Brand BuildingGBC 2012

Overview• How to make MS standout from the MBA program? • Promotion of brand – who is the promoter and how to get

a buy in from students faculty and Dean.• How do you build your brand Internationally• Changing the brand: Rebranding the school to leverage

university’s brand.• Social Networking – (not able to talk about this)• Defining brand• Brand the school or use the University’s brand• How to increase Awareness• Who defines your brand• How to develop a brand to guide program offering

Defining the Brand• Determine the value properly. Use conversations with students

or bring in professional agency. Then get a buy-in from all parties student, Faculty and Dean. We are all ambassadors from our schools.

• Key concern was how to best position the brand. Should you use the brand position of the university or focus on the school’s brand or the program’s brand.– Use the brand that is more established and has the most recall value.– Determine the value of the program that stands out among the

competition. – Allow this position to engage right candidates and recruiters.

• Brand positioning is a cooperative effort. While students have a short term focus on the brand, faculty and Dean should be engaged in building long term focus of the brand. Alums should be engaged to spread awareness around their work place.

Changing a Brand• Changing the brand is a nightmare and can come about

due to external circumstances ( Johnson school becoming The Johnson school or school trying to leverage University’s brand like Perdue University MBA rather than Krammert School of MBA ). This needs a lot of thought and changes in all the merchandising and positioning.

• Graduate MBA School has a bigger role to play in a professional’s life than the undergraduate. We can engage the Alumni by sending merchandize that serve as a constant reminder of this connection.

• International Awareness can be generated by holding best lectures and may be even having an office in international locations.

• Michael Malenitza - UCLA-Not known for anything special:  Is this embraced

• Sarah at UW—Ranked #2 for Marketing – Not necessarily ranked for finance

– Set up a student run investment fund—this came as a student gift (98% of students donated)

– Students targeting and connecting with Alumni• Track who was involved in which club

during their time at the school to be able to target alumni

• Bestin at UW – Student Government has a VP of branding (brand manager)—ensure that news is really well managed (e.g., someone just got hired by S&P, how do we publish it and use it to improve perception) – Bestin at UW

• Terence at Rotman – working to diversify, have clubs (student driven) really running events and pulling alumni in – they have pretty steep fees for the clubs to have a larger budget

• William Fang – How do you deal with the rankings and actually do anything more than understanding how to actually make an impact on the rankings

• Michael at UCLA – town hall to try and educate the student on how the rankings actually work

• Sarah at UW – There is a dean in charge of the alumni for the first 5 years

• William Fang at Georgetown – There is a Poets and Quants article on how UVA improved their rankings

• Terence from Rotman – How to put the infrastructure in place and “mythology” to enrich the brand and create the identity, rather than just allow it to develop on its own

• William Fang – Create events that are storied/signature events that people can look forward to each term – educate the first years on what is coming up

• Bell curve cup – prizes and competitions, presentations to rally people and remind them

• Sarah at UW – draw the other (PT/Evening students to educate them what is going on)– Berkeley does a male drag show – “This is so Haas”– Maybe have completion/cohort internal competitive units

• Michael at UCLA – weekly roast, ensure that some of the signature events line up with some of the admit events– weekly – have corporate sponsors sometimes, but then in

spring the student government will sponser “afternoon at Andersen” – Have deans show up to drinking events

– Student government to try and focus events that really wrap PT/FT programs together

• Bestin at UW – Mustache event- everyone from UW showed up at a competition with Mustaches – really fuel competition to other schools for differentiation– As president – frame the culture to the incoming students,

set expectations and vision of what you should be getting out of all of this (either at admit days or during orientation)

• Sarah at UW – ensure there is communication as liaison to administration what the “pulse of the students” really is and how they feel

• William Fang• Is there a social media

strategy?

• UW has Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook

• Corey Painter – Admitted student Facebook

• Proving that it’s worth recruiters’ time to visit small schools

• NUS Business School deals with a scale problem of student population

• Do more programs to prove small school’s value

• MBA games done at Schulich School of Business: creates awareness

• Manchester Business School organizes career fairs with alumni. Reunions with alumni every month – 2 months to keep the interaction going

• Return on investment• Emory University finds it

difficult to get companies to visit due to its small size

• When companies visit students feel pressure to attend the events even though they are not interested in these companies: Frustration among students

• Manchester Career Service Center organizes a week long career fair with companies spanning a large spectrum of interests

• Schulich organizes a 1-day career fair that caters to 9-10 different segments, allowing students to attend different sessions based on interests

Issue/Solution• Differentiating Brand• Entrepreneur donating

money to different school “brands”( Engineering, Arts, etc.), so difficult to be well represented and recognized as business school at Shulich

• Shining spotlight to media on things that deserve attention

• Differentiate by saying Schulich Business School , not just Shulich

Issue/Solution• Global Recognition• Solutions: Conferences, Case

competitions • Not only holding, but also attending at

top business schools• Success of such case competitions of

conferences spreads • Leverage use of media to popularize

and get school’s name out to public• Online forums to give recognition and

attention to events• Maintain strong websites that

differentiate your brand, and maintain these websites’ presence online by staying at the top of the page via search engine results

• Use of social media – have the dean of respective school tweet

• Feed information to your school’s communication department for them to put out towards the media

Use of Student Voice• Tell administration

problems, and feed ideas/solutions to them

Brand Building in Student Union• Proving that SU is an

independent entity of Copenhagen

• Solutions: Marketing Case Competition to find solution

• New name for organization • Make it more clear to students

as to how they operate during the election period

• Update logo to be placed on communication that goes out to school when you sponsor an event. Creates visibility and awareness

Role of Faculty• Solutions: Faculty research can

drive brand awareness• Faculty can provide research

results to corporations, and mention students who are also interested in this field to put not only student’s name out there, but also school’s name

• Generates reliability of faculty research, and keeps corporations coming back to the school

• Creates affinity towards school • Faculty written cases used at

other schools, generating awareness

Initiating Infrastructure Changes • Leaving class

gift/donation to school• Students need to feel

pride in school and leads to administration creating these changes