A new slogan, “Unstoppable starts here,” will be launched this weekend as part of a revamped university branding effort, but administrators said the much beloved “Fear the Turtle” will remain a key facet of the university’s image.
Officials decided to tinker with “Fear the Turtle” because they felt the slogan had become too associated with athletics, and didn’t do enough to emphasize academics and research.
The new slogan will be based around four key areas — research, student achievement, a vibrant state and a strategic location.
While officials originally planned to totally overhaul the university’s advertising strategy, a crippling budget crisis, combined with with student and alumni protests over plans to tinker with the “Fear the Turtle” slogan prompted marketing and communications officials to scale back their original idea.
Instead, they have quietly begun to unveil bits and pieces of the campaign around the campus — banners emblazed with the slogan and a shell in the visitor’s center, new wrap-arounds on Shuttle-UM buses, streetlight banners on Campus Drive and free T-shirts and bumper stickers, which will be handed out at the homecoming football game Saturday.
As a way to ease the transition, officials also orchestrated the Fear the Turtle ‘09 scavenger hunt to encourage students to hunt for tiny turtles hidden all over the campus and cash them in for prizes.
“We’re kinda doing as much on campus as we can because it’s cost-effective, and we want to bring the campus community together behind the whole thing,” university spokesman Millree Williams said. “We want to refresh the campaign so that everyone can really connect to it but don’t have to see it as something completely brand-new. ‘Fear the Turtle’ should really be a part of it because that’s really who we are.”
Though officials maintain that the “Fear the Turtle” slogan was intended to emphasize the university’s academics and research, they have found that the catchphrase was too embedded in athletics, since the university took advantage of free air-time during nationally televised basketball and football games to broadcast “Fear the Turtle” commercials.
“Our desire to get the biggest bang for the buck sort of started wrapping ‘Fear the Turtle’ in the athletics lexicon, and even though we were talking about academic and research, the venue kept overwhelming in many ways the message,” Williams said.
Officials used prospective students, parents and visitors as “guinea pigs,” Director of Design Margaret Hall said. They presented the subjects with three potential slogans, and the “Unstoppable” slogan won out overwhelmingly, Hall said.
Many of the posters and placards that will be posted this weekend to introduce the new brand are tongue-in-cheek, while also highlighting university assets. One such poster reads, “FBI – CIA – NIH – FDA – OMG. The world’s resources are in our backyard.”
This re-branding effort was prompted in part by the strategic plan, which focuses on moving the university toward becoming a world-class institution, Internet communications director Linda Martin said.
The new marketing campaign was originally a three-year, $1 million undertaking that kicked off earlier this fall. Because the university wasn’t in such dire financial straits when it began, the university’s marketing team contracted a Pennsylvania-based marketing firm, Red Tettemer, to conduct consumer research and develop a commercial set to air in January.
But after three rounds of budget cuts, the rebranding effort has been scaled back to the typical annual base budget of approximately $250,000, limiting what officials can afford.
In addition, both the assistant vice president of communications and marketing and the director of marketing resigned during the course of creating the new campaign. Other vacancies in both the communications and marketing divisions won’t be filled due to the hiring freeze.
“We’re going to use our existing resources as efficiently as possible to get the new marketing initiative underway and hopefully grow over the next few years,” Vice President for University Relations Brodie Remington said. “I think if we could spend, when better times arrive, a little more, we can point to an impact on research funding, on gifts to the university, on the number and quality of applicants to the university. That’s what this is all about really.”
The university will present the campaign to the Marketing Committee of the Board of Trustees — an advisory board that provides direction on strategies intended to better the university’s national standing — marketing division for feedback tomorrow.
stice at umdbk dot com
