Some people seem to have given up making the case for brand building as a serious discipline in higher education.
We haven’t.
Because once you understand what good brand strategy actually does, dismissing it starts to look rather odd. It’s a bit like ignoring a proven methodology because you don’t much like the language used to describe it.
So let’s get down to brass tacks.
The case for brand in higher education isn't that universities should behave more like private-sector businesses, although frankly, a little more commercial discipline in the right places wouldn’t hurt.
The case is much more fundamental.
Universities are extraordinarily complex institutions competing for attention, trust, participation, funding, talent and relevance among audiences who cannot possibly absorb the totality of what they do. Brand is the discipline that brings coherence to that complexity. It connects what an institution does with the meaning people take from it. It helps research, teaching, culture, experience, reputation and behaviour add up to something recognisable, distinctive and consequential.
That matters.
Because the job of brand is not to make a university simpler than it really is. It is to make its complexity matter more to the people who matter — inside and outside the institution. To make the university matter more to prospective students. Matter more to academics and researchers. Matter more to partners, funders, governments and communities. Matter more to the people whose decisions will determine its future. And here’s the frustrating thing: universities are not short of stories, achievements, ideas or genuine points of difference. Quite the opposite. Most international businesses we’ve had the privilege to work with would give their right arm for the storytelling riches sitting inside the average university.
The problem is coherence.
Without a strong organising idea, institutional complexity fragments. Schools tell one story. Research institutes tell another. Central teams tell another. Individual academics tell another. Every one of those stories may be true. Some may be brilliant. But if they don’t add up to something, the institution risks becoming less than the sum of its parts.
Of course, different audiences need different stories. That's good communication.
But those stories should still contribute to an institutional narrative that builds recognition, meaning and reputation over time.
This is where brand earns its place as a serious strategic discipline.
Not by forcing uniformity onto a university, but by creating enough coherence for its diversity to become meaningful.
Not by flattening complexity. By helping people navigate it.
Not by manufacturing significance. By connecting what an institution genuinely does with the people for whom that work can have real significance.
That's the proposition at the heart of the manifesto we’ll explore in future articles:
Brand is the discipline that helps complex institutions matter more to the people who matter.
And yes, we’re gonna keep banging that drum.