How To Take Big Brand Swings (like NASCAR, Indy 500 and SXSW) with R. Ethan Braden, CMO of Texas A&M University

Asked about the trope that new CMOs shouldn't rebrand, Braden says some higher-ed institutions already had a platform and a compelling reason to believe in them for years, and he would not throw out one that works. A&M didn't have one, so he built one. In any role, he says, you need not just a tagline or logo but an identity and an understanding of what is 'in character' to get everyone singing the same tune.

“If you haven't it's working, I don't need to throw that out. But for us, we didn't”

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Gerhardt cites a mentor pointing him to Salesforce, which he says ran a front-page Wall Street Journal ad on its CRM market share for about twenty years. He contrasts this with the many B2B teams he talks to that change their messaging monthly or quarterly. His point is that there is value in picking a lane and staying in it.

“It's not always about having, like, like, the sexiest or craziest or clueless message. It's about the ability to, like, repeat it over and over and over”

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In 2018-2019 the Nasdaq billboard was associated mostly with companies going public, which made it a perception play. A full day was out of budget, so Gerhardt asked for the smallest increment, which was 15 minutes. He brought video and photo teams to New York and used the footage on LinkedIn. He argues nobody on social media cared that it wasn't up for the whole day.

“So We bought it for fifteen minutes. I went to New York with a video team with a photo team, we took the pictures”

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A&M had spent 'a pretty penny' on an Ag House at SXSW, but Braden says it mainly attracted Aggies, who already knew the university. For three years A&M has partnered with Fast Company magazine at its grill venue, with exhibits on innovations in space, health, farming and national security, plus panels of researchers and astronauts. Attendees routinely say they had never heard of A&M or didn't know about its work. Fast Company returned asking to add an entire A&M-focused day.

“who comes to an Ag house at South by Southwest? Ag. Right? Well, the Ag know us. That's a bit of the choir.”

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Braden has a team focused on knowing the university's roughly 4,300 faculty, what they work on, and the media value of that work. When outlets like the New York Times call about public health or egg and beef prices, the team routes them to a specific expert. An agricultural economist, David Anderson, went from 35 earned media hits two years earlier to 3,500 last year. Braden says Anderson 'didn't become an expert overnight'; the team gave him the megaphone.

“I'm gonna give you David Anderson out of the ag school who literally two years ago had thirty five earned media hits. And last year had thirty five hundred.”

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Faculty are free to talk to the press on their own. The team also runs media training and maintains a pool of experts it trusts to build credibility with reporters, because consistency and repeat appearances matter. Using these experts at events and in ads shows who knows what and how they perform. When a reporter calls, matching them to the right expert becomes 'a really easy equation'. One physics professor has over 2 million Instagram followers.

“So we're able to understand who knows what how do they do with the media, And when we get a phone call, it's a really easy equation of you need to talk to x y z”

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Early at Eli Lilly, Braden went deep on the pain indication of a drug. A leader, Mike Mason, asked whether he was 'a pain expert' or 'a great marketer'. Braden says focusing on the craft let him move across pharma, nonprofit and online and traditional universities, and that he believes he could do the same at a consumer brand like Yeti. The same leader advised taking jobs with 'enough clay to mold something beautiful', meaning a large gap between what is and what could be.

“are you a pain expert or you a great marketer? Because if you're a pain expert, I can never move you to something else? If you're a great marketer, I can put you anywhere.”

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Braden says the strong student demand built over 150 years and 600,000+ former students does not extend to the other audiences he cares about. Those include the federal government, companies hiring and partnering on research, and journalists such as the Wall Street Journal calling faculty experts. Outside Texas the university is known mainly for football and agriculture, which Braden's team calls 'true, but radically incomplete'. His job is to create the same demand among these audiences that exists among students.

“twenty five to forty percent of America have never heard of or at least have no opinion of Texas A&M University.”

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Braden says the charge from his former president when he joined was those four words. Dave Gerhardt, from his time at Drift and HubSpot, observed that while executives default to goals like adding 100 customers or $10M of pipeline, the best leaders also give a forward mantra that sets marketing's direction. Braden says that once the team understood who the national audiences were and what they needed, it could orient the marketing contribution.

“the charge for my former president. Was a simple four words. It was national reputation and national conversation.”

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His first move at A&M, as at Purdue before it, was an insight-based, distinct brand platform: positioning, messaging, character, creative identity and distinctive brand assets. The aim was to get not only his 70-person department but the entire campus to believe the platform was authentic and defining. That creates a common language for consistent external storytelling.

“we create a common language that we can tell the world one thousand times instead of telling the world a thousand things one time.”

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'Together we stand' draws on the Twelfth Man tradition and 38,000 students standing at every football game. 'Force' rests on three words: magnitude, momentum and mission. The proof points are 82,000 students, $1.5B in research last year and 650,000 former students. 'Good' ties to 150 years of permanence and to the land-grant mission of contributing to the greater good.

“at Texas A&M, together we stand as a force for good. And those are hardworking words.”

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Braden says that to be the best university 'for the nation', the nation has to know A&M on its own terms. That means understanding what audiences want from A&M's students and research and then appealing to it. The same two criteria, impossible to ignore and easy to understand, later act as the first filter for which stories his team pursues.

“We can't be ignored. We have to be impossible to ignore and we have to be easy to understand and demand.”

