To Brand or Not to Brand?
As development and alumni relations professionals, we are often making decisions about whether to brand or not to brand annual funds, alumni associations, donor societies, major (homecoming/reunion) events, campaigns, etc. I often see people default to creating and launching new brands for these new initiatives, which I believe can be a mistake. Here’s why…
Branding is not just about names, logos and font types. If it were, then every creative out there would hail themselves to be brand strategists. And be careful here, because many creatives actually do hail themselves to be brand strategists without possessing the adequate understanding of brand strategy or without conducting the proper market research and analysis necessary. To make my point more clear, there are many examples of incredible brands out there that have crazy names, logos and font types…such as Yahoo!, Google, Apple, Nike, or Amazon. Who would have ever thought these companies would have been named and branded in this way!? However, each of them possess incredible brand equity, as evidenced by their stock prices, market share, premium pricing, and customer perceptions of their brands. Thus, your brand is not just about the name, logo, or font type (although these do matter!), but what really matters most is positioning yourself along the way towards your aspirational brand identity in order to build brand equity over time in your customers’ minds.
Before I talk about whether you should be branding or not branding your annual fund, reunion weekend, alumni association, etc., let’s talk a little bit about brand strategy 101.
Brand Strategy 101
Your brand image is your current brand associations, assets, and equity among your target audiences, and your brand identity is aspirationally where you are going. So think of your brand image as the “You Are Here”. It’s what customers currently think and perceive of your brand. Think of your brand identity as your “Northern Star”, it’s how you want your customers to perceive your brand. Brand management becomes the active process of positioning your brand along the way from your brand image to identity.
Brand management becomes the active process of positioning your brand along the way from your brand image to identity. Brand positioning (or brand promotion or branding) is the process where creative teams bring your brand to life in a manner that is currently relevant, meaningful, valued, differentiating, and trustworthy to your customers in order to build greater brand equity along the path from your current brand image to your desired brand identity.
Brand Strategy Example: As an everyday example of brand strategy, you might think of someone who just met the love of their life that they want to marry and have children with. Their current brand image might be a young, broke, irresponsible person; and their aspirational brand identity might be a lifelong partner and parent. On day one they might strategically position themselves as someone interesting, cool, and sexy. As they successfully establish this initial brand positioning with their desired partner, they then might move on to position themselves as a responsible provider before eventually positioning themselves as a potential lifelong partner and parent. Now, imagine if on day one this person instead tried to position themselves right off the bat as a potential lifelong partner and parent without establishing the previous associations, the prospective partner might not have found this individual credible and may have actually been turned off by the prospective partner to the point that they did not give them the time of day or any consideration of advancing their relationship. So as you can see, having a brand strategy matters, and it requires proactive and thoughtful consideration and work!
Brand Strategy 101 Cont’d
As part of your brand identity, you also need to understand how your various sub-brands work in concert, or not, with your primary (often referred to as master) brand — which is called brand architecture. Some organizations have what is called a branded house, where all sub-brands directly build equity for the primary brand. An examples of this is Toyota, and their many sub-brand: Prius, Highlander, Camry, Corolla, 4Runner, Rav4, Sequoia and Tundra where each model has it’s own sub-brand that is directly tied to Toyota, but are intended to have a sub-group of associations targeted at specific segments of the market. On the other spectrum is a house of brands, where the primary brand may not even be known to consumers and sub-brands appear to be competing brands but are in fact are also branded to specific target audiences. A perfect example of this is Proctor & Gamble and their sub-branded detergent lines: Tide and Cheer. Unless you read the box very very carefully, you would not know that both are sub-brands of P&G. In general many organizations fall somewhere between these two extreme spectrums of brand architecture in how they optimally manage their primary and sub-brands.
In order to get to know both your current brand image, aspirational brand identity, and optimum brand architecture, you need to do adequate customer research and business analysis. In the end your organization must have the ability and culture to execute consistently and adequately upon your brand promises to its customers, because ultimately your customers will know the truth about your brand no matter how you brand it.
If you want to know more about brand strategy, I would highly recommend you read David Aaker’s books (Building Strong Brands and Brand Equity). David Aaker is a retired faculty member from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and consultant at Prophet Brand Strategy, which is where I had the privilege of working on several brand strategy consulting engagements with him. David Aaker is globally recognized as a brand guru and Prophet Brand Strategy has worked with some of the largest and most prestigious brands. See a selection of slides below from David Aaker and Prophet Brand Strategy.
To Brand or Not to Brand?
Now, returning to branding within the development and alumni relations space…the big question is whether or not to develop brands for funds, programs, events, campaigns, etc. For many of us our primary (master) brand is our university or organization, such as UC Berkeley or Doctors Without Borders. We often jump to branding our annual funds, reunion weekends, alumni associations, leadership donor societies, etc. despite that our alumni and donors’ main relationships and associations are with our institutions/organizations.
So I ask, why do we create completely new brand relationships and sets of associations around our fundraising or alumni relations activities versus just leveraging those of our university or organization?
In my opinion, creating new brands for such things seems to be an unnecessary investment and actually creates a new brand that people may form negative associations with (“all you want is my money”) versus the positive associations they maintain with your primary brand (“college transformed my life”). I would even argue that there is not much reason for us to call our funds the “XYZ Fund'' except that by doing so might provide some financial accountability or security to our donors to contribute to a “fund”, similar to how referring to accounts does with banking customers. However I believe we’ve done ourselves a disservice by creating too many new brands and sub-brands within the development and alumni relations space, when we really should lean more closely into the sentimental associations our alumni and donors possess with our primary institution’s brand.
So while I’ve been called the “brand killer” before, what I ask you to do next time you are thinking of launching a new brand with its own name, logo, font type, and associations, is to pause and ask yourself…does this new initiative warrant creating an entirely new relationship with your alumni or donors? If not, lean into your primary brand (and alumni/donor relationship with your institution) and help your institution build further brand equity in it — which in turn will help your alumni relations and development efforts in the long-run.
Now there are times when developing a sub-brand can be a powerful strategy, such as with your reunion and homecoming weekend. For example, when I started working at UC Berkeley in 2001, we primarily branded our Reunion & Homecoming Weekend and had sub-branding around class years. But then market research among our alumni showed that they possessed little to no class affinity and mostly related to Berkeley itself. This realization made us reposition our Reunion & Homecoming Weekend as a sub-brand to UC Berkeley as the primary brand, and also reposition the weekend around the individual’s nostalgic anniversary of their graduation from Berkeley by moving away from stating…”Class of YYYY’s XXth Reunion”...to…”Come Celebrate Your Xth”...placing the emphasis on the celebration of the individual alum’s milestone. This is an example of how knowing your audience can help determine the optimal brand architecture and positioning to maximize our desired outcomes.
Conclusion
By no means am I stating that we development and alumni relations professionals should get ourselves out of the business of developing and managing brands and sub-brands, but I would encourage us all to be more thoughtful and informed of what we are trying to accomplish in the minds of our target audiences (students, alumni, donors, etc.) when making branding decisions.
