Even when I’m not at work, I can’t stop thinking about marketing and branding. I guess it’s getting in my blood. My son is a senior and has entered into the college application process. So we’ve spent quite a bit of time on various colleges and university websites.
As a branding professional, I see tremendous branding opportunities in the way many of the college websites are handled. Poor navigation. Clutter. Conflicting information.
Some sites feel like they’ve been added to and tacked on and grown organically without any rhyme or reason. It is easy to criticize what is obviously wrong. It’s harder to find good examples of what to do right.
As an example of what I consider good work in branding a university, here is BrandLogic’s case study from St. Johns University. They did a nice job of cleaning up the clutter and focusing on brand. Visually it is clean, focused, good use of color.
But, like any good branding campaign, it didn’t begin with the visual, it began with the strategy. A focus on the customer… the target… the who. In the case of new admissions: it’s a primary target market of three: the parents, students, and high school guidance offices.
Also like most branding campaigns, the visual graphics are the most noticeable, but I believe it’s the strategy behind the clean visuals that really drives the impact home:
- editorial guidelines
- key positioning messages for specific audiences
- attribute words
- as well as the photo style guides
Brandlogic did a great job of showing what they did for the university, including an outstanding style guide… and after I dug deeper on their site, I found a very sophisticated, well developed process for developing brands and implementation across all areas of marketing: Lots of tools, repeatable processes and logical system for developing a brand and implementing the strategy.
Well done!
Related Post:
Too many stakeholders: Rebranding a University
Tags: Marketing Branding University Branding Brand Strategy Rebranding Style Guide
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Hey Chris,
Thanks for the nice comments! It is always exciting when someone picks up on all the subtleties of a complete brand campaign.
You are absolutely correct, a good brand campaign always begins with a strong strategic plan. I was also happy that you saw we focused on the customer, because our Web design philosophy is very much centered on making sites useful and usable–which means always considering the target audience first.
With regards to St. John’s, I must say that the client’s foresight into the value of branding and understanding of Web design made the job much more enjoyable and easy.
Best of luck to your son in his search!
Regards,
Larry Roth
President, BrandLogic Interactive
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