Brand background story
Most of us are aware of brands. They helped Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and Google become among the most recognizable and trusted corporations in the world. But what is a brand? And why has the University of Kansas chosen to invest more in its own brand?
“Branding is different than other kinds of marketing,” said Chris Gregory, KU’s chief marketing officer, who has been leading KU’s new brand strategy. “With branding, we are attempting to shape the way people feel, not specifically drive them toward a certain behavior.”
KU’s new brand platform, titled Towering Toward the Blue from a line in KU’s 1891 Alma Mater, is a nod to KU’s past as well as a reference to the future. It speaks to KU’s ambitions, stature, and creations.
Some might think KU’s brand is simply its traditions, such as the Jayhawk mascot, the crimson and blue colors, or the “Rock Chalk, Jayhawk” chant. However, the concept of KU’s brand goes much deeper and is aligned with a general perception people have about KU.
“In higher education,” said Gregory, “brand is synonymous with reputation. Ultimately, our brand is the way people feel about KU. Many of us, such as alumni, have personal experiences with KU, and we need to shape the way many other people feel about KU, as well.”
“Ultimately, our brand is the way people feel about KU.”
Brands are foundational. They can support nearly everything an organization does. A strong brand simultaneously helps KU recruit, retain, and graduate students; engage public leaders to seek funding and other support; attract and retain talented faculty and staff; enter corporate partnerships; win grants; attract philanthropic support; acquire non-tuition revenue; and influence positive change. A strong brand also helps insulate an organization against a crisis that might unexpectedly rise — and to recover more quickly from it.
Another valuable benefit of a strong brand? It can unite an organization. A strong branding strategy and plan can rally the members of any organization to a common purpose and identity.
Branding: shaping feelings
Because KU’s brand is based on public perception, KU doesn’t directly control it.
“We don’t own the brand. The brand lives in the minds and hearts of people out in the world,” Gregory said. But KU can influence those feelings and public sentiment.
“Branding is our intentional efforts to shape our brand. The things we do and say shape how people think and feel about the university,” Gregory said.
Brand signals
Brand signals are the various elements — both good and bad — that form our opinions. Most of KU’s key audiences are already aware that KU exists. But providing them with a wide range of positive signals builds a greater awareness of KU’s additional attributes and benefits.
We send intentional signals through our owned media — the media that we control — such as our websites or newsletters. We also send out signals through paid media advertising and shared media, such as social media. We can send positive signals through “earned” media by attracting attention to KU — publicizing our scientific discoveries, hosting national conferences, or creating community service projects or public events — or by playing up our affiliation with prestigious academic organizations and entities that showcase KU’s emphasis on research or athletics.
Those intentional efforts are based on building a branding strategy to determine what we want people to feel about KU, then building a branding platform with specific marketing elements to achieve that strategy. “What do we say? How do we say it? What do our materials look like? What is our tone? What is our feeling? What are our priorities?” Gregory said. “The answers are found in the branding platform, and that guides us to use our branding strategy on an everyday basis.”
Targeting the audience, living the brand
The heart of the new branding strategy is positioning: Who are our primary audiences, and what do we want them to think and feel about KU?
“Who can best help us fulfill our mission and reach our vision? And where do we have the most ground to gain? Where’s the most attention need to be given?” Gregory said.
The strategy also includes the personality and attributes KU wants to convey and describes the benefits KU brings to the world. The branding strategy then informs the creative platform, which includes persuasive language and influential visual images.
Great branding, though, is mostly not about marketing communications.
“You have to live your brand as much as you say and show your brand through marketing activities,” Gregory said. “I always put an emphasis on living a brand as much as campaigning it. If you think of brands you feel strongly about, it’s likely not because of their websites or advertising. You likely have a high affinity for brands that offer great products, strong customer service, unique experiences, and fair pricing. People are ultimately attracted to brands that share their values and stand for a higher purpose. While those things can be introduced and highlighted by marketing communications, they aren’t created by it.”
Changing with environment
The new brand effort began in 2023 when KU Chancellor Douglas A. Girod asked for more attention to be given to KU’s institutional brand and reputation.
The brand platform at that time, known as Our Chant Rises, had launched in 2017. It had served KU well, but it was time for a repositioning.
“As is to be expected, our environment, key stakeholders’ perspectives, and strategies had since evolved,” Gregory said.
