News

Take a moment and think about the brands that talk to you every week. Your bank. Your airline. The grocery store down the street.

Now think about what a prospective family hears from your school between their inquiry and their visit.

I’ve been wondering about that gap for a while. I call it marketing dissonance, and I wrote about it in my book, but the more schools I work with, the more I wonder whether the gap is growing instead of closing.

Here’s what keeps nagging at me. My grocery store knows what I bought last week, sends me a coupon for it on Thursday, and reminds me on Sunday if I haven’t used it. It is the most mundane brand in my life, and it communicates with more sophistication than most admissions offices I’ve seen. Meanwhile, we ask families to pay a luxury-brand tuition, and then we send them one auto-reply and a PDF viewbook.

So I’m wondering:

Are the families we serve comparing us to other schools, or to every other brand in their inbox? I suspect the latter, and I’m not sure we’ve accepted that.

How fast is fast enough? Early in my admissions career, I believed a 24-hour response window was fine as long as the follow-up was consistent. I’ve changed my mind. But I don’t know where the new line is. Two hours? Twenty minutes? Does anyone have data?

And where does AI fit? It could close the gap tomorrow by personalizing follow-up at a scale a two-person office could never manage by hand. Or it could widen it, if families start to smell the automation and we lose the warmth that is supposed to be the whole point of a small school.

I don’t have clean answers. But here’s an experiment I’d love for someone to try: pull up the last five emails a prospective family received from your school, then pull up the last five from your grocery store. Read them side by side.

Would your admissions office pass the grocery store test? And if not, what’s the first thing you’d change?

Brendan Schneider
Founder and CEO, SchneiderB Media