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HELPING UNIVERSITIES BUILD A STRONG
BRAND AND NURTURE A POSITIVE REPUTATION
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Elizabeth Shephard
Managing Director
Elizabeth has over 17 years’ experience in international higher education research and consultancy. She has worked in the UK, North America and East Asia, and specialises in internationally comparative research methods, evaluation methodology and education policy analysis. Elizabeth joined THE in 2019 to lead the consultancy division.
Vicky has extensive experience of market research, strategic marketing consultancy, and project delivery. Since 2014, Vicky has specialised within the education sector, and has managed a wide range of marketing strategy projects for HEI clients, including customer journey mapping, persona development, recruitment communications, and delivering extensive campaign activity.
Vicky Irwin
Senior Director
Your Dedicated Team
Understanding your Brand and Reputation why it matters
Managing your brand and reputation is vital to an institution’s continued long-term growth and success. However, effective university branding goes far beyond a logo, colour palette, or slogan.
Your brand is your culture, what makes you unique, and the story you tell about your institution allows you to create an emotional connection with your stakeholders.
Know Your Audience
Building a strong brand takes time. It’s the process of creating a compelling, positive perception that is aligned with internal stakeholders and external audiences.
Brand Transformation Framework
A comprehensive framework that encompasses rigorous market research, brand development and multi-channel marketing, helping universities build a strong brand and nurture a positive reputation.
Discovery
Perception research to understand your current brand position
01
Development
Messaging framework to articulate your brand narrative
03
Activation
A bespoke marketing plan to implement your new brand creative
04
Monitoring & Optimisation
Annual audit to assess impact on perceptions
02
Discovery
Conducting brand and reputation research helps to identify the opinions and attitudes on your institution, held by stakeholders.
Our in-depth brand audit spans six key modules and uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative research to highlight the internal and external perceptions of your brand, and greater awareness of where your brand position is now and where it needs to be.
Development & Creation
Universities are complex, so defining your culture can be a difficult task.
Our Development phase will create a clear brand position that establishes emotional, meaningful and long-term relationships with your stakeholders.
Our Consultancy team will work with you to articulate your brand and bring the brand narrative to life – including the creation of a messaging framework, thought leadership papers and rich media solutions.
Activation via the world’s largest higher education community
With an engaged global audience of over 65, 000, 000 annual visitors, and a sector-leading events series, THE offers an established platform for today’s leading universities to deliver a powerful message to an engaged and targeted audience of students and professionals.
Optimisation
Our Brand Tracker provides a light touch, annual quantitative assessment of any impact to your institution’s reputation. Supported by a review of your digital brand – to assess the impact on performance metrics such as web traffic, reach and engagement – to jointly agree the priorities, actions and activities for the next 12 months.
A successful brand is never finished
Our 5-step Management Process
Your dedicated team of THE consultants will work collaboratively with you and your key stakeholders throughout the project – from Discovery through to Monitoring & Optimisation
Project Initiation
We’ll allocate a project team and agree the project scope, timescales and ways of working
Define
We’ll agree competitor set, panel specifications, and messaging/brand statements to test.
Research
We’ll design, build, and test surveys or topic guides to deploy to our agreed audiences
Analyse
We’ll review results from surveys and interviews, to identify trends and themes
Report
We’ll share our findings and any recommendations through a written report and presentation