The perceived benefits of attending college had come under increasing scrutiny. Adult learners, with different preferences than traditional students, became a larger portion of the student market. And the interests of traditional students shifted, with more focus on career outcomes, belonging, customer service, and experience.
KU’s stakeholders were increasingly interested in KU’s economic development and workforce contributions and wanted to focus on multiple new, long-term initiatives in the field to generate revenue from new sources.
KU leadership groups emphasized the need to enhance KU’s reputation and wanted the strategy to focus on KU’s excellence in teaching and in research.
They also identified that the key audiences should be Kansans and their leaders, higher education leaders from across the country, and the national public with a focus on six key metropolitan areas: Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis, Omaha, and St. Louis.
A whole-university effort
The chancellor himself led an executive committee that governed the process of developing the branding strategy and branding platform.
“It’s critical for KU to represent itself consistently. A unified, enterprise-scale brand is part of our One KU plan,” Girod said.
“It’s time to put to rest the Midwest humility and unspoken pride in being a well-kept secret. We do so many amazing things at KU. Let’s stand tall and share them with our state, nation, and world.”
Others on the executive committee included Gregory; Barbara Bichelmeyer, provost and executive vice chancellor; Matthias A. Salathe, KU’s chief research officer; and Karla Leeper, vice chancellor for strategic communications and public affairs.
“We want the world to know that we are as excellent in our teaching and research as we are in basketball,” Leeper said.
KU is among the top tier of teaching and research universities in America, she added. “The new brand campaign will more effectively share the stories of the important work that is being done on our campuses and how that work is making a significant contribution to the lives of the people of the state of Kansas and to the wider world.”
An executive subcommittee, a steering committee, and working groups from many areas of the university offered perspectives, oversaw the day-to-day development of the brand, and approved milestones throughout the project.
Other executive-level reviewers have been brought on throughout the process, including Tricia Bergman, associate vice chancellor for economic development; Shelly Hooks, vice chancellor for research; Steve Stites, executive vice chancellor for KU Medical Center; David Vranicar, KU’s chief operating officer; and Chari Young, KU’s chief human resources officer.
“Broad involvement was important for many reasons,” said Gregory. “We were creating branding for the whole university, wanted a variety of perspectives, benefited from the enormous intellectual capital, and needed buy-in to make the branding take hold.”
A working group consisting of leaders from KU Marketing, the KU Medical Center, and KU Endowment oversaw the day-to-day work on the look, feel, tone, and messaging for the new Towering Toward the Blue brand platform.
“KU Endowment has had the opportunity to share KU’s brand work with key donors and found strong support. We want our donors and friends to feel inspired — to aspire along with us toward the very best KU can be,” said Dan Martin, KU Endowment president.
“KU’s new brand inspires donors and gives them confidence that their investment will change lives and futures,” Martin said. “That is what we work toward every day at KU Endowment, and we are grateful for partners who share our ambition.”
Seeking an outside perspective
In 2023, through a competitive process, KU selected Ologie, one of the top marketing firms in higher education, to provide branding services. The firm has provided branding services to many higher education institutions, including Purdue University, Iowa State University, and the University of Michigan, to name a few.
“We wanted an outside perspective to help us think about how outsiders think about us, and what to keep and what to change,” Gregory said. “We also needed market research capabilities, which we don’t retain on the KU Marketing team because they’re only an occasional need. Finally, rebranding is a major lift and was not KU Marketing’s only responsibility. We needed more brains and bodies to get all the work done.”
Ologie analyzed KU’s existing research on external and internal audiences and conducted an audit of KU’s current branding and marketing work. That data included enrollment, website traffic, and external information from ranking agencies and organizations that collect higher education data.
Ologie also performed an audit of KU’s higher education competitors, including several large public institutions across the Midwest. That audit examined how those institutions competed for students, talent, attention, and recognition.
Ologie’s discovery process included visits to KU campuses in Lawrence and Kansas City. They conducted extensive interviews and focus groups, in person and virtually, with the chancellor and the provost, presidents of affiliates, other university leaders, students, and faculty.
Ologie also received input from KU Endowment board members, an alumni board, a subcommittee of the KU Athletic Committee, the chancellor’s advisory board, and other employees of KU and its affiliates.
The process also involved inviting about 230,000 people to complete a large quantitative survey. Thousands of people responded, providing enough data for the results to reach statistical significance.
