Brand Sprints for Higher Education
Perhaps you’ve heard of design sprints? They’ve become a thing in the tech and product development world as a way to quickly initiate and test ideas before making huge commitments — teams gather for a short period of time (anywhere from 2 hours to a few days) to engage in timeboxed activities designed to reveal product or service needs, ideas are formed, prototypes built and tested, and knowledge gained.
Sprints have been used for all kinds of needs, like building products, business planning, startup formation, and other endeavors. They have a few basic components in common:
- A small team of participants (4–8)
- A short period of time (from 2 hours to a few days)
- Timeboxed exercises
- Reduced conversation
- Regular voting to advance decisions
- Rapidly create low fidelity prototypes to learn from
- Test prototypes with users
Basically, get the team together, prep beforehand with research, understand the problem, brainstorm ideas, vote for the best one, build a prototype of it, test it with users, and learn rapidly. Replace months of careful but speculative assumptions about what users want with about a week’s worth of educated guessing that produces a testable idea that generates user feedback. Build on the idea or go back and try again, but do it quickly (it’s a sprint after all).
Initially, sprints were conducted in-person but remote working has empowered teams to perform all activities through some fantastic tools. So for each exercise, assume that the activities can be either in-person or remote.
Can a brand be sprinted?
Can this framework be applied to your brand? Sure, in fact the people behind design sprints have done just that. They’ve created a set of exercises just for the development of a brand, but some critical details have been left out, making it problematic for a higher ed brand sprint.
This is not the sprint you’re looking for
Why problematic? Brand sprints are great for startups, but you’re not a startup. In a traditional GV sprint, a few executives gather for a few hours and engage in 6 exercises designed to reveal the attributes of the company, product, or service. Team members write down answers to questions, develop values and brand attributes, place the proposed brand on personality sliders, vote on the best ones, and collect the artifacts of the exercises into a slide deck which is then given to the marketing department or agency to build a brand.
Hmm, seems like a few things are missing.
A deck is not a brand platform
Among my issues with sprints is the way they can sometimes leave open what the results are intended to do for you. And in the case of a brand sprint, it’s even more open-ended: the deliverable is typically a slide deck of captured votes — the top 3 values, the top-voted personality traits, etc. The results are meant to be consulted when others need guidance on brand matters — a brief for the brand agency, or the logo designers, or your brand communication team.
But this seems inadequate, and especially so if your small team will struggle to bridge the gap between a deck and a brand user manual. The sprint team represents what a few top-level people hope the brand represents, but if you are responsible for creating the brand expression it’s up to you to figure out what it all means and how to implement it.
Your school isn’t a startup
It’s been around for decades, and there are thousands of people walking around right now who know your brand as it is, and they have…thoughts. In fact your brand really only exists in the minds of the people whose lives it touches.
If you are contemplating a brand re-set, you can’t just ignore the current perception and drop the new brand into the community. You’ll have to incorporate your current brand into the new one in order to be taken seriously. That’s because your brand has to be derived from what your community believes about you if it’s to be genuine. Authenticity is built on shared values and beliefs. You can start with a clean slate if you chose, just don’t expect your community to accept the new brand at face value. You’ll have to earn (read: spend) your way into their trust.
Who’s not in the room
This is where my version of the brand sprint diverges — the team will welcome a new member: an imaginary but very real representation of your brand’s current position expressed by your research data. Part of the pre-sprint prep will be reviewing recent research data about your school’s brand perception among your core audiences. If you have no current data (1–2 years old) then I’d recommend capturing new data before the sprint begins through a few online surveys or interviews if you can. Your facilitator can prepare stickies with this data ahead of time and place stickies in the related exercises.
So now you’ll have a full team. Current high-level people, like your VP of Marketing, Enrollment, a CMO, and others.
Who we are vs Who we want to be
Finally, a sprint should help you build something new, so exercises should not just reflect where your brand is now, but show you where it could go. For that to happen, the team should use the first part of the sprint to understand where the brand exists now, and spend the remainder imagining what it could, and needs, to be so that you can accomplish your goals.
A Brand Sprint built for higher education
If you’ve gotten this far, there’s a good chance you’ve felt that your school’s brand needs something. So, you might be thinking: can our institution use this framework to address our brand situation? You might consider this because:
- A brand re-fresh was in the plans but we no longer have the budget for it
- Our institution is undergoing change and the current brand is inadequate
- The current brand relies far too much on attributes we can no longer depend on
- Competitive pressure is increasing and we’re not positioned well
So if brand work is needed, why might you consider a sprint? Well, let’s be honest: you might not be in a position to contract with an agency these days. Budgets are what they are but your needs can’t wait — you have marketing and enrollment goals and are being asked to do so much more with so much less. And you might feel that you have enough in-house resources to do this well. An in-house brand sprint could address much of your issues quickly and within your budget. And there’s the added benefit of your people getting the experience, building capability, and taking ownership that can only come from being present when the work gets done.
