In our latest post Brenda Hessney recaps Mark Hammer’s presentation at the February 19th Austin AMA Power Lunch Series. This post includes an audio cast and a slide cast of his presentation, you can click on the audio cast and follow along in the slide cast.

The fight for survival begins early for a tadpole; few make it to frog. Compass Learning needed to re-brand, re-price, plus re-launch. Three years ago, as the new vice president for marketing, Mark Hammer moved quickly to change Compass Learning’s presence.

At the lunch, Mark shared that he began making those changes by reviewing Compass Learning‘s website in conjunction with competitors’ websites. Mark’s talk, entitled “From Tadpole to Frog: Evolving into a Brand with Legs” began with this show of competitors’ home pages – all blue.

Compass Learning, a division of Reader’s Digest corporation, provides learning materials for specialized instruction, tailored to learner’s abilities. Five years ago, I worked for a competitor in product management, Harcourt Achieve. That company is now integrated into Houghton Mifflin. Yes, it’s website color is blue.

Mark’s group changed the website color to bright green, plus the children used in photos are singled out, expressing the A-Ha moment of learning something new. Meanwhile, the “blue” competitors continue using stock photos of kids crowded around a computer screen.

Supplemental education is a competitive space. Publishers are pushed and pulled by federal mandates. During my time at Harcourt, we were responding to the No Child Left Behind mandate. Now, the Obama administration has earmarked funding of educational initiatives in the Stimulus Plan. What does all this mean? For us marketers, it means there’s lots of noise and its corollary, the need to differentiate.

As Mark said, the first thing he did when he came to Compass Learning was pitch management for a redesign of the blue website. Austin based, Milkshake Media went to work.

Following a new corporate mission statement, product and pricing reviews were conducted by Mark and his team. Product pricing followed industry practice to charge school districts for “seats”. In other words, a per student price. This practice, I can tell you from my experience, evolved from the paper booklet, pre-computer, pre-server age.

“We price now by solutions, not seats,” Hammer said. “Plus, we used subscriptions to bring in a regular stream of revenue. The result was improved margins and simplified pricing.”

My key takeaway from Mark’s experience at Compass Learning is that e-mail response rates went down 29 percent in the second half of 2008. This field data shows me that this marketing tool has become so overused it’s delete-happy to our targets.

However, Compass Learning’s use of webinars with non-company experts, such as a Harvard professor speaking on new research into educational methods, reaches the high-level leads that can generate sales. When an entire school district adopts your supplemental materials, it’s a big win in this segment of the publishing industry. Those purchases can last years with refreshed materials, meaning more sales.

Listen to Mark Hammer’s presentation. It takes you through the ABCs of marketing management: differentiation, mission, pricing, lead generation, and effective use of marketing tools.

podcasts sponsored by The IncSlingers

Please share your thoughts on Mark’s talk, and your own experiences with evolving your company’s brand.