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.