So, can you do this? Yes, you can, and I’m going to show you how.
The Plan
How long will it take?
Pre-sprint: a few days
Sprint: about 3–4 hours
Post-sprint: a few more days
Pre-sprint
Pre-sprint activities are all about making sure the team is prepared for a short burst of activity, so nothing can be left to just wing it. You’ll want to gather relevant background research: any perception surveys, admitted student questionnaire data, enrollment profiles, and more. The sprint team will be responsible for understanding your school’s current brand position, and your virtual team member profile will be constructed from this data.
Sprint
Four hours can be covered in one day or across 2 days, whatever works best for the team. You’ll work in bursts of 45–60 minutes with breaks in between. I’ve split the sprint into two parts: Part One is designed to build a foundation for the team; Part Two is for enabling the team to imagine what could be built.
Post-sprint
Much depends on what you expect to do with the sprint results. I’ve got a few ideas for that (see the end of the article), but expect to spend a fair amount of time building concrete documents
Part One: Understand
This 2 hour stretch is dedicated to grounding the team. In a typical sprint this phase leads to a problem-framing activity that sets up the rest of the sprint. While there are no specific problem-framing exercises in this sprint, the activities are designed to guide the team towards an understanding of your brand’s current location to better imagine where it needs to be in order to meet institutional objectives.
Step 1: What and How
We start with the widely used What How Why exercise developed by Simon Sinek, but with some revisions to adapt it to your particular needs. First, the What and How of your institution is known, and unless this a different kind of brand sprint, these two exercises are part of understanding. So I’m splitting them off from the Why, which we’ll do later.
Why do the Why later? Because I don’t believe that you can properly explore your why without spending time examining your brand through the exercises in the sprint. In fact many have told me that the Why changes for them — they assumed they knew why their school exists and what its higher purpose is, only to change their mind later. So we’ll explore your What and How now to begin our understanding of your brand as it is now, and explore your Why when we’re more grounded.
W H I T E B O A R D
Your facilitator draws three squares on the whiteboard. (I changed Simon’s circles to squares because stickies fit better) The outermost square is your What. Next is the intermediate square — this is your How. The innermost square is your Why, which we’ll complete later.
W R I T E
Each participant writes down on stickies their answers to the first question: What do we do? After 5 minutes each person places their stickies in the What square.
Then, repeat this process for How: each person writes their answer to the question: How do we do it?. Some examples could be: “We assemble educators in facilities” or “We educate students.” Avoid embellishments like “excellent” or “challenging” here; that comes later. Again, after 5 minutes of writing everyone places their stickies in the How square.
C H O O S E
Now it’s time for a couple of voting sessions. The facilitator will remove duplicate answers, and group together answers that are similar but different enough to keep. One voting session for each What and How.
D O C U M E N T
The top 3 vote getters for each are moved to the whiteboard corral, where the accumulated artifacts of each exercise are kept for summarizing later.
I N S I G H T
So what did we learn from this? First, note how working together without talking gets results fast without sacrificing quality. Second, your thoughts about what you do and how you do it are related to, but not hugely important to your brand. Keep this in mind during Step 3.
On to Step 2!
Step 2: Competition Sliders
Now we’ll evaluate how your school’s brand feels relative to your competition. I say feel because this isn’t close to scientific. You’re just guessing.
This is a mashup of traditional Competition Matrix and Personality Sliders. I’m combining them because the activities are nearly identical — in each exercise you place your school and your competitors on a sliding scale or a matrix between two attributes to arrive at a relative position.
The exercise begins with a quick survey to establish who your top 5 competitors are. This is likely very well known to everyone in the room, but it might be difficult to agree on the top 5, so we’ll do a quick note and vote if you don’t have a firm list beforehand.
W H I T E B O A R D
Your facilitator will draw these sliders on the whiteboard:
I’ve chosen these sliders because I feel they are best at establishing general traits, but your team could choose different ones before the sprint begins.
W R I T E & C H O O S E
For each slider, your facilitator will hold a stickie with a competitor name on it over the slider and ask participants to indicate where it belongs. Spend no more than 5 minutes for each slider, with minimal discussion.
Next, the facilitator writes your school’s name on a different color stickie and repeats the process — spend a couple of minutes helping them locate where your school belongs on each slider.
D O C U M E N T
What have you got? A good snapshot of where you think your school sits relative to your competitors along 4–5 dimensions. What I love about this exercise is how it allows the group to reflect on what prospective students possibly see when they think about the decision to apply or commit to your school and your competitors.
