What makes a powerful brand?

At Kelsh Wilson, we talk with people at many schools and organizations who deeply appreciate the value of a good brand, but would struggle to say just what makes a brand powerful. Based on three decades of experience, we’d love to share some answers.

First, for a definition. Yes, sometimes people use the term “brand” to mean just a logo. But for the purposes of this post, and in most important conversations organizations have about reaching their strategic goals, a brand means much more.

It’s the carefully designed image of your school or institution that you choose to project to the world. It’s your identity intentionally made public. That means not just a logo, but a look and feel and a story you tell.

So what makes that look and feel the right one? What makes that story sing? It boils down to four things:

You need to project the same image in the same way over time and stress the same messages in many different contexts. If you do so, you become known and recognized and maximize your marketing investment. If you don’t, it’s debatable whether you have established a brand at all.

Without creativity most school’s brands would be built around ideas such as academic excellence and community, or challenge combined with support. These may be valid, but they all lack impact. It takes imagination—visual and verbal—to leap beyond the expected into the territory of something memorable.

To stick, your brand must grow from your true strengths as an organization. It should tell the world in some real way what you stand for. Otherwise, you may succeed in generating a buzz, but you won’t be building a brand that your community can really own or that your audiences will ultimately believe.

Yes, a powerful brand tells the world who you really are, but it needs to do so in a way that will help you get where you want to be. One way to think of this is in terms of your organization’s current image and your target image—how you’re seen now and how you need to be seen to be positioned to advantage in the competitive landscape. The idea is to reveal your organization’s identity with a particular awareness of the strengths that matter most to your target audiences, that set you most clearly apart from peers, and that correct any misperceptions standing between you and greater enrollment, giving, and respect.

We know this can sound like a tall order. “All” you need for a powerful brand is consistency, creativity, honesty, and strategy. As if that weren’t hard enough, we also know that the toughest challenges involve the how—how to define a brand in a way that will encourage consistency, how to sort through a sea of market research to find clarity in strategy.  

We are experts at how. Email Fred Wilson to schedule a call and we’ll outline the steps to empower your brand message.

Showing Off Your Strengths / Brentwood School

In a new multi-part communications project, Kelsh Wilson helped the Brentwood School in Los Angeles to sharpen its positioning, project its image with greater impact, and speak with a new level of consistency.

The Brentwood School, a K-12 independent school in Los Angeles, is an impressive institution indeed. An academic powerhouse, it’s also home to thriving arts and athletics programs and to a warm and inclusive school community. And, that says nothing of its two campuses, beautifully sited a stone’s throw from the Getty Museum.

How well does all this show through in the school’s communications program? This was the question at the heart of a multi-part branding project Kelsh Wilson recently completed for the school. In fact, it was the core focus of the project’s first phase: an audit of Brentwood’s website, admissions collateral, school magazine, and other major communications.

The answer that emerged was mixed. Kelsh Wilson found that some of Brentwood’s strengths showed through clearly, while some were missing or underrepresented. Certain key points were could be found in the message mix, but were not being expressed forcefully enough to position the school with intention.

Analyzing the gap between the school as presented in its communications and the Brentwood a visitor would experience in person pointed the way to enhancements in the branding program. These ranged from design approaches that better capture the friendliness and positive energy of the school, to a more robust vocabulary for exploring Brentwood’s academic strengths.

One distinctive twist—a highlight of the new admissions print package that Kelsh Wilson developed—was a series of captioned photo strips. These provide the perfect motif for revealing and celebrating learning as a process, an idea at the heart of the school’s philosophy.

Kelsh Wilson’s creative and strategic work was reflected across a broad range of communications—in new viewbooks and curriculum guide that KWD developed and in the look and content of the school’s new website, which Brentwood worked with a third-party firm to plan and launch. In addition, a robust brand guide equips the school’s in-house marketing team to bring consistent messaging and visual elements to the many communications they produce internally.

