Brand refresh complete? Think again. Now the really hard work starts.

Why it takes a whole community to raise a brand

I want to begin with a caveat. Nothing I am about to write in any way underestimates the Herculean effort involved in undertaking a brand refresh. A university's identity is the product of many decades of diligent reputation building. Of the many students, staff, vice chancellors and leadership teams - and their output - that have passed through its doors. And of course, of a succession of marketing teams who have picked up the baton as it becomes their turn to expertly steer their brand through increasingly choppy and crowded waters towards brand nirvana. A desired state which above all brings global recognition - a shortcut through the decision making process to achieve ever greater student, industry and civic engagement.

Evolving, dismantling or reconstructing a brand to be better placed to achieve that nirvana takes grit and determination. You will have encountered inevitable nay-sayers, constraints, hurdles and curved balls along the way. You will have had to judge when to push and when to compromise. I occasionally find myself resorting to birth analogies when talking about this stuff. And with good reason. These exercises are often a labour of love.

Raising everyone up, together

But if a brand refresh only manifests on your website, in your brochures or in advertising (the elements most obviously within your remit and control), it will - at least in part - have failed, as crucial as those are in their own right. For a brand to truly ignite, it needs people who don't inhabit the world of marketing to live and breathe it. It needs to shape not only how they think of themselves, but how they behave in their day-to-day work and interactions. That means taking the brand and seeding it through every facet and layer of an organisation. Less a marketing tool than a way of being, thinking and functioning. A way of raising everyone up, together.

This process is harder and messier than the brand development process. But it can be made easier if you organise yourselves well and plan for success. I want to share some of the principles we've used to do this with one of the higher education institutions we've worked with: Loughborough Business School.

Earlier this year we completed a process which saw the Business School take on a new name, visual identity and mission: 'Progress with Purpose'. (I won't take up time and space, but if you're interested, you can read about that here.) We'd been careful to involve stakeholders within the school and wider university throughout the process, and we were confident they were on board - at least theoretically.  With a general mood which felt open-minded and positively inclined, there was nonetheless a degree of hesitancy, probably best summed up by the following question which hung unanswered in the air:

But what does it mean for me?

I wish more of us would ask this question of our brand projects. Because when we talk about brands being authentic, I think this is in part what we're getting at. Can I relate to it? Does it not only reflect what I do (and want to do) but enable me to do more of that with greater focus, energy and impact?

Over the past few months we have set out to answer that challenge. Doing so has fallen largely into the following 3 areas which I hope you can find a way to apply to your own endeavours:

Operationalising the brand

It doesn't sound sexy, and in truth it isn't. This is about baking the brand into the very building blocks of your institution - including in a very literal sense. The project team looked at everything from codes on the university's various systems and what appeared on graduation certificates, to how the building was configured and decorated to encourage students to spend more time there. And with the School setting out to be first-choice for purpose-led people and organisations, no detail was too small: consideration was given to how redundant building materials could be recycled to providing everyone with recycled, reusable coffee cups.

Operationalising has also meant looking at the School's offering and how to evolve and innovate its services and courses to better serve its audiences, with staff inputting into the thinking and definition process. This has a much longer timeframe of course, but the foundations need to be put in place from the outset.

Identifying and delivering on strategic priorities

We established a principle very early on that any brand building activity had to be done in service of one of the three strategic priorities identified as part of the communications strategy we put in place. First: to deliver on the School's international postgraduate recruitment targets. Second: to forge deeper connections with industry. And third: to create a vanguard for change among the School's family of students, staff and alumni.

Delivering on those has meant immersing a wider set of stakeholders and partners into the brand. To a large extent we're relying on these people to surface an ongoing stream of stories and content that bring breadth and depth to the School's proposition. So we need them to have a feel for how it supports their own goals and touch-points, from the university's global engagement team and international agents, to those responsible for internal events, alumni relations and staff performance and recognition.

Leadership and organisation

The scope of this brand behaviour phase has at times been big enough to feel overwhelming. Overcoming that has required a firm belief in and adherence to how we structure and organise the core team involved, and how we stick to clearly defined objectives. I've come to think of this as Mission Control - a team of specialist sub-teams whose job it is to land everyone else on the moon. We meet monthly to escalate issues to the Mission Commander (the Dean) and share updates with each other, with the sub-teams meeting more regularly to progress their respective objectives within that.

Compared to the excitement and dynamism of the vision and creative work in the brand refresh phase, progress during this subsequent phase has been a story of incremental progress, one steady step at a time. But this is often in reality how the biggest transformations in any field are achieved (just take a look at this account from the Washington Post on NASA's strategy to win the moon race). Of course, this is very much aligned with the ethos behind ‘Progress with Purpose’ itself. In that sense, in a very real way, the School is putting into practice what it preaches.

It's still very much early days, but at the School's most recent all-staff away day the change of energy and engagement in the room was palpable. And remember, this was with a bunch of brilliant and talented academics more used to thinking about impact in terms of teaching and research than brand.

It takes a community to raise a brand. When you help people to grapple with the brand you've brought into being, and play their part in nurturing it, then they - and it - can truly thrive.

Photo credit: Dan Holmes