Branding Institutional Identity

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on a conference of enrollment management and mission officers from Catholic colleges and universities designed to explore how Catholic institutions market themselves.

DePaul University hosted the conference. Its senior vice president for enrollment management, David Kalsbeek, is quoted in the article: “Mission officers often complain that their college’s viewbook looks like it could just as easily belong to a public or a Protestant college. What they forget, he said, is that a viewbook is not a mission statement.”

I couldn’t agree more that a viewbook is not a mission statement. But mission officers are also correct–the pendulum seems to swing the other way much of the time.

Is it because institutional leadership doesn’t care enough to find ways to brand their identity? Or, is it because they think their market segments just don’t care? Perhaps it’s both.

DePaul’s experience with exploring how to brand its identity is described in the article:

“DePaul also studied how various groups view it, and neither its Catholic nor its Vincentian identity made the top 10, said Deborah Maue, associate vice president for marketing strategy. The university debated explaining what its Vincentian identity meant as part of its branding, she said, but decided that this would be too big a challenge.

“For most organizations, a brand is the external representation of the mission, said Ms. Maue, whose background is in corporate marketing. DePaul defines its mission as Catholic, urban, and Vincentian, she said, but that doesn’t mean those are the messages its audience is looking for.”

That’s an interesting insight into why some colleges and universities of faith may fail to successfully brand their institutions in a way that connects their identity to the market.

While branding by definition is tied to market research, most of your market segments you survey won’t be talking about identity. They’ll be talking about your brand–what they’ve experienced or heard you to be.

And if your brand experience is not explicitly tied to your identity, the only market segments you’ll find citing your institutional identity as being very important are those whose lives are all about your identity (e.g., clergy, faculty, administrators, and perhaps older donors who experienced the brand when it was tied more closely to identity).

Furthermore, if most of your prospective students are not from your theological heritage, how would they be looking for it?

But even if market segments are not looking for your identity, does that mean the institution shouldn’t be communicating the key takeaways about how its institutional identity uniquely influences the student educational experience? 

The role of branding is to strategically communicate identity, brand, product, culture, etc. to market segments based on what is important to each market segment. While research tells you what’s important, it won’t necessarily tell you the connection between your identity and what the market is looking for. That’s going to take some digging and a good dose of creativity.

Branding institutional identity requires an institution to find out and communicate in relevant terms how its institutional identity shapes its educational experience in ways that meet market needs. As you do so, you may find that your branding of your institutional identity provides for you a market position that will be advantageous as you compete against institutions that lack an identity focus. 

In the coming posts, I’ll be sharing how we’ve been doing it at Concordia University Irvine.

Branding on the Website: Homepage

When I interviewed 14 months ago for my current position, I was critical of the university’s website. After consuming it for hours, I still had no sense of the brand or the culture of the institution. Its website was transactional with plenty of call to action buttons. But while there were multiple identity statements, the website wasn’t telling the Concordia University Irvine story.

The previous web team had put a lot of hours in redesigning the look of the site. There was no need to start over, nor the institutional will to do so. So instead of starting over, my boss (Executive VP, Gary McDaniel) and I decided we would build on the work that had been done and take the site to a new level.

But to proceed we needed talent on the web team, and we needed it immediately. We were down to one web designer and had no programmer. We turned to a website agency with which I had worked previously, Trusted Technical Solutions. I valued not only their talent, but also their experience with higher education culture and web design. One of their partners, Mark Merrick, joined us in the office, daily leading our web team. Additionally, Trusted brought with it a stable of web talent who could be plugged in on-site and off-site when and where needed.

Together we determined our direction for the site would focus on key improvements:

1. Implement our new branding strategy that included a storytelling initiative
2. Replace the obligatory and problematic higher education flash slide show on the homepage, tweaking the website template and look in a way that would accommodate slides for videos and written stories, but not require the team to make massive changes throughout the site
3. Redesign the lower third of the homepage to accurately communicate our brand and brand culture
4. Tweak academic homepage designs to accommodate videos/written stories
5. Clean up what turned out to be over 500 bad links and content errors throughout the site

Our goal in December was to meet these goals and launch a new university homepage by March. To begin with the university homepage was a strategic decision that would strongly communicate to university leadership where we wanted to go with the entire site. And the decisions made on the homepage have proven to be effective.

