The Mornings After Rebranding

So you’ve rebranded your university.

The brand is launched. You’ve received congratulatory emails from faculty members who actually seem to like the work. Your brand video was praised in the student newspaper. No alumni have started a snarky Facebook page to complain about the new logo.

It’s time to pop some corks and quaff some bubbly. You’re celebrating the end of a series of grueling meetings, long days (and nights) analyzing data and agonizing over designs and color choices. Perhaps some hard debates, a little arm-twisting, fights with colleagues or consultants. Video editing. Searching for just the right word. Thinking through your social strategy for this launch. You and your colleagues have earned a celebration!

And it’s also time to consider that the hard work is just starting.

Yes, it’s true! Here are a few important perspectives to incorporate into your thinking about the days, weeks, and months to come.

[Tweet “Four perspectives to consider after your #highered rebrand. #mStoner”]

1. Now, the challenge for your institution is to live your brand.

You’ve worked hard to discover and define your brand and plan and execute the launch. It’s exciting to see people embrace an idea you’ve been working hard on for a long time and in which you have considerable investment, both institutionally and personally.

As that initial excitement wanes, it’s essential to stay focused on making sure your brand takes root and flourishes in your institution. Paul Redfern described how that happened at Gettysburg College in a recent Inside Higher Ed column.

If you’re a gardener, you’ll understand. You can’t just throw some seeds on the ground and expect to harvest vegetables. The ground needs to be cultivated and fertilized first. Plants need to be thinned. The garden must be cultivated, mulched, and weeded. You have to keep your eye out for pests. It takes time and attention.

A brand also must be nurtured and tended. For example, if you claim to be a global university, what does that mean for math courses? How about the theater department? Physics? At a university that has truly embraced globalism, everyone from the president and provost on down will be asking questions like this. About everything.

2. It takes a village to live the brand.

You really do want every one of your colleagues to be thinking about how the promises of your brand affect what they do every day; and if you’re smart, you’ve focused on getting your community on board well before your public launch. That work doesn’t stop after the launch. In fact, there’s a lot to do to remind your colleagues about your new brand and what it means. It’s your job to help keep it top of their minds and to introduce new staff members to the institution’s brand.

And it’s not just the provost and the deans who need reminders, but the campus police, the grounds crew, the administrative assistant in the student affairs office, and faculty assistants who are responsible for greeting visitors, giving them directions, and sharing their own experience and insights about the institution.

3. Communication about the brand doesn’t stop when it launches.

Of course you’ve planned a lot of communication and promotion around the brand launch. But it doesn’t stop there. Communication is ongoing. And you need help! That’s why successful corporate marketers spend so much time focusing on harnessing the attention (and social networks) of their employees:

… They tweet, post, comment and spread the word. Embrace this reality. The new approach is to actually sign them up as a channel: Give them a preview of your ads and messages; provide them with the social media tools to share. Create unique content that they can distribute on their own. Everyone spreads the message today, so why not get them truly ready? Free up your team to blog, and don’t just allow them – prepare and encourage them.

4. When you get bored with your new brand, it’s starting to take hold.

Finally, watch out for signs that you’re getting fatigued by your brand. It’s natural that excitement about it will wane over time, and you’ll be tempted to think about shifting your message, retooling your brand promise, even rebranding.

But resist the impulse to change. Research may tell you you that your brand needs to evolve. Maybe you’ll need to expand messaging around one aspect of your brand promise and downplay something else for the moment. But resist. Don’t change things up dramatically if it’s working. Usually when you’re bored, your brand is just starting to catch on with external audiences.