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Braden points to 'Nothing runs like a Deere' (predictability and performance), Yeti's line about getting you out in the wild and keeping you there longer, and 'The few, the proud, the Marines'. His aim is that hearing 'Ag' evokes a values-based leader of character at scale. He presents this as an ambition rather than something achieved.

“I have a ambition here that at some point, we will position the idea of ag as powerfully as you have when I say the word marine.”

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Braden first identifies audiences whose perception and trust he wants to grow. He then looks for novel access points where he isn't competing with a hundred other universities. 'Strategic presence' means having every right to be there and adding something to the experience, so people react with 'I didn't know that about Texas A&M'. He says this has earned A&M a lot of attention and greater understanding.

“I don't need to win the billboards of the highways. I don't need to win the security bins at the airport. I wanna go to where there's fandom and communities who are engaged”

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The relationship began with sponsoring a driver's helmet and grew into an associate sponsorship with a team plus race sponsorships. A&M sponsored the Coca-Cola 600 on Memorial Day with the name of a former student, a soldier missing in action, on the car's windshield. The goal was to tell A&M's story as the top veteran-serving university 'largely alone'. Braden says NASCAR's fans are getting younger, more diverse and more spread across the country.

“there's eighty million engaged Nascar fans in the United States alone. Forty one percent are women, and they're the most brand attached of any of the major sporting events.”

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A&M sponsored a driver and initially put just its logo on the helmet to create intrigue. It then layered in its commercial and had its social team working at the races. Dave Gerhardt noted A&M is the only university in IndyCar, which he said has 40 million fans, up 20% year over year.

“That a valuable piece of real estate when they go to the in car camera is the back of the Driver's helmet.”

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After three years of accumulated presence, the driver whose helmet and fire suit carried A&M's mark won the closest Indy 500 in its 110-year history. A&M was on board for the dramatic final 86 seconds. Braden says this drew major attention that weekend and across the other 17 races, along with search interest and inbound. Gerhardt drew the lesson that marketers want a viral hit right away and won't put in the years of reps that make one possible.

“Marketing can't create the lightning, but it can create the lightning rod. And our job is to put us into environments where the extraordinary can happen.”

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Braden wants everyone aged 8 to 16 to know that the five Dude Perfect founders are Aggies and that it started at A&M. He does similar work with another former-student-founded company. He stresses these are not just licensing deals or sponsorships but 'full blown partnerships' that A&M can tell stories around and create impressions with. Gerhardt framed them as the B2B equivalent of customer case studies.

“They're not just light sensing deals and not just sponsorships are actually full blown partnerships that we can then story against and create impressions about”

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A story must first serve the strategy: best university for the nation, impossible to ignore, easy to understand. It then has to fit a current content pillar. For the coming year these include fostering trust (affordability, access, value of the degree) and health, where all twelve colleges work on Alzheimer's and dementia even though A&M isn't known for it. Braden says that with so many colleges you can get 'extremely distracted', so focusing on a few priorities for a year is how public perception actually changes.

“You can get spoiled, but you can get extremely distracted. As to what would you focus on versus bringing in things two or three priorities that we're gonna nail for a year”

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He uses Cision to measure earned media volume, including per-expert counts such as the jump from 35 to 3,500 hits. He reviews the overnight hits each morning as a gauge of how outside perceptions of the university and its people are being shaped.

“I come in every day and see between a hundred and fifty to twenty two hundred media hits overnight from our experts and our university”

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Braden describes the president's announcement of the Ag Passport. It records service projects, study abroad, involvement in 1,300 student organizations and civic activity. The aim is to show employers what that experience looks like at graduation and to set the expectation that students gain it while enrolled.

“announcing what we're calling the Ag Passport, which is basically documenting all of the education a student gets outside of the classroom.”

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Braden says A&M's shared language (former students, the Twelfth Man, the ring) binds people across generations. More broadly, he wants marketing words to carry great weight. Gerhardt added that he and Dan have started intentionally naming internal things, like their Friday meeting and goal-setting process, because named things feel more real and get picked up through repetition.

“I want the words to carry weight. I want the one word to say a thousand.”

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Gerhardt says many marketers ask for a specific B2B landing-page example and can't make connections from elsewhere. He contrasts this with Braden, who learns from Nike, HubSpot and consumer brands rather than only other universities. Gerhardt says the episode made him rethink his own habit of interviewing only B2B marketers.

“You can learn more for people who are not necessarily in your industry”

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Braden says he learned this at Eli Lilly. He wants marketing to materially contribute to the organisation's goals, demand, reputation and future, the way finance, law or faculty do. He describes marketing as both art and science (gut, judgment and taste plus a lot of data), and says part of his role is bringing non-marketers up to speed on that.

“Materially contributing to the creation and the reinforcement and sometimes the changing of audience attitudes, beliefs and behaviors is what we're in the business of.”

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Braden says he has to build 'a hell of a marketing team' that can do justice to the institution, though he has quite a few remote workers. He says one advantage is that he can recruit people out of the corporate world to come to A&M.

“Paying them on a public university salary and get them to contribute at the level that they would at Yeti or Sony or Coca Cola or American Eagle.”

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He lists rising prices, affordability, access, relevance and usefulness of degrees, and the political environment as forces making families wary of whether, where, and for how long to attend college. He says he likes where A&M sits on the 'pendulum' of what the public wants and frames its role as being a beacon that the American dream is still accessible. Fostering trust is a content pillar for the coming year.

“I think for us it's a giant opportunity. I love where we're positioned in the spectrum or the pendulum of what the American public wants, but the decline in trust, the decline in perceptions of value.”

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