Ologie and KU Marketing then began collaborative work on developing the branding strategy.
Defining goals, targeting audience
Survey responses indicated a wide recognition and appreciation of KU’s athletics program and the strength of the KU Medical Center.
The survey also showed KU has a strong reputation in the Midwest, but less so nationally. The same was true for KU’s prestige: Despite being an NCAA Division 1, Big 12, AAU, and flagship university, KU performed better in the Midwest than nationally.
KU alumni who were surveyed said that KU had provided them with a high-quality education. They also indicated that their level of loyalty to their alma mater was far above that of alumni at most other universities.
Another point Gregory emphasized was the finding that KU is perceived as a place that creates opportunities.
“We create opportunities for research,” he said. “We create opportunities for students to go to school, start careers, and make an impact in their community. KU creates opportunities for staff and faculty to do what they love, work at the University of Kansas, and change lives all over the world. We create opportunities for research and through our research. We create economic opportunities for students, businesses, and communities. The list goes on, but the key is KU creates opportunities.”
The findings also showed that respondents saw KU as a strong community, that KU’s various disciplines and fields have their own smaller communities, and that there is also a sense of KU being a part of the Kansas community.
Emphasizing research and academics
One of Ologie’s findings was that that the majority of KU’s outgoing communications have focused on recruiting students and describing student life and experiences in Lawrence. While important, there was a cost to focusing that much on recruitment.
“While we say we’re a great university to many audiences, we don’t take the opportunity to say how we’re a great university often enough,” Gregory said.
Another part of the research showed that there isn’t a wide acknowledgment of the breadth of KU. It has more than 400 fields of study, over 30,000 students, comprises five campuses, and has multiple research centers and institutes.
As a university, KU is arguably among the most complex organizations out there, with many disciplines across academics and athletics performing at the highest levels and producing far-reaching, mighty results. “KU researchers add to our catalog of discoveries daily,” Gregory said. “We are even more interested in being seen as one university.”
Positioning the strategy: the Power of Creators
Ongoing strategy meetings determined KU’s positioning and brand strategy in terms of messaging, personality, and how to measure the effectiveness of the branding work on the chosen audiences.
“Our positioning is that KU creates. We make things. We build things,” Gregory said. “We create knowledge through our research. We create opportunities through education. We create the workforce for Kansas and beyond through the students we educate and graduate. We create hope. We create so much more for our students, for our staff and faculty, for Kansas, and for the whole world.”
The Power of Creators brand strategy emphasizes that KU isn’t just a place to dream about ideas.
“We actually get to work,” Gregory said. “We do the work, and we finish it by delivering. We create a finished ‘product’ to the benefit of the world.”
Building the new brand platform
Equipped with the branding strategy, the process moved into building the branding platform of Towering Toward the Blue.
In that stage, KU Marketing staff developed the tone, the voice, the visuals, and the feelings that make the strategy come to life — how we connect that strategy to the hearts and minds of those target audiences.
Creating the Towering Toward the Blue platform has involved creating and documenting branding guidelines for KU Marketing’s own use and for the use of other KU communicators. That process included creating brand guidelines and finalizing and distributing templates, guides, job aids, and other marketing materials, which have a new, different look.
“We are elevating our look and feel to match the prestige and accomplishments of our university,” said Gregory.
Towering Toward the Blue
The platform will continue to use many of KU’s most recognizable symbols.
“The KU logo is not changing. The Jayhawk is not changing. Our colors, crimson and blue, are not changing,” Gregory said. “We have many traditions — our chant, our Alma Mater, our waving of wheat, our walking down the Hill — that we wouldn’t dream of changing.”
After its late January 2025 launch, the new branding campaign should be represented in everything that comes out of the university. “The messaging — feelings and imagery and words — needs to either be for the purpose of branding or contributing to branding,” Gregory said.
Communicators can accomplish that goal by checking off whether their messaging also contains signals from the brand strategy, he said.
Some of KU’s branding activities will be visible, while others will be behind the scenes, such as providing communicators and campus units who need it with direct support in adopting the new brand.
KU Marketing looks to directly and indirectly encourage “living the brand” as well. It will work with people and units across the university to highlight what KU is already doing and, in some cases, start new initiatives that support the branding strategy.
“Throughout all of that, we will measure the effectiveness of this branding work,” Gregory said. “That will allow us to refine the platform as we learn and the environment around us changes.”