BRENTWOOD SCHOOL EAST CAMPUS / VIEWBOOK (GRADES 6 THROUGH 12)

BRENTWOOD SCHOOL WEST CAMPUS / VIEWBOOK (KINDERGARTEN THROUGH GRADE 5)

BRENTWOOD SCHOOL / SUPPLEMENT

BRENTWOOD SCHOOL / STYLE GUIDE

Happy Holidays!

Making the Message Your Own / The Haverford School

Working with The Haverford School, an independent school for boys just outside Philadelphia, Kelsh Wilson helped create a campaign communications program that supported the development team in meeting their $50 million goal—and that captured something truly unique about Haverford.

Each year, eighth-grade boys at The Haverford School mark the end of Middle School with a transformative journey, the “Rite of Passage.” As part of this experience, they race dragon boats on the Schuylkill River and explore Philadelphia on a scavenger hunt. They spend the night aboard the USS New Jersey battleship then hike 12 miles back to campus, where the school community gathers to welcome them home. 

As the Kelsh Wilson team noted in a brochure celebrating this tradition, “The experience teaches many lessons—among them, the power we have to reach ambitious goals with shared commitment.”

It’s a lesson of value both to eighth-grade boys and to all the members of the school community who were being called upon to help make Haverford’s fundraising campaign a success.

The publication featuring the Rite of Passage was titled “Marking Milestones,” part of a suite of materials including a case statement that Kelsh Wilson created to support Haverford’s $50 million campaign, Character at Our Core. The concept connected the milestones that eighth-graders mark in their urban adventure with midstream milestones the school was able to report in its campaign progress—from $34.9 million raised to 92 gifts of $50,000 or more.

Choosing the boys’ journey as a theme gave the brochure wonderful story quality and great photographic possibilities—injecting an added level of interest into the overview of campaign accomplishments. It also accomplished another important goal. By celebrating and finding meaning in a distinctively Haverford tradition, it made a statement only The Haverford School could make.

The brochure was a hit—and part of a family of communications that helped Haverford hit its goals and, among other priorities, build a stunning new middle school. The project illustrates an important truth when it comes to creative communications: The pieces you produce should reflect your institution’s distinctive identity, and the best, most reliable way to do that is by populating your communications with content uniquely your own.

We’ve all heard someone at meeting to review work in progress say this about an idea on the table:

“It’s great, but if you took our name off the cover, it could be any school.”

To this comment, the members of the seasoned but affable creative team at Kelsh Wilson have two answers:

1)    By no means should you take your name off the cover. It’s simply self-defeating.

2)    Wait until your pictures and people are on the page, telling stories only your school can tell.

Tell these stories well, and you will make a statement uniquely your own. You will show your audience the school they know and love and remind them exactly why. Just ask the team at Haverford.

THE HAVERFORD SCHOOL / PROGRESS REPORT

THE HAVERFORD SCHOOL / CASE STATEMENT

Taking A Fresh, Clear Look at Your Brand / Woodlynde School

The Woodlynde School in suburban Philadelphia has a distinctive mission, providing a great college prep education to students with learning differences. However, their experience partnering with Kelsh Wilson on a school-wide branding project teaches lessons that any school, college, or non-profit can use.

We all know that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and in the world of marketing communications, the #1 bit of knowledge most people have is that you need to focus on what makes you unique. #2 is that you are supposed to move beyond “features and benefits” to talk about your mission and impact in big, inspiring ways. Both points have validity, but if you take them too literally or too far, you can end up with communications that fail to speak to the issues your audience members care about most—or at least the ones they care about first. 

Take the example of Woodlynde School in Strafford, PA, a K-12 college preparatory day school that has served students with learning differences since 1976. When Woodlynde wants to inspire, it’s not hard. Its everyday stories of student success bring tears to people’s eyes. But those stories are just part of what the families of prospective students want to hear.

