Branding & Positioning

Branding is a popular but often misunderstood concept in higher education. A brand is not a logo or graphic identity, and especially not a tagline; it is the market’s expectation of an experience distinctive to an institution. Reducing a brand to a tagline or an empty promise invariably makes it a cliché. When it becomes a cliché, a brand promise has little chance of accomplishing the crucial institutional goals.

We take a different approach to branding and market positioning. We:

• Delve into an institution's history, culture, and mission to discover and define the distinctive elements of the experience that can be the basis for a compelling brand or market position.
• Rigorously test those ideas with key constituents to determine which elements will have the most powerful impact on their decisions and define a more competitive market position. We can even model and predict the impact a brand or market position will have on enrollment and net tuition revenue.
• Create a brand of substance, distinction, and meaning - based on this rigorous market analysis - that becomes the foundation for how an institution defines itself.