How Important is Education Branding?
Take a moment and visualize the college or university you attended with their Education Branding. What three adjectives or emotions immediately come to mind when you think of your uniform or alma mater?
Introduction of Education Branding
“Brand is the promise, the big idea, the expectations that reside in each customer’s mind about a product, service or company. Branding is about making an emotional connection.” (Alina Wheeler, Designing Brand Identity)
Schools want their brand identity to set them apart, to reflect their strengths, values, and mission as a place of learning. In order to avoid generic or misguided messaging, the marketing team (and other key stakeholders) must first clearly define their institution’s positive attributes, and crucially, how those align with their target audience’s motivations, challenges, concerns and educational preferences.
When your audience knows exactly what your school stands for, and feels that this mission aligns with their own goals and values, you’re well on your way to building trust and loyalty.
Education Branding
From primary to post-graduate, Alivea helps schools elevate their visibility, stature, and enrollment as they face fierce competition for prospective students with education branding.
We have a long history of working with higher education brands so we understand their challenges and opportunities. Below are just a few that we’ve helped through the years.
1. Singapore Management University
Students’ mental wellbeing is important so that they will be able to achieve their academic and personal goals, enjoy their time at university, and successfully complete their programmes.
A supportive university environment helps students learn valuable life or self-coping skills and strategies (such as resilience and stress reduction skills), which are transferable to a range of post-university settings including workplaces.
Through the above three-pronged approach of Education, Encouragement and Experiences, we aspire to develop resilience in students so that they can be empowered to take charge of their own wellbeing and support the wellbeing of others, even after leaving university. Furthermore, this framework is aligned to SMU’s Graduate Learning Outcomes (GLO), where resilience and positivity are identified as desired outcomes under ‘Personal Mastery’ (GLO 5).
2. Sunny Dae Kindergarten
Sunny Dae is a kindergarten for children aged 2 to 5. Sunny Dae has a good education system that only emphasizes best practices for beloved children. Sunny Dae also emphasizes the care system for the environment and carries out many activities outside of school. Sunny Dae is a place where the kids grow.
The Objective
Sunny Dae wants to change its brand identity to be more kids friendly. By displaying a design that is more colorful and fun. They want to present an impression that reflects kids’ happiness during their growth.
The Solution
We made the design more kid-friendly by adding child-reflective illustrations to the brand identity and logo. We’ve also added more colors that reflect fun.
We are eager to bring the smiles of the growing children to our designs and make Sunny Dae a kindergarten that has an identity as a fun place to learn and grow.
3. Saint Clare School Singapore
Saint Clare School is an educational institute with a mission to teach children with special needs and enable them to become contributing members of their communities. The school helps children discover their natural talents and implements strategies to prepare them for independent lives outside of school. Some of the learning difficulties include learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit disorder, dyslexia, Down’s syndrome and other disorders.
The client’s brief was to standardize all their current collateral including their website for more uniform and seamless branding throughout. With a new outlook for the client’s brand identity, the school wanted increased focus on outcome-based results, for example, the ability of the students to take care of themselves instead of output-oriented goals, such as the ability of students to pass examinations.
The school’s softer approach also gave rise to the use of subtle, muted greys and blues to make the site more inviting and pleasing to the eye. We also chose a more serious serif font to show credibility and the fact that the school was concerned about educating their students. With all elements being pared down, the site continues to showcase exactly what is at the heart of the school – namely, their students.
Conclusion
To stand apart from the crowd, schools must do much more than tout their academics. Telling an inspiring brand story across various channels is how the most progressive educators are capturing ideal students, attracting superior instructors, igniting alumni support, and boosting enrollment. These are the sights we set for our education clients every day.