Northeastern ‘Stylin’

As the university’s London campus expands, we’re taking proactive steps to build brand awareness of Northeastern in the UK. Sometimes, however, a proactive strategy is supplemented by happenstance. And then it’s a matter of leveraging that moment. 

Last Friday on National Public Radio’s flagship program, Morning Edition, host Leila Fadel scored a highly coveted interview. British pop star Harry Styles spent six minutes talking with Fadel, who was our graduate commencement speaker at Fenway Park just a week earlier. After a fade-out intro of Styles’ latest hit, “Watermelon Sugar,” the discussion went like this: 

Leila Fadel: Harry Styles is one of the biggest pop stars in the world, so he’d be forgiven if he didn’t come prepared for yet another interviewer. But he did his homework on me.

Harry Styles: Leila gave the best commencement address in Northeastern history.

Fadel: Wait, you watched that? 

Styles: I did watch it. 

Fadel: Oh, my God!

Styles: It’s so good. 

Fadel: Thanks for watching my speech, but we’re here to talk about you.

This interaction may seem trivial, but we know from our colleagues in Northeastern’s Network Science Institute that getting potent “influencers” to talk about you is a very effective way to build awareness. Not only is it an organic form of third-party validation, but when it’s someone of Harry Styles’ cross-cutting fame it can pay dividends down the road. 

Styles has more than 45 million followers on Instagram and more than 37 million on Twitter. Our social media team quickly put together a TikTok video that combined footage from Fadel’s commencement address with audio from the interview. (You can see it here on the university’s Instagram page, where we repurposed it.) The post was viewed more than 60,000 times in less than 48 hours—a way of amplifying the moment.  

Click on the image below to listen to the full NPR interview. Meanwhile, there is already an uprising on social media for Styles to be Northeastern’s 2023 commencement speaker. 

Harry Styles speaking with Leila Fadel on Zoom.