Evan is the “deal-maker” – as the Director of Partner Development he leads the business development that connects even more leading brands and students.
Q: What’s your role at StudentUniverse?
A: I head up the student deals service that we are about to launch. I’m working on securing our top deals, determining the deals website design, how students get the cash from their savings into their pocket and everything in between. It’s exciting to be able to build something completely new for such a large user base and well established company.
Q: Why should companies work with you?
A: The audience that we cater to. Students are at the very beginning of their consumer lifecycle so there is decades of spending to be done and they are going to make significantly more than their peers who are not getting a degree. Put those two things together and students are easily the most valuable demographic for any company to target.
Q: What’s so interesting about the student market?
A: Personally, I find students level of influence on society and culture as a the most interesting thing about the demographic. Students are routinely the early adopters and trendsetters of everything from fashion to technology. Look at classic examples like Facebook or even UGG Boots, students adopt the idea or style, pass it to other students and all of a sudden, bam, it’s everywhere you look.
Q: What are “student deals”?
A: Any way, shape, or form that a student can save. Whether it’s in the form of cash back, an upfront discount, coupon code, or even free product, if it saves a college student money, it’s a student deal. Since that’s what we believe, we are making our deals platform extremely flexible to give students savings through a wide variety of methods.
Q: How do you stay connected with the student segment?
A: Students are on the cutting edge, so we need to do the same. By keeping up with social trends, staying connected on Facebook and Twitter, putting on events at places like spring break, meeting with our student interns, and pulling in student focus groups, we are able to see the latest and greatest in the student world. It’s an every evolving segment that literally turns over 25% every year with seniors graduating and freshmen coming in, so there are constantly fresh ideas and new concepts to jump on. In order to keep up, you need to be there right alongside them every step of the way.
Q: Are you observing any student trends you would like to comment on?
A: Students networking capabilities. Today’s college student has already been on Facebook throughout most or all of high school, so they have had ample time to build up a network of their peers and share with them daily on anything they choose. Add four more years of meeting friends on a college campus and that network can easily double. This means that each student is a huge influencer for all of their peers. The ability to tap into that network by a brand can be very powerful.
Q: Any brands that have done student discounting particularly well?
A: The gold standard in student discounting is Apple. They were able to recognize long ago that offering a student discount is the key to acquiring a new life long customer. The premise is simple, give a student a deal to get them used to using an Apple computer and in the interest of not having to learn a whole new operating system and overall enjoying their product, the students will stay as they grow up. It’s no coincidence that just a couple years ago Apple was the most popular computer on college campuses and today they are considered the most valuable brand in the world.
Q: In a world of daily-deals and flash-sales. What do you have that’s unique?
A: Daily deals are just that, daily. With so many deals coming out every day and expiring just as fast, students simply don’t have the time to sift through the noise to find what they want. On top of that, most of these sites are rarely hitting the brands that students are interested in as you seldom see a daily deal on a leading nationwide retailer. The value we hold is in ongoing discounts, available at any time, for a wide variety of brands that students connect with. These brands recognize that they need to do something special to win students business and the best way to do that is giving them a deal.