As Kelsh Wilson discovered through a process of message-building focus groups, what’s more important, at least at the outset, are key facts: Exactly what kinds of learning differences does Woodlynde support and which does it not? What methods are employed and what services offered? Is specialized reading instruction daily or weekly—offered in class or through “pull-outs”?

If these points seem surprisingly detailed, a conversation with any Woodlynde family would reveal their value. The answers to these questions tell families of children with learning differences whether Woodlynde is a potential fit—and whether they want to learn more or not. They also prove the value of informational marketing.

It’s important to note that this kind of marketing is not just for LD schools. Consider these scenarios:

• You are a consortium of universities offering online graduate degrees in engineering. People want to know…  What degrees and specializations can they choose? Are courses synchronous or asynchronous ? How many can you take at a time and how long does it take to finish?

• You are a community school of the arts offering lessons and classes in music, art, and dance. People want to know… What instruments can they choose at each branch location? Do you have individual or group instruction? Do you start just in the fall or all year round? Do you have evening lessons?

• You are a summer camp operation at a school or college. People want to know… What programs do you offer for each age camper? Which ones are scheduled for which weeks? Is robotics all day long, or do you also get to play outside? What about after care and early drop-off? And lunch?

Of course, it’s possible to answer these questions and still have bandwidth left over to focus on your quality, your philosophy, or other less tangible selling points. The key is to identify the facts most people want to know, present them in a clear, brief way, and do it consistently every time.

Doing so not only gives people the answers they want, but also has persuasive power. It positions you as the kind of organization that’s easy to deal with and that delivers customer satisfaction. And it keeps folks from clicking away to your competitors.

WOODLYNDE SCHOOL / ADMISSIONS VIEWBOOK

Thanksgiving Greetings

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The Power of the Particular / Wayland Academy

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Working with Wayland Academy, a small, excellent boarding school in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, Kelsh Wilson created a branding program that’s all about capturing big themes in small examples—a strategy more schools would do well to consider.  

Sometimes the small things you notice about a place tell a big story, giving you the sense of what it’s really like and why it’s really special. This is the belief at the heart of the messaging program that Kelsh Wilson has helped Wayland Academy create. To get a sense of what this approach looks like in action, consider a few “Wayland Moments”:

#1 “It’s walking across campus and realizing you know every single person you saw.”

#8 “It’s when a Latin student sees her Latin teacher in the cafeteria and says (in Latin) ‘Hail, Teacher, who is more than the greatest!’”

#14 “It’s having the house parent in your dorm room help sew your prom dress.”

These and a couple dozen other moments like them are featured in a mini-book stitched into the center of the Academy’s new viewbook, some paired with photos. The result is an eclectic collection of real quotes from real students and teachers capturing the personality and strengths of this wonderful school.

What’s so great about this approach? Three things:

It’s a home run with the target audience. We know because the concept is the result of a process of message-building and testing in which Kelsh Wilson sketched a broad range of creative options, then gathered reaction from prospective students and parents. 

It’s accessible and addictive. These numbered “Moments” have all the power of the web’s best listicles, and package the school’s positioning into bite-size bits as easy to swallow as cream puffs at the Wisconsin State Fair.

It flexibly, scalably connects, print, web and social media. Wayland is already extending its Moments to the school’s Instagram posts and the email campaign from the Admissions Office. But that can be just the start. The list of Moments can grow forever. Visitors to campus can add their own. Alumni can get in on the fun too. 

More broadly, the Moments answer questions every institution needs to face as it tells its story to the world: How are we setting ourselves apart? What are we saying that other schools aren’t?

Sometimes the answer is a tagline no one’s ever dreamed of before. Sometimes it comes from as a spark of inspiration in the mind of a talented designer. But often, the way you set yourself apart best is not through a single masterstroke in concept development. It’s in the content you create to populate the concept. It’s images and examples that are granular, and real, and get to the heart of what people who love your school love about it.

