Centering: Make brand champions of all who know your school

 

Is your institution seeking proposals for a brand identity or an integrated marketing program? Contact Josanne DeNatale, Executive Vice President and co-founder of Cognitive Marketing at 888.241.4411. We'd appreciate being on your consideration list and the opportunity to discuss your marketing needs.

 

BENEFIT TO THE INSTITUTION
By encouraging all those within the institution—students, administrators, faculty, trustees, and alumni—to embrace the responsibility of being brand champions, awareness of the school’s unique voice will amplify. Communications tools alone, even the highest quality admissions publications, Websites, alumni magazines, full-fledged advertising, and public relations campaigns, cannot build the brand. Success requires that everyone who represents the brand know how to define it, create experiences that represent it, and talk about it with shared language and conviction.

 

HOW IT HAPPENS
Working in concert with senior staff and the president, we engage key representatives of each sector of the school’s community in a discussion about how they will contribute to the overall brand story. The purpose of this step is two-fold—to catalog the ways the brand promise is delivered right now and to stimulate creative thinking about ways to enhance the development of the brand in the future. Two management functions are critical to this process, a Chief Branding Officer and a Brand Management Council. This administrator and the council members must have excellent-team building skills and be able to represent and motivate a cross-section of the campus community. A key tool the Council publishes is a Brand Handbook, a guide for the internal stakeholders to use as they develop messages, plan events, or engage prospective parents, students, faculty and others in a conversation about the institution.

 

EVIDENCE OF RESULTS
Like any strategically based initiative, continual monitoring of progress against goals is critical. Campuswide communication is key so that results, which become evident over time, can be shared.

• A powerful example of the effect of engaging brand champions occurred at Gettysburg College. A member of the student senate, to whom the Brand Identity program was presented, incorporated a signal brand-building activity into the first evening of Freshman Orientation. The following morning, at Convocation, the school’s President, Provost, and other faculty and staff wove aspects of that activity into their messages as they welcomed these new members of the college’s family.