You may have noticed that Emmanuel’s brand has a new look. This new brand advancement initiative has been several years in the making as we prepare for our centennial year. We caught up with Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Bob McDonald, as he spoke with Professor Mark Flynn’s Intro to Advertising classes about brand positioning. Keep reading for more information about Bob and an inside look at the recent changes!
Bob McDonald joined Emmanuel as Vice President of Marketing and Communications in March of 2016. He has an extensive background in marketing, with two decades of experience in higher education, corporate, agency, and entrepreneurial settings. Bob came to Emmanuel from Babson College, having served as the managing director of Executive and Enterprise Education. There, he oversaw marketing efforts to create important differentiation and drive growth. Before Babson, Bob managed integrated marketing communications for Harvard Business School, as well as completed two leadership development programs with The Home Depot, Inc. He holds a B.A. in English Communications from Boston College and earned his M.B.A. from Babson College.
Image courtesy of Bob McDonald
Before jumping into the specifics about Emmanuel’s new brand advancement initiative, Bob spoke with the class about the basics of brand position. “[Positioning] is how you want to be seen, how you want to be perceived,” he said. “But the tricky thing is that positioning ultimately rests in the mind of the customer. You can decide that you want to be positioned as, say, the highest quality provider of rugs, but that doesn’t mean that your customers are going to see you that way.” Defined, positioning is a marketing strategy that aims to make a brand occupy a distinct position, relative to competing brands, in the mind of the customer. However, Bob stressed that brand positioning is NOT a catchy tagline or slogan, an idea that is formulated “out of thin air,” something that changes every year. Instead, it needs to be consistent and genuine.
As a non-profit institution, Emmanuel strives to adhere to three concepts that build strong nonprofit brands: integrity, democracy, and affinity. Brand integrity assures that an organization’s internal identity is aligned with it’s external image and that both are aligned with its mission and core values. Brand democracy means that an organization trusts its members, staff, participants, and volunteers to communicate their own understand of the organization’s core identity. Finally, brand affinity means that the brand is a team player, works well with other brands, and generously shares space and credit. Bob reminded the class, “All of you live the Emmanuel brand, you are part of the Emmanuel brand. I don’t see my role as the brand police, to say, ‘you used that logo in the wrong way’. We do need to use proper brand standards, but the brand is much more than that. The brand is more than the logo, the color, the fonts. The brand is all of these touch points that go into the perception. You guys, through the way you are behaving and acting, the things that you’re doing, and all the different ways you’re involved in the community, feed into that brand.”
Image courtesy of Kirsten Spanjer Smith
It’s clear just how much the Emmanuel community influenced the new brand. With the help of Maguire Associates, a market research firm specializing in higher education, the school conducted tons of market research before crafting the new look. “Over 4,800 members of the Emmanuel community provided input that led to the development of this brand platform,” Bob said. “That includes students, faculty, staff, trustees, guidance counselors, parents, members of the community. Going back to the idea that brand positioning needs to be authentic, it was really important to Emmanuel that this new brand platform was not made up, that it was grounded in reality, because that’s what good brands are born out of.” Through qualitative and quantitative research – including one-one-one interviews with Sister Janet and the Chair of the Board of Trustees, campus focus groups, telephone interviews, online surveys, experiential research (campus tours, classroom observations, etc.), and a peer competitive review – a value proposition was established.
This value proposition was designed to represent the message of the college in a concise way. It reads: At Emmanuel, we go all in: we dream big, work hard and achieve great things. Located in the heart of the world’s greatest college town, Emmanuel gives ambitious students access to excellent academics, robust student life programs and outstanding career opportunities within an engaged residential community strengthened by shared values and a proud Catholic heritage. With the overload of information from the Internet and social media, it can be challenging to convey a message effectively. The value proposition helps to boil down the message while not over-generalizing what the college is trying to say. Bob explained, “What this isan attempt to do is to essentially boil the ocean. We’re trying to take Emmanuel – an institution with almost 100 years of history, more than 50 areas of study and programs, 100 clubs and activities, and all sort of things that happen – and trying to boil it down without losing what’s unique about the college.”
Image courtesy of Kirsten Spanjer Smith
The value proposition also attempts to represent all 5 of Emmanuel’s brand pillars into a single statement. These pillars, which are the main messages that support who we are as a college, include:
- Mission – dynamic leaning, enduring values
- Programs – strong academics, strong preparation
- People – superb faculty, spirited community
- Success – successful graduates, lifelong connections
- Place – small college, big city
Bob noted that location has been a main focus of the college’s messaging for years. He said, “Emmanuel’s location is a significant aspect of who we are. Our location in the heart of the world’s greatest college town is a big part of the experience that you go through as Emmanuel students. The fact that you can be on this residential campus in the morning and in the afternoon you can be in the city doing an internship or going to a world-class museum or volunteering is a big part of who we are. […] For many years, we’ve shown our beautiful quad and campus in marketing communications. But if you think about those brand pillars, one being our location, here we’re really trying to show Emmanuel in the context of the city of Boston. Now thanks to drone technology, we’re able to get aerial photography that shows that Emmanuel is this beautiful residential campus right in the city.”
After getting a sense of the broader brand messaging, Bob showed the class the physical changes put in place by the new creative platform that represents the visual identity of the college. The changes are as follows:
New Color Palette
“There’s a much broader range of colors being used to communicate Emmanuel now than in the past,” Bob explained. “We still have a primary color palette – the blue and gold. That has not gone away, but we have a broader color palette now with bright colors, rich colors, and metallics. It’s not as if we’re not using a rainbow sea of colors on everything. Generally, we rely on the primaries and bring in some of the secondary in our communications. Interesting to note though, even the blue and the yellow are different that what they have been in the past. They’re brighter and bolder.” You can get a sense of the new color palette below.
Image courtesy of Emmanuel College Marketing Guidelines & Resources
The Logos
Emmanuel has two new logos! While these creative new logos are helping to usher us into a new age, it’s important to note that the traditional seal has not gone away. It will still be used for formal and ceremonial communications, such as commencement. However, a new primary identity logo (seen below, top) was created to highlight the rich traditions and history of Emmanuel through the use of the architectural symbol of the chapel and the college’s founding year of 1919. Bob described it as a “new modern mark of the college that doesn’t stray too far away from who we are.” The other new logo (seen below, bottom) depicts the Halo mascot and will be used as our athletics and spirit-related identity. Bob explained that the creative team worked with the athletics department and student athletes to ensure that Halo looked “fierce, but friendly.”
Image courtesy of Emmanuel College Marketing Guidelines & Resources
The Message
You may have also seen the new ‘Go All In’ message being used around campus. Bob explained, “‘Go All In’ is not a slogan or a tagline. We’re using it as sort of a rally cry or a way to try to express the Emmanuel brand in a very succinct way. But it’s not the equivalent of Nike’s ‘Just Do It’. We don’t see that as a tagline. But it is a good way to express Emmanuel in a very succinct manner.” You can see the message in action in the video below.
The Photos
Finally, while flipping through all of this new marketing as well as clicking around on our website, you’ll most likely recognize a few friends. This is not unintentional. “When you think about how a brand needs to be authentic, this was an important part of it as well,” Bob said. “We made sure that our communications were highlighting real Emmanuel students doing the things that they do.” Check out the viewbook cover below and see if you recognize any fellow classmates!
Image courtesy of Emmanuel College Viewbook
Overall, Bob’s talk was informative and interesting. We now feel like we know so much more about the rebrand! You can read the official news release about the new branding here, as well as tweet about your Emmanuel experience using the hashtag #GoAllInEmmanuel.