Brand Strategy

A Brand is a Promise of a Repeatable Experience

The brand is in everything we do as marketers – and if the brand team does their job right, as employees too – every time we do it. So how to represent this is a weird thought exercise, since I’m pretty sure I’m not at liberty to post our full brand guidelines online. But from crafting an anti-racism statement for email signatures to producing a short-film for a live event, the brand is the heartbeat of my workday.

So I thought I’d lay this out in three categories of brand expression: physical – print materials and other brand artifacts that you could turn over in your hands; conceptual – content and the stories we tell, and through them, the feelings we want to evoke; and experiential – immersive brand touch points that reach as many senses as possible.

Physical

Print marketing continues to be a hallmark of higher ed. It’s old school, but I also think very on-brand for the industry. Books to read, papers to write, notes to take, research to pursue. College feels rooted in the tangible even as the world moves digital. The challenge is to create physical brand assets that the audience will hold on to.

Conceptual

We are storytellers. This was the big vision that pushed us through the launch of the MeetNYU content platform, when we started seeing ourselves as publishers. The science is in stitching it together, across platforms, across media, across voices, to evoke just the right emotions to connect the audience to our brand.

Experiential

Print gives us a way to touch a brand. Photography and design let us see it. Video lets us hear a brand. But when there are opportunities to experience a brand through all of our senses (at least when events are live), we can deepen the connection. My career started in television production the ultimate “event” in some ways, and here we are.