We all love to believe we make decisions logically. Especially big decisions like where to go to college. But the reality is that emotion plays an outsized role in the process of making big life decisions. As a result, the presentation of information about your college or university can’t just live in the world of facts and figures. You need a compelling brand, as we outline in our ongoing series about personality science and brand expression.
Where institutional brand really shines is its function in storytelling, which is at the heart of emotional behavior change. Humans crave stories and build an understanding of an experience or opportunity through story-based scripting. Unfortunately, if the story of your college or university is inconsistent, bland, typical, or confusing to its internal stakeholders, those outside the institution will not remember or understand what you stand for. And that’s going to have a critical impact on whether or not students want to attend, parents will support those decisions, or college counselors recommend your college or university.
When a fully-realized brand personality is familiar to, embraced by, and communicated through staff, students, faculty, alumni, and everyone else that is part of an institution, the outcome is recognition from the market and an advancement of reputation. In fact, Carnegie has found a positive correlation between a clear brand expression and the reputation scores a university received in market testing. But in order to create this consensus and consistent use, an institution’s stakeholders need to understand your brand.
Why a Consistent System for Understanding Brand is Critical
Unfortunately, sharing a brand personality can be difficult when stakeholders are diverse and know varying amounts about your institution’s vision, mission, and values. As a result, Carnegie recommends using an established personality science approach to brand. What that means is a consistent and scaled way to understand personality. Whether it be archetypes like Carnegie uses, or the Big 5, or any other system, having a way to talk about a brand that isn’t just pillars and adjectives is critical.
Further, in the process of doing brand research, having an established personality science system allows for consistent measurement of personality expression. This means that the decisions about what your brand should be, as well as benchmarking the adoption of said brand, can be couched in good data. For example, Carnegie runs benchmarking studies of brand expression that reveal not only how the institution has shifted in its awareness and reputation, but also how audiences perceive the personality of an institution.
While these are compelling reasons alone for using something like Carnegie’s innovative archetyping system, I would also note that these processes can humanize the work, especially for people who don’t care about brand work. Archetypes are fun, interesting, and easily understood. I can’t count the number of times in our own research that our participants have noted how engaging the process of selecting their institution’s archetypes has been, and how much they want to evaluate their own personality the same way. If you read any Carnegie blog like this one, you’ll see the archetypes and persona of the writer!
How to Measure Brand Expression
So you have a personality science approach you trust. Now what? Measuring brand expression can feel like a difficult research problem. I’d recommend breaking it down into pieces based on the audience and purpose as that will help lead to the selection of an ideal methodology for gathering and analyzing the data. At Carnegie, for example, we use a three-pronged approach to brand research:
1. Internal Perception
What do your stakeholders believe? Evaluate the current and ideal state of the brand with students, staff, faculty, alumni, parents of students, and community partners. Use this research to both gather information and build buy-in for the brand outcome early on in the process. For internal brand research, you can consider a few different methodologies:
- Consensus Workshops: high-volume sessions with various activities that gather both qualitative (open-ended) and quantitative (numeric) data points
- Online Surveys: an effective way to allow for participation regardless of time or location, adding a large amount of data
- Focus Groups: best for small groups of 6-12 who might want to speak more in-depth to the needs of the brand expression
- Interviews: another qualitative approach, especially helpful when getting insight from voices who may otherwise impact how a focus group or workshop would flow (for example, the institution’s president or other senior leaders who those in focus groups might defer to)
2. External Perception
What does the proverbial “they” of the market think about your institution? Here, consider getting input from prospective students, parents, educational influencers like teachers and counselors, business and community leaders, as well as the general public, to understand awareness, reputation, and personality perceptions of your institution. For external brand research, consider these methodologies:
- Online Market Surveys: quickly gather quantitative data from the market through these types of surveys; for the best results, be sure to work with a sampling provider to get an unbiased audience as opposed to lists of prospects your institution curates
- Community Interviews: if the market is small, it might be a challenge to get enough data from a survey to make critical decisions, so consider a more qualitative approach by interviewing people in the community
- Social Media Listening: evaluating what people are saying about your institution in digital and online spaces can be hugely valuable in repositioning misperceptions
3. Competitive Brand Expression
When positioning your own brand expression, knowing what other institutions are doing is ideal in creating differentiation. The first step of this process is identifying who is a true competitor. This could be influenced by institutional type, location, and even athletics engagements. Who do audiences consider similar? Which institutions have the greatest number of cross-apps? And potentially consider the institutions you might want to consider aspirational.
