Let’s be honest: many institutions leap into a rebrand, hoping it’ll magically solve their communication challenges. But without some solid groundwork, a rebrand is just a fancy new logo or a glossy new website. If you want it to work, there are three key steps you need to take first.

I spent the summer break thinking about how creativity can support universities to respond to the well-documented challenges. As difficult as these are, tough times inevitably force change – which can be good.

Embarking on a rebrand without proper preparation can lead to wasted resources and missed opportunities. Here is a practical framework to start right.

LIVE from Bristol Tech Festival - Watch our talk on how to build a brand for greater research and innovation impact.

Be rejected for the right reasons.

Unless you wrote the rules don't play by them.

Drop differentiation and go for distinction. There's always an opportunity to be more distinct than the competition.

Light+Heat combines empirical evidence from research and data with creativity to diagnose your current state and framework a future state.

Universities are complex organisms by nature, with many internal and external stakeholders requiring different things. So compromise is the order of the day.

But what are you often left with. A box-ticking exercise and not much more?

Done right, defining a clear set of university values can shape your culture, how people interact together, and galvanise them behind a shared vision.

We share a few thoughts on how best to approach the task.

The experience, knowledge and passion of your internal team can be blended with the challenge, broad-sector experience and outsider perspective of an external team.

Creatively that relies on two key elements.

If you want better stakeholder alignment, engagement and effectiveness on your next brand or marketing project, consider assembling a Rocketship team. We explain what it is, why it works and how to go about creating one.

In our experience, the tendency for universities and innovation hubs to delve into details and miss the big story determines whether a brand is actually launched/redefined or not.

This tendency is common in both the commercial and academic worlds.

This might help to get you started.

Your university, faculty or innovation hub may have resolved the important challenges of defining its Purpose, Mission, Vision and Values – and it may have found a way to tell a powerful, engaging story. So you may feel you're done, right?

Unfortunately, this is where things often fall down.

Complex organisations with multiple stakeholders like universities, faculties, and innovation hubs, can lead to equally complicated narratives.

👊 This makes cut-through to your audiences incredibly difficult. So simplifying the complex is critical.

👍 Here's a provocation, a potential solution and some practical examples of how it's been applied.

We’re told that keeping it simple is core to building an accessible brand, but great brands are built from dramatised details rather than abstract generics.

A brand refresh takes a lot of work. Alongside its rollout across communications and other brand assets, its ultimate test comes in how well it shapes how an organisation thinks and behaves.

How important is having a clear and compelling brand when building a spinout? Organisations at this critical growth stage often need to improve the role brand plays. But instead, it’s easy to believe brand isn’t a priority for now when telling more people about that product feels like the most important job to focus on. 

Find and remove the obstacles to more creative and innovative work. Tips for Research, Innovation and Enterprise leadership teams.

Shared Values are increasingly referred to by corporate partners as a reason for choosing which university, faculty or enterprise hub to collaborate with.

If the Values are lived (not just written), they help to establish behaviours.