Seven steps for brand building in HE

Last week I attended the latest VC's forum at my university. Reflective of the times we are in, the mood was unsurprisingly dour - like many, we are in the midst of a voluntary redundancy round. The VC has begun talking a lot about brands, mainly through references to the Russell Group brand (which to me is more of an association) but she has begun to talk about Sussex as a brand. Her tone is suggestive that this will be a new way of thinking for our institution and one that may not be acceptable to all. The belief of the need to sell the idea of 'brand' internally is important and got me thinking about Mark Ritson seven steps of brand building that he covered in his MBS MBA class I was privileged to attend as a wannabe MBA instructor many years ago.

Mark's view, and one that is shared by most writers on strategic brand management, is that brand building at a strategic level involves more than design, communications and activations. Rather it involves some broader considerations, especially when one is building a brand from scratch. While universities would argue they have brands, I've written previously that discovering the logic of branding is more important than rebranding for many institutions, as they've largely just got the external signifiers of a brand - the 'assets', the internal bibles (sans any strategy), but little connection to the wider operation of the university and often of little relevance to any stakeholder.

So to build the base for a few posts on brand building, let's start with the seven step process of brand building (think of them as iterative rather than sequential steps).

1. The reasons: why are we developing a brand? Can a brand bring benefits, and if so, to whom? This step is often left out largely because branding is pushed by marketers as something that they are passionate about, but that leads to problems in the second step. Strategically brands should be able to make a difference, which is what we call equity. I've seen instances of utilities engaging in branding, despite there being no being no possibility of the brand shifting behaviour. Similarly, I've seen commodity programs rightly refuse to brand as it would upset large retail partners who believe ingredient branding would confuse their consumers. It's unlikely students will be asking for a 'brand' directly, which is good because it forces marketers to think about other benefits to branding. There are benefits internally for brands, including helping achieve those employer of choice aspirations, attracting partners (from overseas, industry, and suppliers), useful for b-school accreditations, decreasing the costs of acquisition, improving staff retention, higher prices, and potentially buffering against ranking falls and scandals. Spending a lot of time here discussing benefits to all will help build support for branding internally, which leads me to the next step.
2. Form a team: now step 1 assumes you have a senior team already but as I've mentioned above, branding should never be the sole domain of the marketing team. Paul Atriedes may be the One (you know I'll drop a Dune reference somewhere), but this is disastrous for embedding branding in an organisation. In my visit to Yamaha, I was impressed how the brand manager built a team around the CEO, heads of divisions, engineering teams, and designers among others. He realised that any buy-in would require sustained CEO support but also from division heads who had little knowledge of branding and a degree of scepticism about its value. Pick members who have influence, including those who may sit outside the immediate TMT, which could be union reps or heads of dept who can be more credible sellers/translators in specific domains.
3. Research: All branding is based in some research on your target markets, including loyalists, potential loyalists, and I would argue, those who are less attracted to your offer. It also helps to also examine your history in depth. I've argued that I've rarely seen good consumer research in unis, but it's also true I'm not always going to be the one to see it, but UCAS has plenty to start with. At Sussex we know there are those who preference us, those who put us on the list but not as first choice, and those who are not attracted to us. We need to do more to appeal to those who do not choose us first, largely because we don't get enough first preferences. We probably do too much with loyalists (alumni rather than present students), who will often tell us how amazing we are, but there is a bias here. Nonetheless, themes that emerge here may provide useful data for input. Channel partners matter in terms of how they see us, as do employers. Also, look at your history, there's undoubtedly some sources of value here that can help define your distinctiveness/authenticity. Most universities will need to more of the external stuff and for those potential students who are less loyal as they've always preferred the other things.
4. Positioning: I've written about this before, so won't go over it again, but positioning is effectively the brand's DNA, and it should be used to drive everything that comes subsequently. Thus, the first three steps are the foundations for your position, positioning is how you will compete and create value for stakeholders, and the rest is implementation and feedback. Most UK universities think of positioning relative to groups - they are more like 'research unis' or 'members of the RG' or 'plate glass' etc. But this conflates identity with competitive positioning, and rarely provides any source of meaningful difference. It's also heavily self relevant, driven by preferred practices/identity, but doesn't speak strongly enough to students. You need to find a balance between what students want, what makes you different, and what you can deliver on, the last of which brings me to...
5. Internal launch: what no comms? The internal launch is often the missing step for many universities, By this I don't mean, present the brand mantra and assets in a forum of staff as a fait accompli (although if they play that track by shoe-gazers Curve I may change my mind). Since brand's are promises to stakeholders, you need to be able to deliver them, and this requires a full audit of practices, products, structures, journeys and so on. The brand position is the anchor for assessing whether activities you do reinforce the brand or undermine it. This is arguably the most difficult step for many universities as they've often built convergence in their activities, and removals are likely to be met with resistance, which is perhaps why this step is avoided. But, bedding down support for the brand requires hard choices. When we were presented "the business school for change" in 2023 (only step 2 was undertaken and badly), many staff laughed in my Dept, largely because there was so little we could change. Unlike Adam Ant, ridicule is really something to be ashamed of.
6. External launch: now is the time for the comms. The positioning process will involve the development of brand assets, so now it's time to launch with stakeholders. Brand building usually requires one to leverage assets carefully, trying to build fame and uniqueness for each, and restricting investment to those that pay off the most. Changing them should be undertaken with care, although tweaking is normal. Campaigns for local, parents, clearing, agents, schools, international etc are need to be 'on brand' to reinforce your position. As many have noted, rankings are not assets, but at best can be grouped under some associations assuming you want them, but maybe they are best thought of as part of the next step.
7. Tracking: Mark Ritson has a great video on tracking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUmeHbFVsxA and one that is clearly on-brand for him. Brand tracking is simply some measures of your positioning and identity, and whether you are building expertise in the areas you want. Is your comms working? Is your delivery authentic and valued? And so on. Here you track your stakeholders impressions of the brand, usually yearly, with a range of quantitative and qualitative measures and can include a range of measures such as search behaviour, perceptual measures, behaviour, top of mind etc. I've very rarely seen this done deliberately by universities, largely because positioning is very rare, but as Mark rightly says, you're just fucking around if you're not collecting and scrutinising your tracking data. And, without it, don't expect internal support to continue.

I'm interested in the experiences of those in HE marketing about what steps are done, which ignored and so on. And, perhaps those that are done, but not leveraged enough? I hear a lot from teams of their frustrations and also that senior teams often see marketing as comms. In fairness my own VC has said the rebrand will not be a new logo, but I worry that it will be just about comms and avoid some of the internal alignment so fundamental to branding.

If you miss out steps, you either build a weaker support base, which will hurt you later, or launch externally and then find that the experience is off, or do things really well (I've seen this) and lose internal financial support because you can't show you're having an impact.

There's more to each step than can be covered in a post, and a lot more technical detail. I've long been interested in internal branding and also re-branding, both of which I'll post on at some point.