Keep in mind that these are just value judgements and that it’s okay to be outside of the pack, even if it means you’re not in with the cool kids. It just means it’s easier for your community to find you. So it’s not just who you compete against, it’s how you’re positioned against them.
I N S I G H T S
So what did we learn from this? First, you can see at a glance what schools you are stuck to, and where you have some separation. Is this where you want to be? If not, you’ll have a good visualization of where you could go and how crowded it is.
Bonus: Draw a line from your position on the first slider through the other sliders. Is that line relatively straight, or does it bounce around? What does that tell you?
Step 3: Ante Diagram (or Prize Matrix)
The Ante exercise is named after a gambling term: the ante is what players must put on the table before the hand is dealt — it’s an entry fee, also known as table stakes. In our context, the ante is the baseline offering — what any school in your tier offers students.
I’ve added this to my brand sprint because it is uniquely relevant to the higher education marketplace. Perhaps no market is as homogeneous as the 4 year degree granting market — same product, same majors, same curriculum (at least outwardly) with variations in pricing, reputation, and location.
W R I T E
We’ll start with participants writing down features of their school that seem noteworthy (some that come to mind are evergreen: small class sizes, personalized attention, etc.). Set the timer for 5 minutes and begin writing anything that comes to mind.
W H I T E B O A R D
While you’re writing, your facilitator draws the matrix below and writes the following in the respective quadrants:
C H O O S E
Now the group places their stickies in the quadrants where they match best. Duplicates/similars are removed by the facilitator. No voting for this exercise, but the purpose is clear: we’re looking to discover how your school can differentiate itself from competitors, or at least understand why students might not find you all that distinctive.
If you find you have far too many stickies in the bottom quadrants, well you’ve got some work to do. Fortunately the rest of the sprint is designed to get your attributes into the upper right.
D O C U M E N T
The Prize Matrix/Ante Diagram shows how features participants believe distinguish your school might actually cause it to blend into the background. Your facilitator can copy/paste the stickies that made it into the upper right quadrant into their place in the corral.
I N S I G H T
The matrix is a great way to list all of the attributes that you might believe are significant and take them off the table and see if you’re left with anything unique and valued.
We’re at an inflection point in the sprint. We’ve spent the last 2 hours understanding where your brand is now.
The next 2 hours is all about imagining where we want to be. Our exercises will move from exploration to aspiration as we look into a future for your brand.
Part Two: Imagine
Now that we’ve established a baseline for the brand, we can begin the process of imagining what it could and perhaps must become to be relevant looking ahead. So let’s start Part Two with a forward-looking exercise.
Step 4: Map your 10-Year Plan
In a traditional brand sprint this exercise at the beginning, but for me it makes more sense to place this after some background exploration has taken place as this is a forward-looking activity. It gives the team the opportunity to stretch out and imagine what could happen, not merely what will probably happen.
So go big! And remember that while more ambition = more effort, you’re going to be working on your brand in any case so you might as well spend your time on something grand.
W H I T E B O A R D
Your facilitator will sketch a simple timeline on your whiteboard, starting with Now and then intervals for 2, 5, and 10 years time.
W R I T E
Then, each person writes their own guess about how the school is perceived now, and then how they hope it will be perceived in 2 years time, and so on. What constitutes a “guess?” It could be as simple as “we will move up 10 places in US News rankings” but that depends on many things outside your control. I advise teams to think in terms of perception — something like “transition from safety choice to aspirational choice.”
C H O O S E
After 5 minutes each person places their stickies on the timeline. After your facilitator rearranges the stickies for clarity and removes redundant ones, members vote for the favorite goal for each interval.
D O C U M E N T
The top for each interval is placed in the corral. When you’re done it should look something like this:
I N S I G H T
Note how the stickies at each interval might be disconnected from each other; it will be up to the brand team to stitch these together into a cohesive narrative post-sprint.
Step 5: Discover Your Why
We started with the widely used What How Why exercise but with some revisions to adapt it to our particular needs. The What and How were pretty straightforward, but expect to work for the Why.
Straight talk: this is perhaps the hardest part of the sprint. But it’s the most important aspect of your brand and communicates your differentiation. Discover Why you do what you do, and find a million different ways to talk about it (that’s for a brand communications sprint). So spend 30 minutes — or more if you can — to reveal your why.
“People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.”
Simon Sinek
This is pretty basic but here it is: If you are content to know that students are enrolling at your school because it’s the closest to home, or because it’s the cheapest, you are mortgaging the future for the present. Because prices can be cut, and the trend away from residential means that close to home will soon no longer be an issue — you’ll find yourself competing with online schools that are cheaper and already in the home (can’t get much closer than that). The differentiators that you’ve counted on for years could be knocked out from underneath you very soon, and all it takes is a pandemic to bring that future much closer, much faster.
