With a Little Help From Your Fans
Last year, at least one institution scuttled its rebranding effort when students, faculty, and staff took to Facebook and soundly panned the identity before the planned launch. Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, is hoping to avert this outcome by asking its constituents-at least, those who are Facebook fans-to vote on a new logo. Stevens will roll out this logo in celebration of its 140th anniversary.
The poll is the latest step in a process that began last summer. The resulting logo and institutional rebranding is linked to plans for Stevens’ anniversary celebration. Michael Schinelli, the Institute’s associate vice president for graduate marketing and communications, notes that their design partner, Spiral Design, had developed identity materials. “We were going through the normal approval process until earlier this year when we talked about getting the community to give input on the designs. I suggested that we create a Facebook campaign that would allow stakeholders to vote—and also grow our social media fan base.”
Spiral developed four concepts. Schinelli reports, “The designs went through a series of revisions and we settled on four that we thought were both divergent enough to offer a choice and strong enough to be a winner. The poll also has info on the design elements, such as the authentic characteristics, history and aspirations that would identify Stevens better than our current logo. These include our gatehouse, the river (we’re perched above the river, overlooking New York City), Alexander Calder’s artwork (he was an alum), the University motto “Per Aspera, Ad Astra” (Through adversity to the stars), and the S for Stevens.”
Stakeholders can cast their vote via a Facebook poll to be launched today. The poll will be open through 9 a.m. Friday.
I like this approach a lot. I think the “unveiling” of brand concepts is fundamentally odd, though understandable from a project process standpoint. The strong articulation of a university brand is a reflection of the community it represents, so cutting large segments of that community out of the process can undermine the effort if there is not adequate representation of the various voices. Plus, it’s a good way to rally people around the effort. I always go back to the saying, “people support that which they help build.”
Posted on March 3, 2010 by Charlie Melichar
Appreciate this comment, Charlie, and I wholeheartedly agree. I don’t understand why institutions would fear this kind of approach if constituents were involved in the process from the beginning—and the concepts that they were reacting to were all strong enough to stand on their own.
Posted on March 3, 2010 by Michael Stoner
I have to say I chuckled a bit reading about Stevens’ approach. We did something similar during our name change process, back in 2007. Of course, Facebook wasn’t so huge in those days, so we used our now-inactive < href=“http://namechange.mst.edu/”>Name Change Conversations</a> blog to engage alumni, students, faculty/staff and other stakeholders. We also held open forums on campus and in St. Louis. We knew it would be important to engage as many stakeholders as possible in the process, and we used the blog as one of many forums to do so.
Here are a few of the relevant posts for anyone interested:
* Announcing the forums
* Scenes from the open forums
* The unveiling of the new logo. You might find the commentary enlightening.
Posted on March 7, 2010 by Andrew Careaga