WAYLAND ACADEMY / VIEWBOOK

WAYLAND ACADEMY / MOMENTS

WAYLAND ACADEMY / SEARCH PIECE

WAYLAND ACADEMY / EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGN

WAYLAND ACADEMY / SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN

WAYLAND ACADEMY / BRAND & STYLE GUIDE

Speaking Visually—and Very Visibly / Penn Engineering

Kelsh Wilson teamed up with Penn Engineering, a long-time client, to create a series of large-scale photo displays that turn blank interior walls into a visual marketing opportunity.

For years, the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania—Penn Engineering, for short—has been a client of Kelsh Wilson Design. Our latest collaboration is a resourceful, imaginative re-use of some great photos in order to bring empty building walls to life. Here’s the facts: 

Where: The Towne Building, the historic administrative headquarters of Penn Engineering, the corridors of which are busy with steady foot traffic: students, faculty, and many visitors. 

What: Giant photo montages showing scenes of teaching, research, and campus life. Also, 55-square-inch captioned photo panels, featuring specific projects underway.

Why: Because people passing through the building—including those who learn and work there—can’t see the amazing activity happening behind all those marble and plaster walls. Also, the idea presented a wonderful chance to reap an additional return from an investment in photography that had already been shot for other purposes.

How: Durable, high-quality, and relatively inexpensive digital printing.

When: About six months ago—but that’s not really important. More relevant is that any organization with empty wall space and high-quality (and high-resolution) photography can try this pretty much at any time at all—and can swop out images over time to keep things fresh.

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Synching for Success / Malvern Preparatory School

Launching multiple major branding projects back-to-back can be a bit overwhelming—but also exceptionally effective.

Working with Malvern Preparatory School, Kelsh Wilson completed a school-wide branding project, then, in short order, a set of admissions materials and a program of print and digital communications for a major campaign. The result was a lesson in the efficiencies and added impact that are possible when multiple marketing projects all reinforce each other.

Over a period of just a year and a half, Malvern Prep essentially reinvented its program of marketing communications. It happened when the Catholic independent school for boys, located just outside Philadelphia, undertook a major rebranding just as it was also in the planning phases of a new student recruitment program and its largest-ever development campaign. Kelsh Wilson partnered with Malvern from beginning to end—from a discovery and message-building phase that provided the foundation for the rest of the undertaking all the way to a fly-through video spotlighting the new landmark building at the heart of the campaign.

The experience yielded some insights that might be useful to other organizations as they engage in macro-level planning:

Expect Some Efficiencies

As we all know, there are certain tasks common to any major communications effort. And yes, by taking projects on in coordination it is possible to avoid duplicating these tasks and save money. This can be true when it comes to planning photography. (There’s no reason not to shoot a donor for a case statement and a student for a viewbook on the same day.) It can be true when it comes to meetings and administration. (Present ideas for a campaign brochure and website during one campus visit.) Most significantly, it can be true of discovery.  

To start our branding project with Malvern, Kelsh Wilson completed multiple days of focus groups and research interviews. Knowing that we would soon be focusing on a campaign, we expanded our scope of questions to include items on institutional vision and donor motivation. We also talked to more members of the donor audience than we would have otherwise. This allowed one phase of research to do double duty, avoiding duplication of efforts and the risk of interview fatigue among certain go-to stakeholders.

Good Timing is Part of Good Branding

The core deliverables of a branding project typically include a Message Guide and Graphic Standards Manual, sometimes with a new tagline and/or logo woven in. These are vitally important tools, but they do not in themselves make a big public splash. For this reason, it is ideal to plan the roll-out of one or more high-profile marketing projects to show off the new brand in action. In Malvern’s case these included an admissions viewbook and a campaign brochure (both of which reached families across the school community), and a case statement, campaign website, and campaign video.

This cascade of communications helped build excitement, recognition, and momentum for the brand—a roll-out impossible to miss.

