Targeting college spenders - marketing company Campus Concepts

Nation's Business, Sept, 1995 by Janet L. Willen

The basketball hoop in the company's atrium together with the blue jeans on Ian S. Leopold, the firm's president, tell much of the story of Campus Concepts. As Leopold says, his Baltimore company speaks the language of college students.

He was a student himself--a senior at Hobart College, in Geneva, N.Y.--10 years ago when he started Campus Concepts. It began with an advertiser-supported free shopping guide for Hobart students and has grown into a nationwide, multimillion-dollar college marketing company that focuses on students' specific needs.

When he was in school, says Leopold, now 31, students were hard-pressed to get information on the college town, and most of them didn't get to know their local merchants until well into their first year.

Leopold was president of Hobart's Entrepreneur Club in 1985, when, he says, "I suggested we build a product that focused strictly on the local market and the local students, produced for students, by students, tying in the local retailers, and offering special deals to bring students into their stores."

That idea became Campus Concepts' inaugural product--a 44-page shopping guide distributed free to students in January 1986. It contained local advertising and had eight pages of information on the college and area services.

That same year, Leopold wrote a business plan for Campus Concepts as an independent-study project. His professor didn't see eye to eye with Leopold and gave him a failing grade, preventing him from graduating with his class. "So I set out to prove the professor wrong," Leopold says.

He stayed in Geneva that summer to redo his paper, and he worked on the second Hobart guide. In four weeks, he sold more than 100 ads and made a $5,000 profit. In the fall he entered Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, in Evanston, Ill., and hired someone to do the next editions. He returned to Campus Concepts full time in January 1990, after his 1988 graduation and 16 months working for an insurance company in Chicago.

Leopold now has 16 employees, 12 of whom work full time producing various editions of the 150-page guide. Called the Unofficial Student Guide, it is distributed free and reaches 930,000 students at 65 colleges.

The guide reflects Leopold's belief that college students make up a major market and are prime candidates for developing product loyalty. The average student's buying power is about $5,000 a year, he says, which comes to $65 billion a year for the entire U.S. college population.

"Ask someone who's 27 years old and is working at a big company, 'When is the first time in your whole life that you ever bought laundry detergent?' If they were college-educated, it was pretty much when they went to college," he says.

Through an exclusive contract with the National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association, which arranges many college sporting events, Campus Concepts places advertising at member schools' recreational facilities. It also has a cooperative product-sampling program that gets national advertisers' products, such as Ray Ban sunglasses and Right Guard deodorant, into students' hands at member schools.

Leopold expects revenues of about $4.5 million this year and aims to top $10 million in 1997.

Despite his financial success, he says, "People like me are not motivated by money." They're working on their visions, he adds.

Leopold hopes that in two years, people will think of Campus Concepts when they think of college marketing. After that, he isn't sure what direction he wants for his company.

"I want to focus on one vision at a time," he says.