On Brand Platforms and Icebergs
A few months ago I got curious again about higher education brand platforms.
I was curious to see how much they’d changed since I last looked in a big way, from a macro view, and not just at peer schools for a specific project. What’s new in higher ed branding??
If you’d guessed not much you’d be right, but it’s not surprising. This isn’t the place for breakthrough, standout brands. It’s too risky, and higher ed has enough risk now in this time of enrollment crashes, rising tuition/falling net revenue, and most recently, competitive threats from outside of the 2- and 4-year degree marketplace. So, lots of playing it safe.
Now, you might ask what’s so interesting about this particular line of inquiry? What could you hope to learn?
Mostly how schools structure and present their brands. Did they all follow a standard formula, which might be expected since higher ed is so homogenized? Which schools stick to the script? Which ones zag while most zig?
Beyond that, I chose schools that had something interesting about them: a high or low admit rates, or the percentage of students who chose to enroll. These to me are informal markers for brand acceptance. Generally, my take is that the admit rate indicates what the the school thinks of its brand strength (valid or not), while the acceptance rate indicates what students think of that school’s brand strength (usually valid).
Where did I look? Almost every school now has a website subdomain page or section. Some may only have a guidelines PDF, which may or may not have something more than visual assets and rules for how to use them. Some have built entire microsites for their brand — this usually coincides with the way the marcomm office does business (usually an agency model). Once there, I combed through the brand section looking to see how their brand is organized.
I should also say that it’s likely that some the schools that show very little about the brand on their website or in their downloadable guides have more documentation available to them, but aren’t making it publicly available.
As I progressed, I captured the words/phrases schools used for each element of their brand, as it varies. Oftentimes the words represent the same thing, which got confusing. So I mapped a few of the elements here:
Anyway, on to the the platform.
How are higher ed brands organized?
Typically a school will use one of 2–3 organizing principles for the brand: a platform, or a position, or sometimes an architecture. They might leave it there, at least for external audiences, or they might reveal much more. I took this as an indicator of 1) the existence of a sophisticated brand team, and 2) how much the brand team supports others in the institution to carry out integrated brand communications. This leads to another observation: the greater the sophistication and integration a brand has, the more resources are required to support it successfully.
These organizing structures are sometimes represented in visual form: pyramids, stacking diagrams, or overlapping circles. Oftentimes these diagrams include messaging strategies as well. And many times I saw the work of a particular consultant, repeated across different schools.
In any case, the vast majority of higher ed brands have adopted what could be called the MVV+P brand model, where:
M = Mission
V = Vision
V = Values (these two Vs can be swapped in order, but Mission almost always comes first)
+P = some combination of positioning statements, personality tone words, presence, and pillars/attributes.
Now, some schools don’t integrate their MVV with the brand. You’ll find the mission statement elsewhere, like the About section or the strategic plan, but not as a foundational part of the brand platform.
I’ve also noticed that many school brands exist in a delicate balance with their strategic plan. You’d think that these would be aligned but often they aren’t, sometimes due to the 10-year plan cycle not syncing with the brand refresh cadence, although they should. This leads to the strategic plan stating one set of foundational MVVs and the brand working with a different set, or ignoring them altogether. Most brands are built on one or more of these components, and they typically come out of a strategic planning process which might get updated every 5-10 years. That’s a long cycle in today’s marketplace, and it’s not surprising that brand communicators would find the pantry a little empty over that period.
What’s interesting to me is how so many schools use the same set of components but in different combinations, and in a different order. This is important, because the components should scaffold — they should build on each other for support. So when a promise is at the end of the scaffold and purpose is at the beginning in one brand but another has the order switched, the meaning and purpose changes. This doesn’t make it wrong, but it can make for a brand that doesn’t seamlessly extend outward.
Time for a new model
From what I can see, very few brands are intentional about how these elements are organized, and even fewer understand how they connect and work together.
After thinking about this for far too long, I’ve come up with my own organizing structure, complete with a metaphor to visualize it all. First, the structure:
A higher ed brand consists of 4 distinct levels:
- Foundational
- Structural
- Communicable
- Experiential
Each of these has a role to play, and each is anchored to the level above and below it:
Foundational
This is where the core brand is built, and it’s where you’ll find the school’s purpose, expressed by the mission/vision/values trinity. It’s the reason for being, the founding “Why.” It’s where your institution’s origin story lives, whether it be a land-grant charter, or denomination basis, or something else.
Structural
Built on the foundation, the structural elements connect your purpose through pillars, attributes, tenets, positioning, or other ways of expressing what you do, and why it matters that you do it. This is where you’ll see references to what are commonly (but incorrectly) thought of as differentiators: faculty/student ratios, academic rigor, diversity, and more.
Communicable
Now we’re getting to the level where the brand is almost visible to external audiences. This where brands will locate elements like personality traits, voice & tone words, position, and proof points. While these elements seem like things that should be communicated, they’re not quite viable as messaging language. They’re also frequently considered differentiating, but are not, as they are claimed by almost everyone. I call it communicable but not communicated — it’s still too foundational and structural to be ready for messaging.
Experiential
At this level, the brand isn’t described as much as experienced. This isn’t the place to talk about mission, or personality, or diversity, it’s where you show it through narrative storytelling. From this level up, your team is engaged in actual content creation, building touchpoints, messaging, and other experiences. If a school includes this level in their brand guidelines it’s usually through examples — ad campaigns, magazine features, viewbooks, and other items. This is show, don’t tell territory.
When you think about the elements of a brand platform this way, you might see them mapped like this:
What’s very interesting to me is how these tiers have, or should have, different levels of visibility. Some schools acknowledge that their mission statement, or attributes aren’t suitable for external communications, but most don’t.
And here’s where I get to say something controversial: external audiences don’t care about your mission, or your vision and values. At least not as stated. They don’t care because they assume every school has a mission. They assume every school’s mission is remarkably similar, if not indistinguishable from every other school’s mission. They’ll only care if your MVV is very different, in a very fundamental way. But this risks casting your institution outside of your peers in a consideration set for many audiences. Very few schools feel they can afford this risk.
This don’t care attitude extends all the way up the platform, through three tiers, and stops at the boundary between Communicable and Experiential.
External audiences only care about the experience. Their experience. Everything else belongs to you. The experience belongs to them.
Introducing: The Iceberg
With this structure in mind, I started again to think about visibility. What is visible, what should be visible, and how to think about visibility when applied to your platform.
You know what came to mind? An iceberg. Take a look:
As you know, most of an iceberg is underwater. I think we can understand how brand components are visible and therefore meaningful to external audiences, and some are for internal purposes only, useful for marketing and communications teams, but no so much for others. As you get closer to the surface, some components are more visible and also more communicable to your external audiences, even if they are not used in actual creative.
Now: think of the waterline as your storyline — the boundary between what customers can see and experience, and the brand elements used to generate brand communications, just under the surface. The bulk of the brand, from the foundation to the communicable, is beneath the surface, but just because it isn’t visible doesn’t mean it’s not important — in fact the heft of the ice below is what keeps the visible ice visible.
Bonus observation: the invisible vertical line in the iceberg that indicates relative visibility also dictates relative permanence. Foundational elements shouldn’t change that much, unless a total rebrand is underway (and a a new strategic plan driving it). The closer you get to the surface, the more flexible you can and should be with your brand elements. This is necessary to keep the brand fresh for a new enrollment cycle, advancement campaign, or maybe a new school or institute sub-brand that is built on top of the existing structure. The strength of what’s underneath, and your skill at building new experiential elements on top of it, will determine the success of the brand going forward.
Well, does that idea float?
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