Trusted’s designer, Craig Hastie, led the redesign that incorporated the following…

• Design Changes to Highlight Navigation. We made some changes to font and design making it easier to read navigational links.
• Storytelling. We began to tell the Concordia story focusing on stories of undergraduate, graduate, and adult students and alumni.
• Brand. Per my previous post on the difference between brand and identity, we eliminated the multiple identity statements in the site’s header and footer, and put our brand essence in the footer.
• Brand Culture. In the institutional absence of a PR program, we strategically decided to use our main Twitter feed as a type of headline news on the homepage, allowing our tweets about university life to convey our brand culture (in addition to our storytelling).
• Brand Position. We added a brand positioning statement to the homepage describing who we are and why we are a distinctive university choice.
• Banner Ads. Finally, we provided two banner ads that give us some flexibility with content on the homepage, and allow us to promote new programs, important events, university achievements, etc.

None of this is  eye-opening stuff. But for a page that must be effective for a range of market segments, it values simplicity in design and navigation, and shows the varied potential of social media.

Most importantly, our homepage now reflects our brand as it communicates who we are and how our educational products and experiences impact lives. And because of the stories, engagement on the page has improved.

Given limited resources, we’re been making changes to the site in phases. An upcoming post will be about our exciting and engaging new undergraduate admissions microsite. Stay tuned.

The Power of Storytelling in Communicating Brand Culture

I love this commercial. In just 30 seconds, Subaru tells us a story that has the potential to touch us. It’s not a tear-jerker, but it connects to the human spirit with a universal theme of love lost and love found while letting us know what the Subaru brand culture is all about. And of course, it’s a Subaru that has been there for it all. I want one.

We know why this works. In this high touch, high concept story, as Daniel Pink says in his best-selling book, A Whole New Mind, we don’t need words to fill in the blanks, our right brain makes sense of it, and connects it to our heart. Their exchange of glances across the gym floor, the memories of another lifetime, the look at the old Subaru while walking to the house. Our right brain and our hearts have no trouble following it because we know the feeling or can imagine it.

In his blog, Neuromarketing, Roger Dooley talks about this in his post, Your Brain on Stories. He quotes a researcher on monitoring the brains of people reading a certain story. The researcher concluded:

Readers are far from passive consumers of words and stories. Indeed, it appears that we dynamically activate real-world scripts that help us to comprehend a narrative–and those active scripts in turn enrich the story beyond its mere words and sentences. In this way, reading is much like remembering or imagining a vivid event.

That’s powerful stuff that gets ignored in all of our left brain publications as we describe our features and benefits.

At Concordia University Irvine, one of our most important objectives in the last year has been to begin to tell the Concordia story. We have proven we can find words to describe who we are, and at times can debate which words to use. But stories cut through all of that and show our brand culture and how our students have been transformed by their experience at Concordia.

A few months ago, we decided we wanted to communicate how our hybrid delivery system in our degree programs for working adults can fit a busy family’s schedule. Now that’s heavy-duty left brain fare. But we wanted to show how it’s lived out. And we think our director, Ian Swanson of Couture Motion, gave us a story that relates to prospective adult students who dream of getting their college degree but wonder how to fit it into their life.

Much like the Subaru commercial, there are moments that seem familiar to us. Fixing breakfast early in the morning. Brushing your daughter’s hair. Off to work in the morning. Home from work. Kissing your kids goodnight. These are moments that recall feelings in our own lives, or we may imagine what they feel like. That connection matters as we work to recruit students. It always has.

Stories are powerful stuff. In this time when engagement matters–to students, search engines, etc.–stories have the power to use both sides of our brains to captivate us, engaging us to consider that we might want to be part of the story and the culture too.