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Intelligence
The Elements of a Brand

Intelligence

The Elements of a Brand

Mar 02, 2015By mStoner Staff

There’s no one right way to do brand strategy.  It’s as much art as science, and different brand practitioners use different approaches. At mStoner, we’ve developed an effective approach to higher education brand strategy that gives higher ed leaders the tools they need to effectively communicate their brand internally and externally.

[Tweet “Four elements that should make up every #highered brand. #mStoner”]

The Elements of a Higher Ed Brand:

The brand framework itself has four elements:

  1. Brand essence. The brand essence is the glue that holds the brand together — like “Magic” for Disney, or “Safety” for Volvo. It’s really the core of the experience. It’s usually very short, 3 to 5 words, maybe less but it’s what captures the soul of the brand.
  2. Brand positioning. This is the promise that you’re making to all of your audiences about what you’ll be. This is common across all of your audiences. It should be aspirational yet grounded in reality. It should feel like a better version of what you are today. A good brand positioning will make you proud when you read it and will really be inspirational to people.
  3. Brand attributes. These are the main pillars, or themes, that make up the brand. As with the positioning and the essence, they are the same across all audiences. They should include a 1 to 3 word attribute name plus 2 to 3 descriptors to explain how you deliver on that brand attribute.
  4. Elevator points. This is conversational language. This is the way people actually talk. What this does is give people a language that they can use in those short moments that they have to talk about the brand either to each other or internally or externally when they’re in conversation.

To learn more about the elements of a brand, how to use market research to inform your brand framework, and how to translate the institutional brand into compelling audience-specific message maps, check out a recent webinar.

We encourage you to prepare for this webinar by downloading our recent higher education brand strategy white paper. The white paper explores the unique challenges of branding an educational institution and provides strategies for overcoming the most common hurdles.