Strengthening your brand is one of the most effective ways to keep your campus resilient and prepared for what’s next. Measuring brand equity enables you to understand and grow brand strength over time. Brand identity is one of the five aspects of brand equity. It’s the face of your brand or the scope of your online presence and incorporates all five elements to reveal how you show up online.
This is the second post in a series that explores each aspect of the brand equity framework in depth.
Brand identity
Brand identity consists of the tangible assets associated with your brand. Within the context of social intelligence, assets are the social media accounts affiliated with your institution. Your brand identity can span multiple elements, such as visual branding, voice, physical branding, digital presence, and experiential aspects.
Why brand identity matters
A strong identity creates perceived value beyond functional benefits, builds resilience during market downturns through customer loyalty, creates barriers to entry for competitors by occupying distinct market positions, and provides a clear purpose and direction to increase employee engagement. Improving brand identity builds brand resiliency and cohesion.
Social intelligence minimizes fragmentation and maximizes engagement
Most institutions oversee hundreds—sometimes thousands—of social media accounts tied to their brand. Social intelligence research brings all of these into view, so you can see your full identity, no matter who is posting on your behalf. A comprehensive understanding of your owned digital channels reveals how your identity shapes brand awareness and shows how prepared you are internally to support brand building or narrative change. This holistic, research-driven view of brand identity is unlike any traditional brand assessment.
Audit and assess a campus’s digital presence, including volume, consistency, and publishing power of affiliated accounts. Also considered is what the scope of your online footprint says about your target audience and if you’re spending time where there’s a clear goal or strategy.
Evaluate direct customer feedback, engagement rates, and impact of core accounts on a campus’s brand equity. Account and engagement findings reflect your level of trust and loyalty, e.g., they’ll be stronger for more cohesive brands.
Identity insights drive action
Optimize the brand footprint to align across campus
A regional public university in the South was focused on strengthening their brand health. They started with a social media audit—a roadmap to building brand cohesion and proactive communication strategy across all social media properties. We identified more than 600 accounts and provided a campus-wide assessment of their social media presence. This gave the university a framework to work with, helping the team determine which accounts should remain active and which accounts to sunset based on lack of strategy or connection to the brand. The campus team spent months engaging across different departments based on the audit, including literally bringing everyone into a room together for a strategy workshop. The audit enabled the team to align their cross-campus messaging and create an internal communications plan and timeline to move the brand forward.
Strengthen brand cohesion to drive messaging success
Brand identity insights for a medium-sized, highly ranked public university found their total number of accounts aligned with expectations for similarly-sized campuses, but they weren’t balanced. Athletics accounts made up 25% of the total accounts and impacted about 75% of their branded conversation volume. The outsized impact on the university’s brand identity and awareness overshadowed messaging from institutional accounts. Inconsistent naming conventions between institutional and athletics accounts also detracted from their brand identity and made it difficult for stakeholders to locate various accounts.
To maximize their brand identity, the university developed consistent naming conventions and imagery to strengthen awareness and engagement. They also prioritized core and athletics accounts for high level messaging and to amplify relevant messages from institutional accounts. This demonstrates a strong network of interests and specialties, with the added benefit of helping audiences navigate their online ecosystem. Evaluating their brand equity enabled the campus to develop a cohesive brand strategy, optimizing and amplifying the best of their brand to key stakeholders in diverse digital channels.
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.
