Ready to Launch Your Brand? Avoid These 3 Costly Mistakes
Our agency receives dozens of RFPs each year from colleges and universities nationwide that are committed to rebuilding or refreshing their brands. And the reasons they pursue rebranding efforts are numerous. From aligning more closely with new strategic goals to repositioning in a competitive market to strengthening enrollment to growing institutional awareness and reputation, the stakes have never been higher for colleges and universities to clearly articulate, and then deliver on, their value proposition.
Beyond being fewer in number, prospective students today are looking for genuine, high-quality academic experiences, exceptional faculty connections and mentorship, and a strong sense of community, all of which give them the knowledge and skills they need to thrive both personally and professionally.
A strong value proposition positions a college as worthy of their investment (arguably one of the biggest in their lives)—one that delivers a transformative experience that will prepare them for success in today’s complex and competitive world.
If your brand is doing its job, it will answer the question, “If our institution did not exist today, why would it need to be founded?”
Branding efforts require a significant amount of planning, buy-in from leadership, and resource allocation before they even begin. In higher ed, it can take months, even years, to get a branding effort off the ground. And once the branding effort kicks off, it could be another 12 to 18 months longer before all the hard work you’ve done—focus groups across your internal community, quantitative research among your prospective student audiences and other external constituents, strategic messaging and creative concepting, visual identity development, photography, and the creation of brand guidelines—is ready for prime time.
Considering the time, resources, and institutional capital invested up to this point, it’s essential to have a comprehensive plan for follow-through. In our experience, it’s at this juncture where we often see colleges and universities struggle most, often missing opportunities to realize the potential return on their branding investment.
Instead of laying out all the do’s, we’re putting a spotlight here on three critical don’ts. Here we go:
#1: DON’T Forget Your Brand Must be Embraced Internally Before External Launch
Set your new brand up for success by ensuring that you’ve got a well-thought-out internal launch strategy. It’s important to properly socialize the new brand across faculty, staff, and students so that they become familiar with the brand, feel ownership of it, and understand their role in championing it. After all, it was your community’s input during the very early stages of the brand’s development that was central to bringing it to life. Reminding them of the brand architecture process and the value of their participation can help build buy-in and fuel excitement, ensuring that the community is aligned before sharing the brand more broadly with external audiences.
The larger and more decentralized the institution, the more challenging it can be to ensure a consistent brand application across departments, schools, and administrative units. But the extra effort is well worth it. Ensuring a cohesive internal launch will help you realize the unified institutional brand identity you’ve worked so hard to establish.
There are many ways to socialize a new brand with your internal community—choose the approach that makes the most sense for your own campus culture and personality. For example, you might host an internal brand “reveal” event for your community, followed by mini-workshops designed to help stakeholders learn how to communicate and “live” the brand.
Alternatively, you might align your internal brand launch with an existing event. One of our larger university partners chose to integrate their internal brand launch during Fall Convocation, distributing t-shirts with their brand pillars to attendees and inviting faculty, staff, and students to speak about each brand pillar, conveying what it meant to them on a personal level. Demonstrating how their community members saw themselves in the university’s brand story turned out to be a great way to build a sense of ownership right from the beginning.
By planning your internal launch thoughtfully, you’ll ensure that the hard work invested in the rebrand translates into meaningful engagement and long-term success.
#2 DON’T Overlook the Need for Ongoing Resourcing and Investment
This is one of the most common pitfalls we see. So much time and resources are put into making the case for a new brand endeavor, identifying and engaging an agency partner, mobilizing the community to participate, and building excitement about the brand and its reveal, but there’s often a lack of understanding about what it really takes to consistently resource and advance the brand in order for it to thrive and produce the desired results.
All too often, we see a college or university dedicate a two or three-year investment in a new brand before taking their foot off the accelerator. This invariably results in a loss of all the brand gains and momentum that had been realized up to that point, and starting over is never easy or efficient. A brand in motion must stay in motion.
