The people who have come together to create Ztories have spent a long time working with businesses, colleges, and humanitarian institutions to identify and articulate their brands. From that long experience, we have arrived at the conviction that our highest task is not so much to create your brand, as to help you refine it if it is not crystal clear ... or more often, to help you articulate it more accessibly for the current cohort of prospective students.
It's YOUR brand
It is your brand, and often the reason it is a bit fuzzy in the marketplace is that there is ambiguity in the self-perception of the institutuion. Ztories can help in ways that are quite invigorating and constructive.
The Brand Wheel exercise
One of the things we like to do is facilitate a group identity exercise known as the "Brand Wheel". Gathering your key stakeholders, we help each person express their ideas freely, and listen to the other ideas in the room. This may mean that students listen to faculty better than before; or faculty to administration, or administration to students.
As each perspective gains a hearing, each person gains perspective on the brand as a nuanced, articulated identity. The exercise drives out not only the core essence or "soul" of the brand, but key message components that can be used in all marketing communications.
The process is fun, and intentionally so: consensus can only be achieved through a relatively pleasant interchange of ideas.
Brainstorming sessions
Ztories branding principals Owen Richard Kindig and Ken Christie can also conduct two- and three-word descriptor brainstorming sessions. Here, we bring all the brains in the room to a sharp focus on specific phrases. We help you free-associate, expand, stretch, aspire; and then test, evaluate, vet, critique, and qualify the flights of fancy until they are reliable air cargo vehicles that can carry the mail of your institutional persona.
SWOT Analysis
If you prefer to start with an evaluation of systems that are already in place, Ztories can conduct SWOT analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats existing in your institution as a whole, and specifically in how it presents itself to prospective students. Often, new ideas to address key challenges surface during such analysis. For example, branding issues have arisen in places where the institution has not yet adequately embraced the realities that trouble either prospects, students, faculty or administration. By probing these issues, we can help maximize strengths and opportunities, while minimizing weaknesses and possible damage from treats.
The successful plan of action in this sort of engagement will more closely resemble farming than hunting. Ultimate success is not a mastodon you can chase down and kill. It is a seed you must plant and cultivate. In this process we can be a catalyst that allows fresh ideas and needed strengths within the institution to emerge, gain a footing, and thrive in balance with other strengths that may have previously overshadowed them.
Adcepting
When we facilitate the emergence of advertising ideas from within, or bring our own ideas for your advice and consent, we like to frame the discussions using a process sometimes called "Adcepting". In this forum, we gather for basic advertising concept brainstorming. Everyone including your Ztories consultants must promise to check their egos at the door, and launch into the most pointed kinds of dialog about where a brand should be headed, and whether the ads or websites or viewbook concepts or video modules that are in question are accomplishing what the institution needs. Often, compelling new messages or institutional positioning ideas come from this activity.
Branding as Conversation
All of these techniques together may be described as a conversation. It is a conversation which rarely seems to happen without the help of a professional outsider like Ztories, and yet it could not happen without the other stakeholders of the institution in place, engaged, ready to listen well and speak their minds. This is the best part of our chosen profession, learning the institutional personality and helping it express itself with distinctness and authenticity.
College branding and "Lovemarks"
Much has been said in advertising circles about lovemarks — a term coined by Saatchi to describe those brands that people love so much that they cannot do without them. In our view, lovemarks are a useful concept if we're talking about the kind of loyalty that an alum might have for his alma mater. But to expect a 17-year-old to approach the choice of a college as a lovemark is a bit optimistic. According to Lovemark theory, respect is the traditional currency of a brand... the more respect, the more brand loyalty it engenders. Lovemarks attempt to go beyond that ... toward a virtual relationship which involves the advertising equivalent of mystery, sensuality, and intimacy. "Take a brand away and people will find a replacement. Take a lovemark away and people will protest its absence." It's doubtful that very many undergraduates would protest the loss of Harvard or Michigan if those august institutions closed their doors tomorrow. :-) They'd just go to Yale or Michigan State. On the other hand, the alumni would go into an extended period of mourning, after filing their class-action lawsuit. And then they'd find some other place to send their contributions!