Effective brand management is a continuous cycle of activities designed to analyze and influence people’s perceptions of your brand. While most institutions have a process for reviewing print publications, updating websites, and managing their social media channels — brand management is often overlooked. It can seem daunting to create a process for managing something as abstract as a brand, but it is possible.
Use the following four questions to evaluate your current brand management practices:
1. Do you understand the current perception of your brand?
We at mStoner believe your brand is what you stand for in the minds of the people you wish to reach, influence, and move to action. In other words, your brand exists outside of your institution and inside of people’s heads. Before you can effectively influence what you stand for in people’s minds, you have to understand what you currently represent.
Audience research is a critical first step in effective brand management. It helps you understand where you are today and what your audiences value. Education institutions should conduct research with prospective students and parents, current students, faculty and staff, and alumni. Guidance counselors, hiring managers, education leaders, and major donors are also key audiences that offer a window into how people perceive your brand. Audience research can be qualitative or quantitative. Usually, it’s a combination of both and involves focus groups, surveys, questionnaires, interviews, and online discussions.
2. Have you identified your ideal brand position?
What idea or sentiment do you want to evoke when people hear your institution’s name? Brand strategy is the art and science of discovering, understanding and articulating what your brand ideally stands for. Your brand strategy considers your institution’s mission statement, audience research, and competitive environment and ultimately defines what your organization represents and promises to its core constituencies.
A clear brand strategy will differentiate you from the competition and help attract the best-fit students. A strong brand also provides instant credibility for new programs and helps attract and retain the best employees and faculty.
3. Have you established ways to influence people’s perception of your brand?
After defining your brand strategy, you’ll need to develop techniques for realizing that strategy. That means devising additional campaigns and tactics that will move people’s perceptions of your brand toward your articulated goals and ideals.
Brand management includes the following tactical components:
4. Do you have a plan for measuring results and evolving your approach?
Branding efforts require an investment of time and resources, and you will want to establish a consistent cycle of assessing progress and refining or redirecting efforts. Is your work actually influencing people’s feelings about your brand and moving perceptions in the right direction? Ways for measuring your progress include:
Great brands stand for something enduring, but they do evolve over time to reflect changes in culture, markets, and customer expectations. A continuous process of audience testing and research will help you determine when it’s time to make careful, deliberate evolutions to your brand strategy.