University Relations Senior Director David Hoover recently proposed our university’s latest branding campaign centered around the catchy slogan, “Do Something Big.” The campaign hopes to celebrate what is good about being a “big” university and focus on its many academic accomplishments. Unfortunately, this endeavor suffers from ambiguity and unoriginality, not to mention being a huge waste of student money.
Upon pondering the three words, several “big” things come to mind: The big riots that occurred last year, causing big property damage and a big loss in public respect. What about the big waitlists that keep students out of important classes and in school longer? Or the big debt that OSU is shouldering after constructing our big Schottenstein’s Value City Arena. How about the big jump in tuition forcing a big number of students further into the red, not to mention those forced to quit school entirely? The slogan doesn’t effectively promote doing something well, or even doing something positive. Here at OSU, size matters.
Furthermore, as long as we’re going to pay out the nose to make ourselves look foolish, we might as well do something original. For years, Bowling Green State University promoted itself using its “Think B!G” campaign and recently started its “Get the B!G picture” campaign. Even the Ad Council is now using the campaign slogan “Do Something.” It’s a wonder that we’re not already facing a big lawsuit. Regardless, it makes us look like copy-cats. Anyone with two minutes and a computer could’ve done something small and checked with our fellow state universities to keep this sort of error from happening. What did we pay these people, after all?
$273,000 dollars – to be exact – were spent to develop the campaign, the product of the marketing group HMS Partners. Truth be told, a graduate student in marketing could produce a better slogan. Imagine if the university offered a $20,000 scholarship to the student who thought up the best slogan. We certainly wouldn’t have ended up with anything worse than what we have now. Think of all the good we could’ve done with the money we saved. From shortening waitlists, to lowering tuition costs, this administration could have saved us all some big headaches. This financial hemorrhaging couldn’t come at a worse time either. OSU is already scrambling to pay its faculty and staff with something other than empty platitudes. How many raises were scrapped to fund this campaign? How many talented people will we see walk out the door this year as OSU once again does something big – and unnecessary.
