Towering Toward the Blue

Welcome to the central resource for KU brand standards and guidance.

Towering Toward the Blue,

a line from KU’s Alma Mater, represents the connection between the boundless Kansas horizon and KU’s boundless creativity. Soaring vistas inspire soaring ambition. Vast skies inspire us to make vast improvements to people’s everyday lives.

Brand positioning statement

The University of Kansas is a community that harnesses the talent, ingenuity, and determination of Jayhawks to create and discover, working to bolster Kansas and better the world.

Brand goal

The primary objective of our brand strategy is to emphasize KU’s significant contributions to teaching, research, Kansas, and higher education.

Why KU’s brand matters

Familiarize yourself with these brand basics to understand the power of KU’s brand.

What is a brand?

A brand is not one thing. It’s a collective idea, created through perceptions, associations, and emotions — intended and not — and experienced in countless individual moments. When we talk about KU’s brand, we simply mean: how people feel about us. In higher education, we can think of “brand” and “reputation” as synonyms.

Why is KU’s brand important?

The brand is the foundation of our interactions with people inside and outside of KU. The brand supports everything we do. A strong brand helps attract and retain faculty, staff, students, industry collaborators, external funding, and other benefits to KU. It supports ongoing affinity, fandom, and philanthropy. Our brand also unites us across the university, providing a singular identity for all of KU’s far-reaching components. As one of the nation’s leading research universities, the flagship university of Kansas, and an organization with ambitious goals, we need a strong brand to fit our aspirations.

How do we use KU’s brand effectively?

Marketers have a responsibility to define their brand by designing a strategy and expressing it through a creative platform that includes voice, tone, and visual identity standards.

First, we decide whose support is most important to have for us to fulfill our institutional goals. These are our key audiences.

Then we decide how we need those people to feel about us, using research to clarify what our audiences care about and which of KU’s authentic qualities align with their interests. This is our brand strategy.

Finally, we create and deploy brand signals about who we are, specially crafted to connect with our audiences about the things they care about. We send signals to our audiences by what we do, how we do it, and what we say. That's branding.

All our brand signals should follow a common set of goals, beliefs, attitudes, messages, and visuals. This ensures our key audiences experience the same brand signals across KU, allowing our branding to shape the way people feel about us through clarity and repetition. That's our brand platform.