Strong brands don’t happen overnight. They take years of strategic and continuous investment to flourish. A brand launch isn’t the final step in the process; in fact, it’s just the very beginning. Dedicated resources will be needed indefinitely to fuel your brand’s success. A continuous investment ensures that the brand is implemented and sustained across multiple touchpoints and experiences. Without dedicated resources for marketing, design, content creation, advertising, and communications, your new brand risks losing momentum and failing to effectively inspire and engage your most critical audiences.
One incredibly successful brand we’re all familiar with that has become ubiquitous is Apple. Apple did not achieve the success and global brand recognition it enjoys today by simply launching a logo and clever tagline and then walking away. Over a period of many years, it invested heavily in consistent messaging, exceptional creative, smart marketing and advertising, and an industry-changing user experience.
In the same way, colleges and universities, admittedly at a different scale for obvious reasons, must maintain brand investment long after initial launch—whether that be through differentiating marketing collateral, smart traditional and digital advertising campaigns, or memorable campus visit and current student experiences—ensuring that its brand continues to be visible and that it resonates with its most critical and diverse audiences for years to come.
So even at the early stages of planning for a new brand and launch, don’t forget the critical importance of fueling it with a proper investment strategy. Be sure to work with your leadership to allocate sufficient budget, personnel, and time for the long-term growth of the brand. Invest in a dedicated team and external support, when necessary, to manage your brand’s evolution and impact.
#3 DON’T Ignore the Importance of Measuring Brand Performance
With your brand successfully in motion, and the resources and commitment in place to ensure that it stays in motion, an effective measurement framework must be implemented to track your brand’s performance against your strategic goals and objectives.
When it comes to brand, “set it and forget it” is simply not an option, and now more than ever, marketing leadership at colleges and universities are expected to continuously optimize brand performance and demonstrate ROI. Recent research among chief marketing officers in higher education reveals that while nearly all CMOs indicate that brand measurement falls under their responsibility, less than half actually have measures in place to track brand strength.
Without a framework for brand measurement in place, it’s very difficult to demonstrate ROI on brand/marketing spends, making it challenging to justify future resource allocation. We believe this is why we often see brand investment drift after the first two to three years post-brand launch. Poor measurement also makes it impossible to effectively identify areas for improvement and to optimize accordingly.
For example, among other things, you’ll want to know if your brand is resonating with your target audiences. Have you demonstrated an increase in brand awareness from your initial benchmark data? Has there been any shift in how prospective students perceive your institution’s academic reputation or in your alumni’s willingness to positively promote your college or university (net promoter score)? A lack of actionable measurement strategies leaves an institution uninformed about which strategies and tactics are not as effective as they need to be, resulting in a misallocation of resources and wasted marketing budgets.
Establishing a brand measurement framework strategy begins by identifying a set of agreed-upon key performance indicators (KPIs) early on. Brand strength can be measured in many ways.
Sample KPIs may include:
- Aided and unaided brand awareness
- Brand recall
- Net Promoter Score
- Key enrollment measures (inquiries, apps, visits, yield)
- Web traffic and engagement
- Student retention
- External rankings and peer assessments
- Alumni outcomes and employer perception
- Alumni engagement
- Donor engagement
Preparing for brand success must include the early allocation of resources for comprehensive measurement systems, including, but not necessarily limited to, brand tracking studies, competitor analysis, and performance dashboards. It’s essential that your community understands and agrees on the KPIs that have been established, and that you schedule regular reporting intervals to evaluate progress and make data-informed optimizations.
The difference between higher ed brands that die and those that thrive often comes down to these more common-than-you-might-think pitfalls. By ensuring internal buy-in, committing to sustained investment, and actively measuring brand performance, colleges and universities can set themselves and their brands up for long-term success.
Your brand is one of your most powerful assets. It has the capacity to become your most formidable tool for growth, engagement, and enduring impact.
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