Do you listen to Internet radio, read newspapers and have a below-average budget? You might be a “Healthy Snacker.” Or maybe you like daytime TV, professional wrestling and don’t rely on mom and dad to pay rent. You could be a “Mobile Muncher.”
These segmentations, along with eight others, are the result of complex “psychographic behavioral profiles” used by likely campus dining provider Sodexo as it attempts to build menus and marketing tailored to the student population.
“When people don’t have a choice, they aren’t very happy about it,” said David Dayton, a 35-year veteran of hospitality and travel marketing at the Zimmerman Agency, the largest public relations and advertising firm in Florida. The goal, then, is to manage perceptions. However, the dining service will be providing a direct benefit to students—food— and that may help initially.
On-campus residents will have little choice in how they spend their food budget when the Multi- Purpose Student Center opens in the fall, bringing with it the university’s first dining service. According to a list of meal plans provided by the university, freshmen living on campus will be required to purchase a comprehensive, 19 meals per week plan at a cost at or below $1,600 per semester. Second year and other campus residents will have more choices, but will still be required to purchase a meal plan.
The marketing strategy will involve guiding customers before they form a solid opinion. “A lot of times, people are waiting to know how they think,” Dayton said. Even as an experienced marketer for hotels, he rarely forms an opinion about an overnight stay until something out of the ordinary happens. Managing perceptions is about managing that moment.
Institutional dining services are a lightning rod for on-campus criticism, but Sodexo, a company that earned roughly $20 billion in North America last year, uses a number of communications channels to shape opinions. The aforementioned student segmentation, based on data from consumer research giant Neilsen, is one method to target the message. Sodexo also has strategies for coopting existing campus media outlets, presumably including this newspaper, by creating media events, writing feature articles and by generating publicity for award winning employees that “deliver outstanding service and who epitomize our brand promise.”
According to the proposal submitted by Sodexo to the university, there will also be focus groups; comment cards; meet and greets with chefs; a full spectrum of social media messaging through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Flickr; and the targeting of potential tastemakers in the student population to “involve them in creation of the brand story for added believability.” “Brand evangelists” armed with bylined news stories, talking points and informational materials will hope to “create word-of mouth momentum.”
But students aren’t the only stakeholders: parents of students often control the purse strings and the university administration controls the contract. Student demographic information can be hard to pin down, Dayton said. A zip code analysis of the student population, as prescribed by Sodexo, doesn’t really target students, but their parents. Through public records, student names, addresses, phone numbers, major field of study, photograph, previous institutions attended and other directory information are available to whoever asks. This information and U.S. Census data combined with research from Neilsen and Teenage Research Unlimited is used to create a population profile. This information, Sodexo said in its proposal, allows it to build menus that cater to the specific campus population, but it will also be used to target marketing to students and their parents.
To students, the message might be that campus dining is sociable and convenient. Parents’ worries about their adult children receiving three squares a day will receive advertising in mailers and orientation packets.
But the marketing savvy of one of the “big three” food service providers would be meaningless unless university officials sign on the dotted line. Sodexo, through luck or skill, created a proposal focused on USF St. Petersburg, rather than the USF system, as Aramark did. In Bayboro Hall, where it is as likely to hear “Go Bull Sharks!” as it is to hear “Go Bulls!,” the St. Pete-centric proposal decked in green and blue—not green and gold—was a winner.
Aramark’s proposal, emblazoned with the who-are-you-trying-to-convince university slogan “United as One,” is chock full of photos of the Marshall Center, Tampa dining facilities and the bronze bull statute. While the selection committee wrote in its recommendation that either provider could reasonably handle the new dining service, the pros were weighted heavily in the favor of Sodexo.
As of April 11, Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Julie Wong said the university has signed an agreement and is waiting for a reply from the provider. She did not say the name of the winning bidder, as the university continues to maintain that records pertaining to the contract are exempt from Florida public record laws until the deal is completed.
Students will have some choice in the dining arrangement, Dayton, the hotel marketer, said; if the food is bad, second year students might decide to move off-campus or buy the smallest possible option. “The first ‘P’ is ‘product,’ ” Dayton said, referring to the Four Ps of marketing: product, price, promotion and place. The dining provider will also be eager to upsell service to the students that have more choice. This will mean convincing the freshman population that when the academic year is over, it makes more sense to re-sign for the comprehensive meal plan. Sodexo also plans to analyze the local restaurant scene to assess its competition. Much of this work might have already been done: Sodexo runs the cafeteria at USFSP’s neighbor All Children’s Hospital.
Additionally, reactive pricing, traffic-building promotions and increasing the average check size by creating “value offers” will be used to gain retail sales to non-meal plan holders.
In an era where media consumers willingly disclose specific, personal information about themselves to social media companies, focus groups and demographic studies might seem quaint—Facebook hasn’t been valuated at between $94 billion and $110 billion because of its infrastructure—but the methods work and continue to work.
Do people become immune to advertising if they see how the ad sausage is made? Not really, Dayton said. People are used to being marketed to, but it can be difficult because neighborhoods change. People lose trust in a company if bad demographic research leads to messaging that isn’t targeted to them.
