Finding a truly distinctive market position
With three campuses in different towns; an extensive and diverse portfolio of courses; and a huge staff, teams at University for the Creative Arts (UCA) saw more differences than commonalities in the range of offers they delivered and target audiences they served.
Our goal was to help UCA create a powerful market proposition to strengthen UCA’s position as one of the UK’s leading, industry ready, arts and creative universities in an increasingly competitive market.
Through multiple staff workshops across the different campuses, we brought everyone on the journey developing a set of brand promises. Our goal was for everyone to understand and connect with these so they can help fuel the change they need to close the “brand gap” between the communicated brand and the experienced brand.
We supported the marketing and recruitment teams to develop and brand-led, student-informed strategies – examining the student lifecycle from interest to application to graduation.
We developed a framework to support staff teams across all roles and campuses – from recruitment to operations to heads of schools – to deliver in their day to day roles.
Leading a session at UCA’s annual Leadership Conference, we looked at how the UCA Brand Promises provide a blueprint for leadership at the University.
We supported UCA in partnering with Hingston Studio to deliver a fresh, noisy, interruptive visual brand campaign. This campaign (below) was also informed by target audience focus groups we ran, to ensure the execution of the proposition would land with the different priority audience segments.
The result is a brand and positioning strategy for UCA affirming the economic power of the UK’s creative industries, positioning creativity to prospective students as both a viable career path and an essential contributor to national growth. Reframing creative education as a strong, future-ready investment and placing UCA as a preferred option to key competitors for identified target audiences – rather than a second or third choice to many.
“Working with Jo and Lorna has been a game changer. Their approach is inclusive, ambitious and practical. Their work has already had a huge impact on us as an organisation and I have personally learnt so much and feel very supported. They are the perfect match and will be my first choice for future strategy projects.”
Emma Power, Director of Marketing & External Relations, UCA
Please Do Not Eat the Art is just one of many outcomes of our work embedding brand and audience insights with the marketing team who collaborated with a lecturer from their Animation Course. This idea for this exhibition and video came from a session exploring how activity that was commonplace at UCA could be used to generate storytelling opportunities that would communicate their brand and resonate with a specific audience segment.
