What's in a Name?

"Free samples of Stride gum?” asked the two pretty blondes standing outside of the Mass. Ave. CVS last Wednesday afternoon. Passers-by were offered colorful handfuls of sample-sized gum by pairs of young women stationed on either side of the street. Some hold their hands out mechanically to receive the gum, barely breaking their stride, while others ignore the women completely: preoccupied, irritated, or just utterly uninterested.

On any given day, the odds of finding freebies of some sort around the intersection of Mass. Ave. and JFK St. are fairly good. While this sort of marketing is familiar and widely accepted (if with some degree of resignation), there is another strain of brand name promotion slowly establishing itself on Harvard’s campus and on college campuses across the nation. Certain companies are targeting Harvard students by hiring them as “campus reps.” From the marketer’s perspective, college students are not only easy to target, but are among the most lucrative consumer groups—if their loyalty can be retained.

The slow but certain saturation of Harvard’s campus with brand names trying to establish themselves in the minds and wallets of college students has raised some eyebrows and a few questions. Are these student representatives a welcome presence on campus, and do they add something valuable to the undergraduate experiences of their peers?

Or can it be that they are simply viewed like the young women handing out gum in front of CVS: faceless figures doing the work of impersonal and (ironically enough) generic brand names, adding to the overly commercial feel of college life? Perhaps this “ridiculously long lasting gum” (the Stride slogan) has finally overstayed its welcome.

REPPING THE ‘ASPIRATIONAL’ BRAND

Harvard’s campus reps get their jobs in a variety of ways: through corporate ads posted on Facebook, or from abandoned positions to be picked up by friends and roommates, like the now infamous Papa John’s campus rep Merrily E. McGugan ’09 (see the March 15, 2007 article, “Papa John’s... Pimp My Ride!”).

And others hardly have to search outside of Harvard’s prestigious wrought-iron gates, like Kiehl’s campus rep Ravi K. Manglani ’08.

In the fall of 2006, after responding to a listing on the Harvard Student Employment Office website, Manglani began work as the first official Harvard campus rep for Kiehl’s cosmetics. And if the sparsely attended store event at Keihl’s Newbury Street boutique was any indication of campus initiatives to come, then Manglani was sure to have a tough task at hand.

“Our turnout wasn’t as high as we wanted,” Manglani says. “It was cold outside, and people had class. It’s very hard to convince Harvard students to leave campus sometimes. And that was one of the challenges we ran into.”

After his one semester tenure had finished, the company decided to temporarily close its campus outreach program in order to better restructure and streamline its operations. And in the end, Manglani is skeptical as to how effective campus rep programs like Kiehl’s can be.

“I go back and forth on this,” he says. “The objective is to introduce people to the brand and the benefits of the brand, so that if they can afford to start using it now they do, but even if they can’t it becomes an ‘aspirational’ brand.”

But at some point, “aspirational” becomes too impractical—especially for a consumer group so driven by what’s tangible and immediate that even the slightest variation from common goods can make it irrelevant.

DID SOMEONE ORDER A PIZZA?

While these concerns are certainly real—perhaps even widespread—many brand reps generally report positive feedback from their fellow students.

McGugan, who was the Papa John’s pizza campus rep for three semesters before leaving to study abroad in Australia this fall, recalls that her job made her “quite a popular person in Kirkland House, and all around campus,” she said in an e-mailed statement. She recalls providing the Kirkland Stein Club and her brother’s suite of six in Mather with pizzas throughout the year (the latter, in fact, did not have to pay).

Similarly, JetBlue campus rep Jason B. McCoy ’08 reports a positive response.

“Most people are really receptive to chips,” McCoy says, referencing the potato chips he hands out in collaboration with JetBlue’s partnership with Terra Chips, the official snack provider of the airline.

“Even though not everyone gives a positive response,” he adds, “it’s a good environment to work in because we’re all students. So, we understand the situation—that everyone has their jobs and responsibilities.”

For McCoy, it hasn’t been too difficult a product to market. And with little touches like a JetBlue link in the bottom of his e-mail signature, the process of integrating his campus rep identity with his overall campus identity seemed to go off without a hitch.

BRINGING IT TO THE PEOPLE

McCoy’s is an example that many can learn from, especially when it comes down to making the product more readily accessible for consumers. Even Kiehl’s rep Manglani was taking notes from McCoy.

“JetBlue was online so it was easier for them because no one had to go out of their way to get to the product,” Manglani says. “I started to understand a little more about product marketing versus online marketing.”

And at the end of the day, as Manglani notes, “would you really be spending that much money on facewash?”

DO WE REALLY NEED THIS?

It’s easy to dismiss all these stories as college students trying to make an extra buck any way they can. But there are more layers to these narratives than a one-sided view would recognize.

Harvard senior D. Zak Tanjeloff ’08 also jumped on the brand marketing bandwagon, but he was representing InternBar, a product of his own creation. Tanjeloff discovered that there were perks to running a bar-crawling group that went beyond being able to pay his rent.

“We sort of connected a community together,” he recalls, “which felt really good because everyone was new to New York City.”

McCoy and his JetBlue co-representative, Taylor M. Owings ’08, procured a donation of travel vouchers to both Comedy for a Cause and the South Asian Men’s and Women’s Collectives, who eventually used the vouchers to raise money for charity.

And even Manglani maintains that his experience promoting Kiehl’s was positive. “I’m happy I did it and I learned a lot from it,” he concedes.

Given that the job was paid in Kiehl’s products, we’re guessing his skin is looking better for the experience too.