Building a Brand Strategy
2 National Website Awards
Recognizing Luther’s brand-driven digital transformation
2023 Communicator Awards — Award of Excellence
2023 WebAwards — Best University Website
A cohesive brand strategy unifies Luther’s story and strengthens student connection.
Though consistently ranked among the nation’s top liberal arts colleges, Luther College lacked a unified brand strategy to clearly communicate its distinct value. The College partnered with Carnegie to align brand expression, creative, and web strategy around a cohesive, student-focused narrative built for long-term impact.
The Challenge
Although Luther College is ranked among the nation’s best liberal arts colleges, senior leadership recognized they lacked a cohesive brand strategy. Luther College sought, and found, a partner in Carnegie who would help them to connect better with best-fit students.
Our Approach
Using Luther’s existing brand strategy and applying Carnegie’s proprietary archetype system, Carnegie’s concept work with Luther began with in-depth discovery among campus stakeholders and the creation of two campaign concepts. The chosen campaign concept, “Shaped By You”, was implemented widely across campus, including Luther’s brand standards, the admissions packet, financial aid packet, alumni magazine template, and on-campus signage.
Concurrently, Luther began a partnership with Carnegie’s web team to translate the brand strategy across its web presence. The website redesign project focused on audience alignment, web governance, and a shift from project to process mentality with a focus on continuous improvement.
The Results
Grounded in Carnegie’s discovery and research, Luther is equipped to communicate its compelling and unique story. And with a renewed focus on the prospective student audience, its new website brings that brand strategy to life. The site won a 2023 Award of Excellence from the Communicator Awards— the competition’s highest honor—and a 2023 Best University Website from the WebAwards. We are proud to partner with Luther in its ongoing goals and enrollment marketing efforts toward building familiarity and consideration with prospective students.
Carnegie provided the added capacity we needed to design a new look and feel for Luther College. It was so helpful for us to have an outside perspective from their creatives to think differently about how we communicate about Luther. We are very strongly still leaning on the look and language of Carnegie’s campaign to lend consistency and a new approach to how we’re portraying and talking about Luther.
