Brand Development for Public University
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Introductory information
Please prepare a description of your construction.
I work for a open university serving more than 40,000 undergraduate and graduate students.
What is your role and responsibilities?
My title is senior vice chairman for university relations and chief marketing official. So, I superintend marketing, interactions, alumni relations, and government relations. Essentially, all of our outer facings stakeholder relationships are part of my portfolio.
Desired goal
What was your goal for working with Ologie?
We were facing a couple of challenges. Most significantly, we didn',t have a unified brand for the University as a total. I came here in the spring of 2013, and there was no brand platform or messaging strategy.
One of my leading responsibilities was to propel an exploratory committee into creating the largest chief campaign in the university',s history. I fast realized the leading step to propeling the chief campaign would be educeing a new, unified brand strategy.
Provided solution
Please draw the aim of their work.
I brought them on board to do marketing investigation, and create out a brand strategy, and subsequently to educe and design our advertising and messaging platforms as well.
What was your process for selecting Ologie with which to work?
I',ve worked with them previously. I was the CMO [chief marketing official] for another university, and had hired them to do some branding strategy there as well. So I was household with their work, and when I propeled a choice process here, I, of order, asked them to yield an RFP [request for offer].
The condition of their work is leading rate in my mind, and I',ve been pleased with the working relationship and all of the creative output up to this point.
Can you prepare a ballpark dollar aspect for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?
Overall, it',s been in the $250,000 to $500,000 range.
Can you tell me almost the timeline of the project?
We initially occupied with them in June 2013, and they artistic most of the work by April 2014. We recently brought them back to work on our different websites. They',re revamping separate of our websites and doing some other web-related work. But, the bulk of the brand positioning work was done in those 11 months.
Results achieved
Can you talk almost the results of the project and how you feel they performed?
Their work is just top notch. They built a subordinate hue palette for us. They did all of the logo lockups. You can conceive an institution of this size that didn’t have a brand platform in locate, just a lot of the personal colleges were all kind of doing their own thing, in provisions of messaging and material. So, they helped us restardize all of our marketing materials. They built a number of templates for us to use for advertising, both print and digital.
The work they',ve done for our website has also been veritably significant to our brand. They did a lot of work with us to revamp the home page, and help us create out a better navigational construction for a lot of our sub pages. Not all of that work is done, but the home page revamp is complete, and it’s been veritably well accepted and embraced athwart campus.
If you talk to anyone in higher education, you',ll hear that demediateization is a real challenge, and getting nation to buy in to mediate platforms can be a resistent sale. So, I ponder it speaks not only to the efforts that we undertook to make sure many different stakeholders were included soon in the process, but also to the condition of the materials that Ologie produced, that nation were inspired to use them and veritably get on board.
We’ve won separate [American Advertising Awards] using the platform that they built for us. So, overall, the results have been fantastic.
Is there anything sole almost them that veritably makes them rest out, compared to other companies?
I’ve worked with a lot of big agencies. I spent most of my course in financial services marketing with insurance companies, so I’m used to the big agencies like DDB [Worldwide] and BBDO. Ologie is a smaller boutique agency, and the condition of the relationships I',ve formed with their team is much better than what I skilled with other agencies. In accession, to the condition of the relationships, it',s also the level of nation who are occupied in your day-to-day work. Often in the bigger agencies, much of the work is assigned to more younger folks on the account, who perhaps don’t have the depth and breadth of experience to fetch the work to the next level. Ologie has big account managers, but you',re also intercourse with the leadership of the organisation, and you can',t relocate the value that fetchs to the project.
I ponder it goes without assertion that in the higher education space, we obviously want to be working with veritably intelligent nation. Everyone at Ologie is extremely thin. I don',t know how they feel their hiring process, but they obviously influence veritably well-educated, intelligent nation.
Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you ponder they could better upon or something that you might do differently?
No. I didn’t experience things like aim creep, or lack of clarity in billing, or any of the things that are somewhat ordinary with agencies.
Being a smaller agency, one challenge I ponder they will face in the forthcoming is as they swell in areas like health care and higher education, they need to make sure they last to create differentiated platforms for all the clients in the same state. I ponder they do a big job of that now, but it',s surely something they should keep an eye on.