Case study: University for the Creative Arts

University for the Creative Arts (UCA) is at the beginning of a brand journey. Three different campuses in different towns, an extensive and diverse portfolio of courses, and a huge staff team means this project is on a vast scale. When we arrived, staff were able to see more differences than commonalities between the range of offers. Our work has explored what makes them all UCA. What is the UCA’s ‘why’ and brand promises that makes it truly distinctive in  an increasingly competitive market? How can the cut through and get the right message to the right people? And how can they then ensure the students’ experience lives up to these promises at every single touch point from enquiring and applying to being an alumni.

The University had been through challenging times, leading to a struggle to step back and think about the future and the bigger picture. But under a new and dynamic Vice Chancellor and further incoming leadership roles, there is fresh impetus for UCA to define what makes it special and different and to use that as energy to make real change and move forward.

We’ve run a large number of brand storytelling workshops, consulting more than 200 staff and generating almost 4,000 post its which through thorough analysis we distilled down – then convened smaller focused discussions with the Vice Chancellor, Marketing, Comms & Recruitment teams, Directors of Schools and others.

The output is five UCA Brand Promises

Using these as the inspiration, we’ve supported the marketing and recruitment teams to develop and brand-led, student-informed strategies – examining the student lifecyle from interest to application to graduation.

We’re supporting the delivery of a fresh, noisy, interruptive visual brand campaign currently being developed by Hingston Studio for launch in Spring 2025.

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.

Our goal is for everyone to understand and connect with the Brand Promises so they can help fuel they change they need, the Brand Promises being used across the University to help teams in every role make proactive choices to close the “brand gap” between the communicated brand and the experienced brand.

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.