OR/MS Today - October 2003 President's Desk The Branding Dilemma By Thomas Cook INFORMS President tom.cook@calebtech.com In my first president's column, I said that unlocking the latent demand for our solutions is the most critical and highly levered task that we as a society and a discipline can undertake. Consequently, I made the marketing of our profession the number one priority of my presidency. We simply must do a better job at strengthening our identity and communicating the unique value proposition our profession has to offer to key audiences. Early this year, the INFORMS board approved the funding of an ambitious project to do the research and planning necessary to define our marketing position and develop the creative platform consisting of the messages and images that best convey our position and value proposition to the appropriate target audiences. I am pleased to report that the project has been completed and the results and recommendations were presented to the INFORMS Board in our August Board meeting. The Board was quite pleased with the results and has given preliminary approval to launch a multiyear campaign to market the profession starting in 2004. Final budgetary approval is expected at the fall Board meeting in Atlanta. Many of you may remember that prior to the current marketing initiative the Public Information Committee of INFORMS (PIC) was engaged in a branding initiative to "brand" the profession. Early this year, we decided to merge these two projects because it was felt that they had essentially the same goals, and we needed to integrate the branding work within the context of our overall marketing/communications plan. It was clear that we couldn't have an effective marketing plan without making a decision regarding what we name our profession. We also thought that because of the history of TIMS, ORSA and INFORMS that the issue of branding the profession was controversial and some of our members had strong feelings/opinions regarding "the brand-name." This hypothesis was confirmed by the branding survey that Gary Lilien and PIC completed early this year. We decided to tackle the broader marketing problem and address the branding issue at the appropriate time with objective third-party help from our marketing consultants, Phil Johnson & Associates (PJA). With respect to naming the profession, we (the Marketing-the-Profession Steering Committee) were guided by one overall goal, which was to pick a brand name that would be most effective in communicating our value proposition. We decided not to be overly motivated by preserving sensitivities that are historically based. We realized that whatever name we chose would be unpopular with some subset of our membership. Consensus on this topic is simply infeasible. We decided to ask PJA to recommend a name for the profession that would be used for all communication to the world outside of our profession. PJA strongly recommended the use of "operations research" for the following reasons: Of all reasonable options their research showed that operations research had by far the most brand equity amongst potential target audiences. All other reasonable options had some strong negative connotations with some important constituency. Operations research is the primary name used outside of the United States. Building a new brand is simply infeasible due to the INFORMS financial constraints. PJA goes on further to say that the name itself is not as important as a consistent and well-designed campaign built around the brand. For those of you who don't like operations research, please keep in mind that it will be used primarily for us to communicate to the world outside of our discipline. There is no intent to try and change how we think about ourselves, nor to change the name of INFORMS. Like many of you, I belonged to TIMS for the same number of years I belonged to ORSA. I taught in several business schools, co-authored a book entitled "Introduction to Management Science," and was a longtime member of the Management Science Roundtable. In short, my roots are strong in management science but I believe that operations research is the only viable choice for our external marketing campaign and hope you will agree with the logic that has brought us to that conclusion. So what's next? If the INFORMS Board approves the 2004 budget for the Marketing of the Profession initiative, we will launch the campaign in Atlanta at our fall meeting and give those at the meeting a chance to see the creative ideas that PJA has developed to effectively communicate our message. The specifics on the message, the creative platform and the 2004 plan will be the subject of a special plenary session at the Atlanta meeting. I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible in Atlanta and getting your feedback on our marketing initiative. Table of Contents OR/MS Today Home Page OR/MS Today copyright © 2003 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved. Lionheart Publishing, Inc. 506 Roswell Rd., Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060 USA Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969 E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com Web Site © Copyright 2003 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.