Strengthening your brand is one of the most effective ways to keep your campus resilient and prepared for what’s next. Brand equity—the value your brand holds in the minds of your audiences—is how you understand and grow that strength over time. Brand experience is the aspect of brand equity that assesses if a brand provides unique value and lives up to its promise. Knowing and measuring brand experience enables you to evolve messaging to reflect what the brand delivers, deepening loyalty and trust.
This post is part of a series that explores each aspect of the brand equity framework in depth.
Brand experience
Brand experience details how your specific stakeholders experience your brand, what they say about it, and whether or not they believe your brand provides unique value. It includes the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes stakeholders maintain about your brand.
The experience aspect of brand equity helps you lean in to only what your brand delivers, rather than messaging that could apply to any brand in your category.
Why brand experience matters
Experience is a direct connection between behavior and action. Campuses deliver on brand experience when they meet student expectations, invoke a positive overall impression and emotional response, and build loyalty and trust.
Brand experience is also an opportunity to understand the impact of current or potential strategies with various stakeholders based on how they encounter your brand.
Social intelligence recognizes unique differentiators
Social intelligence analyzes the audience to amplify stakeholder beliefs, attitudes, and needs. The data and insights help you understand if your audience believes your brand provides the unique value you say you do.
Investigate perception. Analysis that investigates perception within specific audiences to identify audience-derived differentiators. The insights explore if there are gaps in your messaging and if or how they align with your brand pillars.
Evaluate market position. Use competitor analyses, benchmarking, and comparisons to understand your brand’s market position, empowering you to lean into the unique value that strengthens your brand and increases your differentiation.
Experience insights drive action
Challenge internal assumptions
A medium-sized, highly ranked public university needed support identifying strategic marketing, brand, and positioning opportunities to support increased student demand and yield. The university’s smaller size and close-knit community were differentiators that students positively described as similar to a private school atmosphere. The university believed they were perceived as ”too rigorous,” but rigor didn’t negatively impact brand perception and was mentioned positively.
There’s an opportunity for the university to move applicants to enrollment by highlighting their market-defined differentiators at the top of the funnel, such as affordability and outcomes, and their unique, audience-driven differentiators at the bottom of the funnel, such as smaller size, community feel, and student research. Students are drawn to the research opportunities the university offers, but incorporating “whole self” messaging throughout the funnel provides a better understanding of their campus experience.
Align perception and experience to meet expectations
A large public university in the South had a strong reputation and brand narrative, but was looking to create a baseline understanding of their current brand and how it was perceived by the audience. A Brand Diagnostic provided an understanding of their brand equity, enabling oversight and strategic use of their full institutional platform to drive brand growth and support positive institutional outcomes.
When they evaluated their brand experience, three major themes emerged that closely matched existing brand perception. Athletics surfaced as a primary way stakeholders encounter the brand, and prospective students view the university as a competitive, high-value option—often expressed through strong institutional pride. At the same time, external scrutiny driven by state-level narratives and ideology, rather than campus experience, is challenging the brand’s perceived value. By focusing on the themes that consistently emerge in audience conversations, the campus can build stories that resonate with both athletics and non-athletics audiences and better leverage these areas of interest.
This gives the campus a chance to show alignment between what audiences believe about them and what they actually experience, building trust and confidence that students’ expectations will be met.
Brand equity framework
Broader knowledge and understanding of your brand awareness prepares you to examine the rest of your brand equity and build a brand strategy aligned with your future vision.
Learn more about the value of measuring brand equity.
