cornell-brand-development-oct2015
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The Cornell University brand is evolving into a story-based, audience-focused, endorsed brand architecture. Shane Trost, Senior Director of Marketing discusses the shift toward greater flexibility, relevance, and authenticity to all of Cornell’s audiences.
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Editor's Notes
- Hello Cornell ambassadors. Thank you for coming to today's session. I'm Shane Trost, senior director of Marketing in University Relations. I also lead the conversation around brand development and brand architecture for the university and I help guide the creative direction for any high-level projects that leverage the university brand. I'm presenting two ideas today: how we're developing a brand architecture that over time will help Cornell reach a broader audience with greater relevance and authenticity, and how we improve the impact of our storytelling through analytics and data collection. Notice the social media credentials on the bottom of each slide and feel free to join the conversation there as well.
- The best place to start is to define the term “brand”.A brand is what you stand for in the minds of the people you want to influence. A brand is an experience. An example would be a prospective student that takes a campus tour with her parents and learns about an aspect of the university that lines up with her values and makes an emotional connection. That's the transaction that takes place within a positive brand experience. It’s an emotional transaction.
- Cornell is a community of scholars, known for intellectual rigor and engaged in deep and broad research, teaching tomorrow’s thought leaders to think otherwise, care for others, and create and disseminate knowledge with a public purpose. That’s our brand promise. You’ll find elements of that message embedded in everything that we do; from writing news articles, to writing a long feature story, to a magazine article, to tweets and Facebook posts, video productions, website content, tour guide scripts, messaging, event promotions, broadcasting interviews to CNN or NPR, everything we do maps back to that one statement.
- The highest expression of the Cornell brand, that brand promise, is the daily, high-level procession of stories, news, and events because that’s what drives consideration in our audiences. Without that there is no pulse. Our brand has to be a vital, living thing that’s ‘always on’ to cut through the noise and deliver on the promise of “creating and disseminating knowledge with a public purpose”. But it doesn’t end there.
- Regardless of how well we manage the daily procession of stories, there will always be a constantly evolving landscape in the field of communications and we need to be responsive to change. Today’s communications are increasingly more personalized, targeted, widely distributed and mobile first. And the challenge is always to deliver the right message to the right person n the right place at the right time. We have to provide a flexible brand architecture that allows the university’s constituent parts (mainly colleges and schools) to talk “with” not “at” their audiences. So the School of Hotel Administration can talk to present and future hotelies and their industry partners in the language of hospitality, so Computing and Information Science and Cornell Tech can speak the same language as Silicon Valley, that Arts & Sciences can identify tightly with the culture of humanities and give their college relevance and authenticity in the minds of the people they want to influence.
- In collaboration with the college communication directors, we’ve created a flexible brand architecture that strikes a balance between institutional standards and authentic relevance. Both are critical. The greatest equity lies in the university logo so it’s counterproductive to ignore that – but the opportunities to align more specifically with audiences is within the college and school identities. In this system, called an “endorsed brand architecture” in agency parlance, colleges and schools can identify themselves with distinction without losing a clear connection to that university brand position – the “community of scholars, engaged in deep and broad research…”. (Explain engineering, hotel, AAP). They’re delivering on that in their own unique ways.
- A great example is the new identity for Arts & Sciences, just launched last month in tandem with a website redesign. The highlight (for today’s presentation) is the adoption of the new logo convention as one of the first, high-visibility use cases. School of Hotel Administration and Computing and Information Science are two more groups that are using the convention.
- This represents the standard, default approach of the logo lockup, similar to what we’ve had in the past. But what we have now is a more portable, more flexible system that allows the colleges and schools to lockup to the university logo without conforming to a universal, homogenous type standard. This not only allows the individual colleges and schools to identify with distinction but also enables optimal portability and flexibility. And that’s become an incredibly important criteria, and I’ll explain why.
- The relationship between the university and college identity is not fixed in a single configuration. For the past several years we’ve been working with the new standard called “responsive web design”. This is an approach to presenting content that automatically configures a layout based on what device you’re using. This is now a requirement because sometime in 2014, we tipped over into more mobile content being consumed than on desktop so the web is now a mobile-first platform. This is very helpful because it allows us to communicate well in this space but there is no new standard for branding in this environment. There is no new industry-wide, commonly accepted solution for responsive branding. But we have one now, and adoption is underway.
- AA&P is another good example of a college that follows simple university logo conventions but presents a unique identity through design distinction and content strategy. Those two tools, design distinction and content strategy, more than logos, are the things that most effectively influence people.
- And the way that our division supports both the institutional brand and the individual college identity is by distributing and amplifying their content on our university-level platforms. Allowing us to move our partnership beyond the secondary topic of logo conventions and into the more important, high-level collaboration and strategic alignment.
- That’s a good segue into the topic of measurement. Metrics are critical because you can’t improve what you don’t measure. The way we measure our value to our campus partners is through a variety of analytics tools, for example, we have a reporting tool that measures the traffic and engagement with content specific to college, school, or unit, so we can tell how their stories are performing on our platforms. We also do usability testing on cornell.edu to create benchmarks for the optimal user experience. In a recent partnership with the Undergraduate Admissions Office, we conducted a usability study with almost 2,000 prospective students from a sample of high school juniors and seniors from around the country. And the results were very interesting. A lot of our original assumptions about site design and user experience were validated, but we learned that prospects wanted a better sense of day-to-day life on campus and a high-level overview of campus, which is a great data point because we have a beautiful campus and can easily develop content in direct response to that ask
- This is an example of our proprietary dashboard tool that reports on the performance of all of the university’s major platforms like edu, Chronicle, CUinfo, etc. One highlight of this report from last month is the 1.8 million age views so we’re definitely achieving a broad reach with the platform but beyond that we want to understand engagement the content, gather the qualitative data and really understand how our storytelling has impact. Only then can we truly understand if we’re doing the right message to the right person, right place and right time.
- Explain itin builder tool Explain stats
- Has anyone seen this story? It’s a particularly popular and interesting story from a group of engineering faculty researchers. (Explain foam heart story – similar to soft robotics) This is a great example of how we service a story, over time and throughout our various platforms, that we measure, analyze, and use to improve communications over time. TO VITALY!!!!!!!!!
- But we’re not simply slaves to the numbers and not simply in the business of generating click bait. We make sure to always getting back to the storytelling, the emotional aspects that tie each story back to the university brand promise. This story about a proposed prosthetic heart is about Cornell’s potential impact in saving real lives.
- Through the lens of the brand position – this story, like any other can map directly back to this promise. (walk through)