There’s Power in Partnership

When you have a strong working relationship with a creative firm and their capabilities match the needs of varied projects (and only when these things are true), it can be highly advantageous to make full use of their talents in multiple ways—just as Malvern did in choosing Kelsh Wilson for brand development and then for several key components of the brand implementation. It’s a beautiful thing when a school and its creative firm form a true partnership. By the time the Kelsh Wilson was called on to shoot Malvern’s campaign video, we not only knew the personality of the school and the messages it needed to send, we knew each of the educators we were interviewing on camera.

There is another advantage too: The fact is, the people most likely to implement your brand in a way that’s fully faithful to its true spirit are the people who created it to begin with. To establish a truly strong brand, it’s advantageous to turn to these people for the first major initiatives that will bring it to life.

Back-to-Back Beats Simultaneous

Clearly, there are advantages to planning multiple major branding efforts in the same timeframe. However, this is not the same as doing them all at once. For the strategic work of branding to shape a website or print program, the branding project needs to come first and requires a bit of a head start. Without that, web or print designers are forced to make important decisions in a vacuum and then to retrofit later—or even worse, produce work embarrassingly out of synch with the new brand. As long as the brand work leads the way, other pieces can fall more or less where they will—or where they need to support your development, admissions, and communications programs.

Is it always possible to plan several significant marketing and communications projects on the kind of back-to-back schedule Malvern did? No. Is it worth trying? We absolutely think so.

The Essential Work of Informational Marketing / Woodlynde School

The Woodlynde School in suburban Philadelphia has a distinctive mission, providing a great college prep education to students with learning differences. However, their experience partnering with Kelsh Wilson on a school-wide branding project teaches at least one lesson that any school, college, or non-profit can use.

We all know that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and in the world of marketing communications, the #1 bit of knowledge most people have is that you need to focus on what makes you unique. #2 is that you are supposed to move beyond “features and benefits” to talk about your mission and impact in big, inspiring ways. Both points have validity, but if you take them too literally or too far, you can end up with communications that fail to speak to the issues your audience members care about most—or at least the ones they care about first. 

Take the example of Woodlynde School in Strafford, PA, a K-12 college preparatory day school that has served students with learning differences since 1976. When Woodlynde wants to inspire, it’s not hard. Its everyday stories of student success bring tears to people’s eyes. But those stories are just part of what the families of prospective students want to hear.

As Kelsh Wilson discovered through a process of message-building focus groups, what’s more important, at least at the outset, are key facts: Exactly what kinds of learning differences does Woodlynde support and which does it not? What methods are employed and what services offered? Is specialized reading instruction daily or weekly—offered in class or through “pull-outs”?

If these points seem surprisingly detailed, a conversation with any Woodlynde family would reveal their value. The answers to these questions tell families of children with learning differences whether Woodlynde is a potential fit—and whether they want to learn more or not. They also prove the value of informational marketing.

It’s important to note that this kind of marketing is not just for LD schools. Consider these scenarios:

• You are a consortium of universities offering online graduate degrees in engineering. People want to know…  What degrees and specializations can they choose? Are courses synchronous or asynchronous ? How many can you take at a time and how long does it take to finish?

• You are a community school of the arts offering lessons and classes in music, art, and dance. People want to know… What instruments can they choose at each branch location? Do you have individual or group instruction? Do you start just in the fall or all year round? Do you have evening lessons?

• You are a summer camp operation at a school or college. People want to know… What programs do you offer for each age camper? Which ones are scheduled for which weeks? Is robotics all day long, or do you also get to play outside? What about after care and early drop-off? And lunch?

Of course, it’s possible to answer these questions and still have bandwidth left over to focus on your quality, your philosophy, or other less tangible selling points. The key is to identify the facts most people want to know, present them in a clear, brief way, and do it consistently every time.

Doing so not only gives people the answers they want, but also has persuasive power. It positions you as the kind of organization that’s easy to deal with and that delivers customer satisfaction. And it keeps folks from clicking away to your competitors.

