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We'll name an athletics department, you tell us what comes to mind.

Oregon.

(Nike. Speed.)

USC.

(Hollywood. The beach.)

Stanford.

(The West's answer to the Ivy League.)

Utah.

(...)

Sure, you might say that seven of Utah's teams finished the past season nationally ranked, that the football team is the original BCS buster, and that few campuses are framed by such natural majesty.

Good luck fitting all that on a bumper sticker, though.

The real question is: What is Utah's brand?

"We haven't settled on what that one thing is," said deputy athletics director Kyle Brennan. "We're trying to put it into one idea."

Utah is increasingly directing its marketing efforts at not only ticket-buyers — who already have a fair notion what Utah is about — but also prospective student-athletes — who often don't.

The calculus has changed in the era of Internet and social media, when coaches and their successes are no longer singlehandedly responsible for shaping their program's perception among recruits.

Players want more, players win games, and wins — more so than billboards — sell tickets.

So this has become a marketing problem, too.

How do you get these players, exactly?

Social anxiety • One of the first things Fred Whittingham Jr. noticed when he joined his brother's staff in January 2012 was the football team didn't have a Facebook page. There was a @Utah_Football Twitter account, but it was run by sports information, with little input from the team.

Whittingham, assistant director of player personnel Pablo Cano and digital media specialist Dave Rogers — whom Whittingham poached from sports information — spent their first year trying to prove that those accounts were safe in their hands.

Of Pac-12 teams, he said, "I think we were the last team to the table, or second-to-last team to the table, with dedicated social media sites for the football program."

A study by Niche found 87 percent of 2014 high school graduates used Facebook, 66 percent used Instagram and 55 percent used Twitter — though the latter number may be higher for recruits, who like to stay connected with coaches and fellow summer campers.

Red Rocks coach Greg Marsden realized the potential benefit of social media early on, Brennan said, and taught himself the ropes. Others were more resistant.

Whittingham thinks the department was pleasantly surprised last year when he proposed the hire of Madison Ford — an experienced social media specialist and not a "coach in waiting" — to run the team's accounts.

You may have seen Ford at practices, knifing in and out of huddles for intimate live footage that she shares on Periscope. She's a third the size of some players, and "if they see something flying my way, I'll have a couple people step in front of me," she said. "I've got some really good bodyguards."

Ford estimates 95 percent of her efforts are aimed at recruits, not fans, and Whittingham said the results have been "phenomenal."

"Really, I think, we're just getting started."

Flipping the script • Whittingham's background is unusual.

Like Kyle, he grew up learning the game from their father, a former NFL linebacker and longtime defensive coach. Like Kyle, he played for BYU and briefly pursued a professional career.

But afterward, Fred Jr. left football to spend two decades in higher education publishing, directing the efforts of 50-odd sales reps and a half-dozen district managers.

Some Utah coaches, he thinks, may have initially been wary of working with a corporate salesman.

"Honestly, I think they underappreciate how much recruiting is like sales and marketing," he said.

He observed, for example, that assistants were assailing recruits with the many positives of Utah's program before finding out what they cared about: "The kid's sitting there for minutes at a time just kind of nodding their head."

Ask, he urged them. Don't tell: "It's a simple sales principle, but it's amazing to me how much it was being ignored."

Here again, Ford comes in handy. Part of her job is analyzing which posts recruits are engaging with — @Utah_Football and otherwise. When she found out last year that players were into gaming, Utah doctored up personalized covers of EA's "Madden" (i.e., "We can get you in the game") and told them quarterback Brian Johnson once graced the cover of the company's popular "NCAA" series.

Utah now employs four recruiting assistants who compile reports on each recruit's performance every Friday. When a coach casually mentions to a young wideout that he was impressed by his one-handed catch against Bingham, this is the fruit of their labors.

And Whittingham paid JumpForward to create a new recruiting database that coaches can access on the road, doubling as a coach-tracker for the compliance office.

All this, combined with a more collaborative effort between area recruiters and position coaches, is in the hopes that Utah can persuade a recruit to visit their campus before other schools have convinced him that Utah has no girls, no parties and no chance.

Whittingham remembers current stars on opposing teams taking late official visits to Salt Lake City "and then all of a sudden they're thinking, 'Wait a second, I love that place. But I'm already in so deep with [another school] that I'm going to have a hard time wiggling out of that.'"

A united front • Brennan wants to provide help at a department level.

When he noticed that Salt Lake City ad agency Super Top Secret was hired by Oregon to create a recruiting sitea showy, multi-platform effort that allows a visitor to experience the perks of Oregon football without setting foot in Eugene — he called in Whittingham, Marsden and others to see what they thought.

Utah has since consulted with Super Top Secret, which created rendering videos of the new basketball facility to "whet the appetite" of recruits before the plans were finalized, and other agencies.

The focus, though, has mostly been data. Brennan wants to be sure what young athletes in Los Angeles, Houston and Miami are interested in before the department commits to a simpler definition of its merits.

In the meantime, Whittingham's department is reading a book, "Brands Win Championships," by Jeremy Darlow.

"You can go anywhere in America, I think, and ask a 12-year-old who their favorite college football team is, and who are they going to say? Oregon. And that's because over the last 20 years, Oregon has done a marvelous job of raising the brand of that program," he said. "They're the coolest, hippest, most cutting-edge program in college football. I mean, what else can they sell there?"

While Utah waits to discover its pithier self, it can still try to emulate the spectacular on-field successes of Oregon, USC and Stanford. Those help.

And it can learn from its mistakes, too.

Some fans will remember that replicas of the football team's new mountain-themed jerseys were on the racks at Scheels before the team even saw the real things.

Under Armour, marketing and the football program were on separate pages. Never again, said Whittingham.

"You could put that in a marketing textbook of how not to do it. ... There may be rumors of a new uniform this fall, for a game or two, that will be handled much differently. Right?"

Said Ford: "Much, much differently."

mpiper@sltrib.com Twitter: @matthew_piper