Or, if you think your market is different, that your prospective students will always prefer and pay for the experience you offer, then consider if even that market is growing, or shrinking right now.
So your need to offer a compelling and unique Why is here, now. Students may opt to enroll in the cheaper/closer/easier to get into school, but they won’t be passionate about their choice. And they’ll see more aggressive transfer marketing from your competitors, making loyalty ephemeral.
Your Why is what prospective students want to associate themselves with. When they see your optimism and enthusiasm they’ll want to join your community and follow your flag. Your Why is why your brand matters, to you and to others.
W R I T E
How this works: the group spends 5–10 minutes writing their Whys on stickies, then places them on the Why box. Since this exercise is so critical to the success of your sprint I’ve added an additional step: begin a 20 minute conversation where each person explains their why. Others are free to ask questions or silently write their own notes on stickies which are then placed next to each Why.
C H O O S E
At the end of 30 minutes it’s time to vote. Users place dots on their top choice.
D O C U M E N T
The top 3 Whys are moved to the corral, which should be quite crowded by now.
I N S I G H T
If you’re doing it right this exercise should have been challenging. The Whys will play an important role in the next exercise so the effort will position the team well.
Step 6: Identify Your Top Values
Now that we’re close to the end of the sprint, it’s time to gather all of the understanding and imagining you’ve done and create your top values. Your top values are interconnected with your Why, so placing this exercise here is intentional.
Your top values are qualities that you ascribe to your school’s brand. Some examples could be: Challenging, Welcoming, or Rigorous. The values should be restricted to single words as much as possible.
It’s important to note here that these values might seem to be not all that different from others. Partly that’s because values are used to drive so much brand communication, and it’s often the case that you’ll see the actual words in marketing and advertising. The thing to remember is this: these values won’t likely appear in ads (unless your advertising is uninspired). You’ll use these values later when building a brand platform. These values will inform and point towards your brand pillars — the statements you’ll create to build a brand communication strategy.
It’s also important to consider all the work you’ve done prior to this exercise to understand your school’s brand and consider how the Ante Diagram helped to position you (hopefully) in a place that is distinctive. Your top values should be authentic and resonate with your audience, while at the same time positioning you in your own brand space.
W R I T E
So grab your stickies again and start a 10 minute writing session, with each person writing as many values as they think are relevant. At the end each person places the stickies on the wall, while the facilitator removes duplicates and organizes them.
Each person gets 2 minutes to talk through their choices, with no discussion.
C H O O S E
A voting session is begun and the top 3 vote getters become your top 3 values. You’re done!
D O C U M E N T
Well, not quite. Your facilitator will move your values to their place in the corral, and if empowered will prepare a summary of the sprint. This can be as simple as a collection of jpegs of the exercises, or a much more robust report with recommendations for next steps and an action plan, or something in between. You’ll use this documentation to help you make decisions about brand communications, integrated marketing, digital campaigns, or whatever comes your way.
I N S I G H T
Well, that was a lot of work! But note what was accomplished with a minimum of discussion, a few stickies, and 4 hours. No, it doesn’t replace the work of a dedicated agency but it’s very close, the rest is up to you and best of all, you own this.
For your creative and content development teams the work is just beginning. This experience has documented what your brand could be, but to put yourself on the path towards your aspirations the work to create that will now begin.
Wrap up
So that’s it? Not quite. This is just the end of the beginning — you can continue this project with a number of next steps. Here’s a couple of ideas:
Brand Platform
A brand platform combines the results of your sprint with a structured framework for communicating your brand to internal and external audiences. It includes your brand pillars, which are just more complete iterations of your top values, expressed as statements that drive content development and messaging.
Platforms require time to write and develop and the work isn’t a good fit for a sprint team, but your efforts will give them a great foundation.
Prototype and Test
Unlike most sprints, brand sprints usually end without a prototype and testing with users. But that doesn’t mean you can’t keep the party going. Why not take your new brand out for a test drive by building a digital brand campaign prototype and run it past students?
Develop a tagline, some brand pillars, and build some ads that can be tested with your community. What to look for: do your test subjects believe the ads feel authentic and true to the school they know? Or do they think you’re trying too hard, that you’re making brand promises that can’t be kept?
Brand Book
What you’ve captured so far is a collection of thoughts and opinions of your team. A Brand Book creates a how-to manual for creating brand messaging and communications, and includes your brand platform, a brand style guide, brand assets and examples for all types of media.
A complete brand book can save time and resources by providing guidance to internal and external teams producing brand content for your marketing and communications efforts. It also helps to ensure consistency in messaging, language, and visual style.
Whew, that’s a lot! But it’s much less effort than months of research and strategy. Save that time and money for building great content in support of your new brand.
If you want to know more about me and the kind of work I like to do, visit:
By the way, I’ve written more about sprints for edu. Check out my ebook here.
