Strategic Planning and Strategic Branding
Should Strategic Planning Inform Branding Efforts or Should Branding Inform Strategic Planning?
Strategic planning may be a familiar undertaking at most schools, but as more and more schools embrace strategies to strengthen their brands, many are unsure about which process should be prioritized.
First, let’s be clear. To be “strategic” doesn’t mean you can simply envision what the market will want from you, and it certainly doesn’t mean that you can guess at why consumers value your school. To be strategic, you need data about both.
Strategic planning is designed to provide a school, its divisions, departments and even individual stakeholders with a plan to achieve specific goals and objectives to improve how the institution delivers upon its mission. From a branding perspective, strategic planning helps to identify market opportunities to strengthen a school’s value.
Strategic branding is designed to provide a school with a platform to tell its story and differentiate it from the competition. It is intended to gain more support for the school in tuition dollars and philanthropic gifts and, ultimately, improve its market position. From a strategic planning perspective, branding helps clarify what consumers value most so those aspects of a school’s program can be a focus.
Education is, of course, always evolving. As shifts in your school’s program occur, the need to enter a strategic planning or strategic branding process increases. Prioritizing one over the other isn’t critical. What is important is that your efforts reflect a path toward a more sustainable future.
As just described, strategic planning is distinctly different from strategic branding, but a symbiotic relationship exists between the two processes. What bonds them together is a school’s mission. Your mission statement should articulate your school’s path forward. (If it doesn’t, rewrite it!) Crafted correctly, it states exactly what your school does and what its benefits are.
Strategic planning is your “how.” How will your school live out its mission?
Strategic branding is your “why.” Why is your mission worth financial support?
In other words, strategic plans improve a school’s ability to deliver on its mission. Strong delivery of mission creates community, culture and an institutional ethos around shared values, beliefs and benefits: the essence of a school’s brand.
Again, the timing or prioritization of one particular strategy is not critical. You’ll find in today’s shifting landscape that these strategies will overlap at points, converge with each other at other times, and eventually—ideally—coalesce for a period in perfect alignment with the market.
There’s nothing more powerful than data. Collecting it only every three to five years is no longer realistic for an enterprise as complex as a school. To develop effective planning and branding strategies, we must continually study our schools’ “how” and their “why” through objective research and analysis.
Data will always show the way toward a brighter and more sustainable future for your school.
Written by Joe Cliber, Principal at Creosote Affects
Creosote Affects helps school, colleges and universities nationwide find their brand voice in highly competitive markets. We are a comprehensive branding firm—executing research, strategy and creative.