, called Backing the Brand, about the Communicator Certificate program she and her team developed.

117 Rutgers employees have completed the certificate program and 134 are currently working on it. The program teaches employees who are responsible for communications how to tell the University story and reinforce the brand strategy. Honestly, I thought this program was pure genius the first time I heard about it a couple of years ago.

Forget getting your campus to support a comprehensive brand strategy….I work with many institutions that are struggling to enforce their institution’s very basic visual identity strategy. The Rutgers program takes it way beyond that proverbial “next level” and truly represents the future role of the centralized higher ed marketing department. This is definitely an idea everyone should be looking to copy.

Elizabeth Scarborough

Click here to follow me on Twitter