Around noon Janice and I finished shopping in Cambridge. Went over to Car Talk Plaza to pick up our lunch companion. (It’s not a plaza – just a business office/clubhouse combo.) Bad planning on our part. Huge crowds. No parking. Congested sidewalks. Restaurants sold out. The Square was in bedlam!
A mob trapped us diagonally across the street from our destination. We moved the way we were pushed – and watched the crowd in fascination and a bit of fear. It was Harvard’s graduation day. An Affinity Army of students and families was strutting its Gang Colors.
Parents of graduates, grandparents and maybe a great-grandparent or two, flaunted Harvard logos on clothing, bookbags, pennants and more. Young siblings wore “Class of 2002” T-shirts. An ancient red “Harvard 1934” freshman beanie bobbed its way through the crowd. 1934? I gawked around a bit and finally spotted the elderly gentleman underneath that beanie. He was wearing a Harvard sweater that was way too hot for that Spring day, a sweater I bet he wore when he was a student there. More remarkable - he was pushing a walker down the sidewalk through a throng that could trample him without noticing. (Quick calculation: in 2002 a member of the class of 1934 was about 90 years old!)
In that slow-moving mass we were surrounded by other old alums in class blazers, by new alums with school T-shirts under unzipped graduation gowns, by future undergraduates with crimson Harvard balloons. Thousands of people. Thousands of logos.
Attempting to navigate to the Car Talk Offices we were pushed the other way – over to the Harvard Coop across the street. No sanctuary there! On the main floor was a second jungle of people. The Coop is a college store. So naturally, they were buying more and more Harvard plumage.
That Spring day badges of affinity silently screamed from every direction – announcing a bond that helped those people define who they are and define who they want to become.
Janice and I managed nonprofits for years. For additional years we supplied nonprofits with imprinted branding products. Even with that background we had never considered the possibility of such a scene. Constituencies of nonprofits, no matter how worthy, just don’t achieve the crazed intensity we observed in Harvard Square that graduation day. Here’s what we concluded:
Every successful nonprofit has a constituency of its own. It took Harvard, founded in the early 1600s, a few centuries to figure out that a logo-saturated constituency is a strong, supportive constituency. Naturally, Harvard rigorously enforces its intellectual property rights. It aggressively polices the licenses under which products imprinted with its graphics are produced. But the institution has taken a Disney-like approach to making its branding messages and graphics impeccably produced and widely available. There is a lesson here – one more universal truth the rest of us plebeians can learn from Harvard.
The Bottom Line has three components:
1) We suggest you stay out of Harvard Square on graduation day.
2) Realize that by displaying a badge of affinity a person not only adds to the organization’s visibility - at the same time the person is partially defining himself or herself by that display. Logos are personal!
3) Most important: displaying the branding element actually reinforces the affinity that motivated the display. Example: there is no way you can announce to the world ”I’m a big Taylor Swift fan” without the act making you actually feel greater affinity for Ms. Swift! (Unless, of course, you are Kenye West…..)
Displaying affinity reinforces affinity. Keep that in mind. It’s a marketing dynamic we hope readers of this blog will utilize efficiently and productively.
We want to repeat this point: Displaying a badge of affinity reinforces that affinity.
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My colleagues at DU could use this article in their marketing courses. This is a great example of affinity marketing and how it can be used.
Thanks,
John
“Displaying affinity reinforces affinity.” This is beyond denial in any marketing campaign. Not only does it work on the person that uses/wears the product but on all who see it. It’s both personal and public. It’s a marketing twofer.
Does such affinity lead to action such as alumni donating? This might be an interesting topic.
Reply from John: Absolutely! Affinity for a cause is the key to almost all philanthropy. It would be an interesting topic to write about in a future blog post. Fortunately, I have seen high affinity and low affinity and the fundraising consequences of each. I was once vice president of a college whose students and alums couldn’t give a damn about the place. At the other end of the scale I was VP of a college whose graduates had such commitment we won the US Steel Award for having the highest rate of alumni contributions in the country. Having seen both situations I think I can recall some good examples and funny anecdotes which will help answer the question you raise. I will schedule this topic. (Right now we have a cache of 17 articles ready to roll out over the next few weeks.)
John and I had an interesting encounter, last night. We ran into a really terrific local woman who read this post about Harvard’s Gang Colors. She was wearing her Univ of Denver hooded sweatshirt. She said that reading about the self-defining power of logos gave her an immediate urge to flaunt her own higher education affinity.
Incidentally, we met up with her at a lecture by author and NPR reporter, David Baron. He gave a talk about how mountain lions coexisted with humans for centuries in the Boulder Valley, but recently began to lose their fear of us. The phenomenon is occurring nationwide with many species, predators and nonpredators alike. You can read about David’s extraordinary book (Beast in the Garden) in the commentary about our town of Lyons Colorado (link is at top of the blog)
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