It’s hard to believe that Graduate Communications turned two this summer. I’ll admit, when we first started, it was a bit of a mad rush, and to be honest, it still is! But we have loved every minute. Since 2020, we’ve worked with over 40 different community colleges and universities on a wide variety of projects and added eight fantastic team members.
I’ve always loved the joke that marketing is a bit like building a plane while flying it and in many ways, this has been true for Graduate Communications. For the past two years, it’s been all about keeping our sights set on the horizon. But after so much growth and success, we decided it was time to land the plane for a bit to think about who we were and who we wanted to be. The consensus on our team was that it was time to make sure our own visual identity matched the level of excellence that we provide to our clients.
So, how does a marketing agency that specializes in helping colleges elevate their brands, elevate its own?
We started in the same place that we might start with a client—by first clarifying what a brand is.
Many people wrongly assume that a brand is the same as your college’s logo or mascot. But the truth is, a brand isn’t just one thing, it’s the summation of positive and negative impressions that internal and external stakeholders have about your college or company. Brand is all about identity.
Branding, on the other hand, is the process of communicating that identity to prospects or potential customers. Branding speaks to those visual and linguistic cues and elements that help create a clear sense of identity in the minds of your prospects. Your logo is one part of this, but branding also includes your color palette, fonts, campaign language, and more. Strong branding improves marketing efficacy by aligning individual materials with the larger core values and identity of your institution. Another way to say this is that good branding effectively tells your brand story.
Unfortunately, telling consistent brand stories is a common problem we see in almost all the communication audits we conduct for clients. And it is something that we always recommend be fixed. Well-designed collateral that is on message results in brand recognition and trust. On the other hand, if your collateral looks unprofessional, it can create the unflattering impression that you are unprofessional as well. To see an example of how a college can elevate its own brand with consistent messaging and visual cues, check out our recent work with Cerro Coso College in California.
For colleges, there’s a reason that we recommend rebranding efforts often start with the development of a great tagline. By providing a rhetorical foundation for future messaging, a great tagline helps capture who your institution is while making it easier to align messaging to a cohesive and focused brand story. To get there, we often start with some combination of student and community surveys, focus groups, and individual interviews with internal and external stakeholders.
With our own rebrand, we knew we needed to have a tagline of our own. One that communicates to our clients and potential clients what we are all about, and one that can grow as our company continues to grow and expand. As a team, we discussed what makes us unique, what makes us stand out from competitors, and what makes us successful. As is often the case with projects like these, the answer was right in front of us. At our core, we are All About Higher Education. Whether it be marketing, career education, continuing education, design, video, podcasts, writing, fundraising, or media buying, our main goal is to help institutions attract more students and to help those students succeed.
As a former community college marketing director, I started this company with my partner and digital marketer extraordinaire, Chris Walker, to solve a problem I had experienced first-hand. As college marketing professionals, between managing media buys, developing marketing campaigns to support enrollment, handling crisis and public records requests and navigating bureaucratic relationships, college marketing professionals simply have too much to do and too little time to do it. Because of this, our focus has always been on supporting your needs, which is why another major change we’ve made is renaming our Account Executive arm “Client Services”. Our amazing Client Services director, Jamie McNinch, is herself a recovering community college marketing director. She and her team have a service-first mentality and deliver exceptional results to help your institutions and make your jobs easier.
When I was a college marketing director what always helped me through challenging times was remembering that when we do our job well, people’s lives are changed. It can be easy to lose focus on the impact you make, especially as the demands of your job shift, grow, and change, but what you do matters. If students don’t know who we are or why they need us or fail to persist after starting, they will never achieve the life-changing opportunity that is a college degree. Like a stone thrown into a lake, the ripples of this impact reach far beyond the graduation stage into the lives of families, their communities, and the world around us.
Part of our “brand research” was to refine our manifesto to capture why we’re here—check it out here and let me know how we did!
Because graduation is the pinnacle of success for both college and student, it remains the core of our identity and mission. And while our company’s core identity hasn’t changed much, our look and name have!
From now on, Graduate Communications will be known as GradComm. This new construction is more contemporary and uses the power of compression to distill our identity into something simple but recognizable. Plus, it’ll make our email addresses a lot easier to type (you’re welcome!).
To support this distillation, we also updated our company colors, logo, and website to better reflect the life and energy that’s at the core of who we are.
As a company, we’re thrilled to be embarking on this next phase of our journey and look forward to continuing to support you in any way we can.
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