Rebranding Academic Heritage for the 21st Century

There is a myriad of reasons – but I’m willing to say that few people chose their higher education institution because of the brand. And I’d like to argue that if you really think about it, you’ll realise that the brand image projected by the institution actually played a bigger role than you think.


Reinventing a Heritage Education Brand

At Boomtown, we’ve been privileged to work on several brand initiatives across higher education institutions, but the biggest piece of higher education work we’ve done by far was for the University of Stellenbosch.

The aim was to get the 100-year-old brand where it needed to be for 21st century South Africa. The new messaging was about ‘moving forward together’, driven by the university’s desire to create real change and promote unity and diversity.

The process involved two and a half years of gathering data, research and doing the kind of personal immersion with students, faculty and staff that is foundational to Boomtown’s work.


Internal Messaging is as essential as External Messaging

Something we learned early on in working to change an academic brand was that internal messaging and buy-in was important. In FMCG, an agency will work with a marketing team which has defined where it wants the brand to go, and we’ll work with them to see if we can get it there.

At a university, the entire vision has to change, across the organisation – and there are different ways of communicating that to administrative staff and the academic staff. We managed to communicate that cultural change through branding, internal communication and genuine engagement across different divisions to get everyone on board with what re-branding meant for the university, in their context.

We had to be transparent to demonstrate that we didn’t want to throw a century of history out the window, we had to be authentic because the brand still had to represent the ethos of the university while helping it move into a new era and we had to ensure that our quality assurance was water-tight to ensure that the new brand was true to what the university was delivering.


Students and Parents are Customers

We also spent time learning about what prospective students looked for – as we do with all the higher education institutions we work with. We learned that it was important for us to frame things around access – how they could get into the university, what kind of opportunities the university was going to give them while they were studying there and what opportunities being a graduate of that institution was going to mean for them in the job market.

Positioning the university as an institution that showcases access to opportunities with a real-world outcome gave us the chance, from the brand point of view, to find the balance of heritage versus real-world solutions.

And yes, at the end of the day, one of the deliverables was also a new logo – one that showcased the university as a modern, globally competitive identity, yet still felt ‘unmistakably Stellenbosch University’.

Any successful rebrand needs clear, targeted messaging – and the higher education space is no different.