Update on marketing for October 2021
Author(s)
Renea Morris
This week, I’m sharing the latest updates on our marketing, branding, and strategic positioning initiatives and efforts, specifically focusing on the most recent announcement of the Kennedy Mountain Campus andVisual Identity initiative.
Mountain Campus Launch
AllMarCommhands were on deck this past month engaging in preparation for supporting a week of activities, including the Chancellor’s Inauguration and Homecoming, and in collaboration with the Chancellor’s Office, Advancement and agencypartnerHeavyDoesIt,last Tuesday’s Kennedy Mountain Campus acquisition announcement.In addition to developing recap videosfrom and , for the mountain campus announcement, we wereable to realize the powerwithin the team that we’ve spent the past two seasons cultivating, from developing a teaser video, to a large-scale media event, to preparing for the marketing and environmental branding yet to come. A big thanks toour campus partnersfor your ongoing patience, partnership, and support as wecontinue to evolve and grow together. As aMarCommteam,we’re turning a corner, and I’m excited to see everything that comes next.
The mountain campus will be featured in our upcomingand over the coming months, we will continue to develop assets and weave the campus into our marketing in the new year.
Visual Identity Initiative
Last month, I mentioned that the team has started work on developing a robust visual identity system for the University—one that will give us flexibility while maintaining focus and creating consistency for the outside world. The ultimate deliverable for this initiative will be an expandedandrefined visual style guidefor DU.
The first phase of this foundational work has focused on exploring our primary mark. While our visual identity is much, much more than our logo and the identity system we construct will reflect this, the logo is a cornerstone and necessary place from which we cascade future work. When we did research last fall, we also tested our three primary marks with experts from across the nation. Theresultsaligned with many of our other findings—that our marks are nice,don’t differentiate us in the marketplace, and don’t reflect who we are. Additionally, we have since heard from our internal audiences with two major themes emerging—our current academic logo suite doesn’t scale well for digitalandsocial marketing purposes and the names of our sub brands are minimized.
With these notes in mind, the team began to conceptualize what it would look like for the University to have one logo set to raising our visibility and contributing to the goal of a more sustainable future.Hundreds of concepts were developed in collaboration with CarnegieDartlet, our third-party partners in the reputation strategy work. Over time, the concepts were refined (repeatedly) to seven that reflect our personality traits and can be tied directly to the “who” and “why” of our brand and mission statement. It’s now time to test the results.
DU’sbrand owner groups—employees, current students (grad and undergrad), and alumni—will have an opportunity to participate in logo testing through focus groups over the next two months anda quantitative survey sent toall faculty, staff, alumni, andathleticsseason ticketholders before the end of the fall academic term.The 91 is fortunate enough to have housed within theDaniels College of Business, a(CiBiC)that we are working with for some of the upcomingfocus groups.
Our goal with thereputation strategy workthat is underwayremains to ensure that everyone has a voice and opportunity to be heard.We are focused on moving the University forwardso that we canrisein the rankings,engage innewmarkets moremeaningfully,builda robust student pipeline,and createan authentic narrative that resonates with all our audiences.