To do this work, Carnegie recommends blending competitors into an external perception market study explained above, but also employ the method called Content Analysis. This includes a systematic review of the top collateral of competitors: viewbooks, website pages, digital ads, videos, and brochures.
When combined, these three areas of brand research will allow your institution to make strategic decisions about how to express itself. The next step is then figuring out how that brand will best resonate with your audiences.
How Brand Research Connects to Audience Research
Luckily, if you built your brand using human personality science research, the application to audiences is almost entirely direct. For example, when Carnegie identifies archetypes for an institution, we also offer the chance to create archetype-driven personas of students. This allows a one-to-one connection between the brand’s key archetypes and those archetypes that are most motivational to different student groups. This sets up the opportunity for audience segmentation to be driven by personality instead of just demographics.
Further, understanding the personality of audiences can help make brand decisions easier. If the institution is stuck between two options for an authentic story, reviewing what audiences care more about can create an effective tie-breaker in the research.
When doing research about audience groups, such as students, your institution could consider a few other types of research:
- Ethnography: the process of observing and sometimes interacting with an audience in depth and catalogued in a systematic way to understand their culture and motivations
- Personality Surveys: similar to those people like to take online, these surveys allow you to understand the way people evaluate their own personal brand
- Positive Deviance: a way to find people within a community that buck a trend and have positive outcomes (such as enrollment or retention) in the face of challenges; usually those people offer great information for understanding student needs and can also be trained to help future students with similar challenges
Why It All Matters: Schemas and Setting Your Institution Apart
With an effectively measured and strategically built brand personality, an institution can begin its storytelling journey with far more direction. To reiterate the importance of this process, I like to have my clients consider something called “Schema Theory.” In effect, this is the way our mind maps out concepts. Some concepts are close to one another. Some concepts trigger others to become relevant or remembered. If you think about the term “Camping” your personal schema might include tents, family vacations, and S’mores, while someone else might think of hammocks, fishing, and hiking with friends. Those schemas differ because of personal experiences and the media people consume.
For a college or university, there is a schema for the baseline of higher education. People think of majors, classes, campuses, and other typical details. When they think of your institution in particular, their schema might be almost identical. The goal is to make the schema about your school as individualized, emotion-driven, and differentiated as possible.
Instead of a general college campus, you want them to think of the sun peaking over rolling hills of wheat (at least at my alma mater of Washington State University, that’s a compelling and authentic image). Instead of thinking about your programs generically, you want them to think about your specific student opportunities and hands-on experiential offerings. Instead of thinking about you as generically “nice” you want them to think of your institution as “nurturing” or “hospitable” or “selfless” (if those things are part of your brand strategy).
And the only way a schema can get there, the only way it changes and shifts, is consistent and memorable experiences and communication from your brand. If people get an unbranded, generic, or confused story then their schema of your school will never evolve. And without good brand research, couched in a system people at your institution can remember and effectively utilize, the consistent and expressive story will never be possible.
Transform Your Brand Strategy With Carnegie
So good luck! The research can feel daunting, but the more you do to make the measurement consistent and seated in personality science, the easier your process will be.
Curious how your brand measures up? Explore our Brand Strategy services to see how Carnegie can help you uncover the insights that set you apart. Reach out and start a conversation.