Speech on Business Communications

Last Wednesday, Dave Guerin came to speak to our class. He is the executive director of university communications. This is a new department as of May last year to Louisiana Tech. Some things that his new department is responsible for would include institutional marketing. Because athletics are a peephole to how people view Louisiana Tech, they do their best to well represent them. They pair with Learfield Sports to try to get Louisiana Tech's brand tone the strongest it can be. He really emphasized Howe have to be consistent when trying to build our brand. The goals, ideas, and marketing strategies have to overall be the same  across all of our departments. Louisiana Tech did not even have a branding program until 2003. Before this, there were all kinds of weird Tech logos out there. The branding program helped consolidate those and eliminate them from the marketplace. He continuously stressed how much the strength of our brand depends solely on consistency. 

Dave's department also is responsible for all of the athletic or academic press releases. They must be timely where some viewers want to know the news immediately. He mentioned that their ingest challenge is that anyone can post bad news which spreads quickly and is not always accurate. More of this department’s responsibilities include press releases, experts database, being the primary point of contact for media for the university, printed media, and branding and imaging. Some things this school has trade marked are 'La Tech', 'Louisiana Tech', the logo, a photograph, a recognized image of the campus, and the bulldog. We cannot have 'dawgs' trade marked because this is already co-owned by Georgia and Washington.