Smart Branding for Your School

At Kelsh Wilson, we talk with people at many schools and organizations who deeply appreciate the value of a good brand, but would struggle to say just what makes a brand good. Based on three decades of experience, we’d love to share some answers.

First, for a definition. Yes, sometimes people use the term “brand” to mean just a logo. But for the purposes of this post, and in most important conversations organizations have about reaching their strategic goals, a brand means much more.

It’s the carefully designed image of your school or institution that you choose to project to the world. It’s your identity intentionally made public. That means not just a logo, but a look and feel and a story you tell.

So what makes that look and feel the right one? What makes that story sing? It boils down to four things:

You need to project the same image in the same way over time and  stress the same messages in many different contexts. If you do so, you become known and recognized and maximize your marketing investment. If you don’t, it’s debatable whether you have established a brand at all.

Without creativity most school’s brands would be built around ideas such as academic excellence and community, or challenge combined with support. These may be valid, but they lack all impact. It takes imagination—visual and verbal—to leap beyond the expected into the territory of something memorable.

To stick, your brand must grow from your true strengths as an organization. It should tell the world in some real way what you stand for. Otherwise, you may succeed in generating a buzz, but you won’t be building a brand that your community can really own or that your audiences will ultimately believe.

Yes, a good brand tells the world who you really are, but it needs to do so in a way that will help you get where you want to be. One way to think of this is in terms of your organization’s current image and your target image—how you’re seen now and how you need to be seen to be positioned to advantage in the competitive landscape. The idea is to reveal your organization’s identity with a particular awareness of the strengths that matter most to your target audiences, that set you most clearly apart from peers, and that correct any misperceptions standing between you and greater enrollment, giving, and respect.

We know this can sound like a tall order. “All” you need for a great brand is consistency, creativity, honesty, and strategy. As if that weren’t hard enough, we also know that the toughest challenges involve the how—how to define a brand in a way that will encourage consistency, how to sort through a sea of market research to find clarity in strategy.  

So please look for future posts where we’ll dive deeper into these questions. Or give us a call. We’d love to talk!

Powerfully Promoting Your Event / Penn's Life Sciences and Management Program

Too often campus planners go to the hard work of attracting a great speaker or planning a public event and then miss the branding opportunity that comes with it. Working with the Life Sciences and Management Program at the University of Pennsylvania, Kelsh Wilson showed how to use event communications to project quality and professionalism—as well as draw audiences.

Life Sciences and Management at the University of Pennsylvania is an innovative program drawing on the strengths of the Wharton School and the College of Arts & Sciences, and each year it sponsors a marquee lecture featuring top figures in fields ranging from bioethics and biotechnology to medical research and pharma.

This annual highlight presents two communications goals: to shine a bright spotlight on the event and its featured speaker, and to use the opportunity to raise the public profile of the Life Science and Management program.

Kelsh Wilson has partnered with Penn for years on this project, and learned some key lessons along the way.

The first is to think of the event as the chance for mini-branding project. The event invitation, program and folder, plus related digital communications should also share an instantly recognizable look. This approach boosts open rates for communications, projects a sense of coordination and professionalism, and helps create the feel of a multidimensional experience—much more than a speaker in the front of a room.

Second, it’s key to find a path to visual impact. Your event might be round-table on political issues, a debate on the topic of inclusion or, in Penn’s case, a talk about communicating science to the public or developing a new drug. These topics, though diverse, share something in common: none are photogenic. That means turning to other tools in the graphic kit—from bold uses of color to creative typography. In the case of LSM, Kelsh Wilson’s design team has developed conceptual illustrations exploring each speaker’s theme in order to add interest and impact.

The final lesson is simply to plan ahead. Too often event invites and programs are dull because event deadlines sneak up on creative teams. Assess all the pieces it will take to make an effective promotional program and get them started well in advance!