When R. Ethan Braden took the helm as chief marketing and communications officer for Purdue University and Purdue Global, he had his work cut out for him.
“What I found in 2018 was a well-meaning but emaciated, antiquated, and dilapidated sort-of comms shop of 55 individuals that were often driven by the random and tactical marketing requests of the campus,” he explains.
Ethan’s first order of business? To build a world-class marketing organization to tell the Purdue story no longer as the driven but as the driver of the brand.
He took the helm of the 150-year-old iconic Purdue brand, which has graduated 27 astronauts (the most of any non-service academy, including Neil Armstrong). Throw in a pandemic, shifting notions about the value of a college education, and multiple target audiences, and things got complex.
Today, Purdue’s marketing team stands nearly 100 strong. They’ve elevated the $3 billion Purdue brand and its portfolio, which includes the flagship university and its Purdue University Online, three polytechnic high schools, Purdue Global for working adults, a new urban campus in Indianapolis, a research foundation, and an alumni association of 600,000.
And Purdue content reaches a bigger audience than it ever has. Under Ethan’s leadership, the team has become a content juggernaut, culminating with this year’s viral video, What Can You Imagine at Purdue?” (The spot amassed over 28 million views in eleven months on YouTube and was named a Content Marketing Project of the Year finalist.) It’s one of many reasons why Ethan was named Content Marketer of the Year for the 2023 Content Marketing Awards
Take a look at Ethan’s content approach, how he gets his team into character to tell the emotional stories of Purdue, and how he helped double Purdue’s marketing investment in five years. You can hear part of the story in his own words in this brief video interview.
Instilling a campus-wide mission to enchant
Ethan loves the word “enchant” in defining his content philosophy, and it has nothing to do with princesses or mythical creatures. “The definition of enchant is ‘to rouse and attract an ecstatic admiration and demand for.’ And when we think about content and its distribution with our target audiences, that’s the goal – to rouse and attract their ecstatic admiration and demand for Purdue in whatever that means at that moment. Whether that’s to come to school here, buy season tickets, come to work for us, partner with us on research, etc.,” Ethan explains.
Staying ‘in character’ instead of ‘on brand’
When Ethan arrived, the marketing at Purdue was often focused on colors, logos, taglines, and fluff rather than deeply understanding its students’ and alumni’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors – the emotional resonance that even manifests itself in tattoos of the school’s logo, name, and boilermaker mascot.
That led Ethan to ask (and answer): “How are you turning up that pride, the nostalgia, the love, the impact this place has on humans?”
To stay in character, the team developed an enormous, centralized database of professional assets and tools available for colleges and departments to localize rather than creating something on their own or making individual requests for marketing.
“There is freedom within this framework, so you’ve got some latitude to tell your target audience what you stand for. But the tip of the spear is Purdue University, and we want people to say, ‘This feels synergistic. This all feels like it’s coming from the same place,’” Ethan says….Read More