What is a Brand Narrative?

And why do colleges and universities need them now more than ever?

It’s a tale as old as time: a college or university needs to market itself in a way that is compelling to prospective students, authentic to the lived experience on campus, aspirational enough to echo the pillars of the strategic plan and timeless enough to appeal to generations of alumni.

I apologize; that sentence should have come with a warning for higher education marketers. It’s an exhilarating, dizzying and daunting proposition to craft language about your institution that resonates with constituents ranging in ages from 14 to 104. It’s even more difficult to do so in a way that stands out from your competitors.

When these myriad audiences and strategic objectives are swirling in the ether, a brand narrative can serve as a unifying document: focusing your messaging, connecting the dots between constituent groups and providing institutional shareholders with common language to guide them in their marketing efforts.

What we talk about when we talk about brand narratives

In short, a brand narrative is a concise and compelling articulation of your institution’s story, written in a way that reflects the character, personality and aspirations of your college or university. It stakes a claim, telling audiences who you are, why you exist, what you value and what you hope to accomplish. While there is no steadfast word limit, brand narratives run the gamut from 200 to 400 words. 

What does a brand narrative do?

Much like a brand guide establishes a cohesive color palette, collection of typefaces and parameters for logo use, a brand narrative provides a vetted lexicon to return to when communicators need inspiration and guidance.

More specifically, a strong brand narrative provides external-facing language you can use across creative expressions. Lines from a brand narrative can be utilized as headlines verbatim, voiceovers for an anthem video or language to be displayed on pole banners and signage around campus.  

Not only does this language serve internal communicators in their daily work, but it can also function as a high-level creative brief for first-time freelance writers or to help new hires understand the points of distinction that set your institution apart.

But the unseen benefit of generating, editing, reviewing and iterating on a brand narrative is that it forces everyone involved in the process to work towards a shared understanding of messaging priorities and actively engage in creating the connective tissue that will keep your communications coherent, regardless of the medium or audience.

But where does this language come from? It starts with asking the right questions.

Connecting with Addison and Ezekiel   

Your institution has survived for decades, in many cases, a century or more. Addison, born with an iPhone in her hand, attends the same school as Ezekiel who arrived on campus on horseback for the first day of classes in 1874.

What steadfast institutional truths connect these two across the decades? What desires and aspirations do they share? Why were they compelled to attend your institution in the first place? What traditions have endured—and why? And what do those traditions say about what your community values?  

What about your mission? In our Coherence series, we’ve developed exercises to help you evaluate your mission statement for distinctive language. What is that distinctive language? And how does the truth of that language still permeate the experience you deliver to students and drive the outcomes you achieve in the world?  

Finally, lean on your institutional knowledge. At what times have you felt immense pride in your university? Can you recall moments when someone delivered a line that captured what your college is all about, perhaps during a commencement speech or a president’s inaugural address? Are there inspirational snippets of language from your strategic plan? Does your fight song have anything to offer?

Once you’ve identified those steadfast truths and the language you’ve traditionally used to articulate them, collect these distinctive words, phrases and attributes in one place—a shared document or whiteboard in a conference room. Identify common threads and patterns that exist between how you’ve communicated these core truths in the past and how you might re-articulate them to reflect your current educational experience and future aspirations.

As you begin to write the brand narrative ask yourself:

• • Why tell this story of your institution now?
  • What current or future challenges in the world is your institution particularly equipped to address?
  • What’s at stake if those problems go unaddressed?
  • What would happen if all your institution’s aspirations came true?

Why do you need a brand narrative now more than ever?

The sheer number of ways you can creatively express who you are to your constituents continues to expand as the content machine begs to be fed videos, social media posts, digital ads, copy for your website, print communications, etc. Marketing and communications departments, many times composed of individuals wearing multiple hats and responding to urgent last-minute requests, rarely have the bandwidth to think strategically about how everything they produce advances the larger story your institution is trying to tell.

If your writers are feeling rudderless (more so than writers usually do); if you’ve exhausted all possible ways to use your tagline creatively and have resorted to shoehorning it in to every call to action; if you feel like you’re writing at a moving messaging target–one that grows more nebulous with each new project–a brand narrative can help.

If you’ve just launched a strategic plan and find yourself struggling to connect the dots between its aspirations and the current reality of your institution, a brand narrative can help. 

A brand narrative can also help bridge the gap between what you’re delivering to your various audiences. If you’re telling contradictory stories to your prospective students and alumni, you put yourself at risk for muddying your brand in the market. The work of identifying your enduring institutional truths and articulating them in the form of a brand narrative can help you reign in rogue messages.

A brand narrative can serve as a north star, as inspiration, as a reminder of all the things that make your institution great—things that sometimes get lost in the grind of day-to-day creation.

In the end, humans understand the world in terms of stories. In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari writes extensively about the primal power of stories:

“Homo sapiens is a storytelling animal that thinks in stories rather than in numbers or graphs and believes that the universe itself works like a story, replete with heroes and villains, conflicts and resolutions, climaxes and happy endings. When we look for the meaning of life, we want a story that will explain what reality is all about and what my particular role is in the cosmic drama. This role makes me part of something bigger than myself and gives meaning to all my experiences and choices.”

Every one of your constituencies—and everyone writing on behalf of your college or university—want a story that they can find themselves in. Write them that story.

And if you need help, we’re here for you. RHB has been crafting brand narratives for decades. It’s one of our favorite things to do.