Problem
The Institute for Study Abroad, Butler University (IFSA-Butler) is an educational nonprofit that found its origin more than thirty years ago on the campus of Butler University in Indianapolis, IN. The founders established the organization to facilitate study abroad experiences for undergraduate students across the U.S., largely in direct-enroll programs at prestigious universities around the world, especially in the U.K. and Australia/New Zealand.
For many years, this model served the organization well, and small liberal arts institutions partnered with IFSA-Butler to help students complete study abroad applications, navigate complicated educational systems overseas, and provide care and safety services during the four-month experience. The market shifted in the mid-2000s, though, and students began arranging their own study abroad experience.
When a new CEO came to the organization in 2015, she identified a new strategic direction with a fresh mission, vision, and commitments better aligned to the market.
The IFSA-Butler brand, along with a smaller brand, The Alliance for Global Education, which had been acquired but maintained as a separate entity, did not reflect the new direction and lacked visual identity.
Solution
Corporate rebranding can be a multi-million dollar investment involving dedicated marketing staff, branding agencies, and multiple years. When I arrived at IFSA in 2016, rebranding was just one aspect of my responsibilities, and we had a nonprofit budget (read: minimal) and only a handful of team members and partners to accomplish it.
Market Research
Before undertaking corporate rebranding, it is critical to gather market research to confirm internal feelings about the brand. We formed a hypothesis:
our name was too wordy
using Butler as part of our name created confusion
we needed a name rather than an acronym
Alliance might be the better business name, so we might need to flip brands (using 'Alliance' had the benefit of being at the top of the alphabet - a plus in a crowded marketplace)
The marketing team, supported by outside experts, conducted a variety of qualitative and quantitative research, including surveys, focus groups, and individual depth interviews (IDIs). The data clearly indicated that our hypothesis was only partially incorrect. The name was too long, and the association with Butler was confusing to all constituents. However, our B2B audience had a negative association with The Alliance, so we couldn't use that brand as the organization name. Additionally, we learned that the B2B customers were comfortable with acronyms, perhaps because they didn't know anything else.
Brand Strategy
With the organization's strategic plan already outlined, we worked to ensure the brand communicated the mission, vision, and commitments through its visual and verbal expression. We faced a common challenge in educational environments: word bloat. To combat this, we partnered with an agency to help solidify how we presented the brand verbally. More on this later.
Competitive Analysis
Simultaneously, we conducted a thorough competitor analysis, looking at each competitor and their brand identity. In an interesting color study, it was clear that study abroad providers dominated one area of the color wheel: blue.
One thing we knew for certain was that the new visual identity would claim a color space largely ignored by other competitors. We selected purple as the dominant color and gold as a secondary color with a selection of supporting colors as tertiary brand colors:
Visual Identity — The Logo
For almost thirty years, the IFSA logo had been a word mark with little color or visual distinction. Since then, the graphic world and consumer expectations of a brand's visual presentation had exploded. We wanted a fresh logo design that would distinguish IFSA among the many study abroad providers while still honoring its past and anchoring it in the organization's core mission.
Verbal Identity — Finding Brand Voice
Reducing the academia and word bloat from the brand communications was our biggest challenge. The guidance of an education-focused marketing agency along with focus groups and multiple rounds of edits helped to solidify brand language for both the B2B and B2C audiences. From there, the marketing team developed extended brand language, a series of pull-out phrases, and a document to help non-marketers understand how to use the pull-out phrases into their communications.
Integrated, Multichannel Brand Campaign
With language and visuals solidified, we developed a multichannel brand campaign designed to elevate the brand among the critical B2B audience. We launched a six-email drip campaign along with coordinating landing pages to communicate the four key organizational commitments. Recipients engaged with blog and video content relevant to each topic — open rates: 29%, CTR: 7.1% — and coordinating messages appeared on LinkedIn, our primary B2B social outlet. A follow-up print piece arrived in the mail to the most engaged constituents at the end of the campaign, and the sales team carried physical and digital copies for distribution during and after sales calls.
Results
The target for the rebrand campaign was to shift brand association among our B2B audience from "expensive" and "direct enroll" to "innovative" and "educational." We also expected to improve unaided brand awareness by more than ten percentage points. Unfortunately, we were scheduled to conduct the follow-up surveys in the fall of 2020. Given the environment at the time - the pandemic had caused staffing changes in study abroad offices and stress among our target audience was at an all-time high - we decided to delay the survey until a time when the B2B audience would be better positioned to focus on providing quality feedback.
While launching a rebrand is always hard work, branding work is never really finished. Nurturing a brand is much like nurturing a child — every phase is different and requires attention and care. Once the rebrand and launch is complete, marketing organizations should move into development phase, building out campaigns that will elevate the brand and build equity across time. Along the way, marketing should monitor engagement metrics, tweaking and improving to optimize the experience for customers.
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