An audit of Barker College’s advertising and a review of quant and qual research led to a new brand story for Barker College.
Following the successful delivery of a new enrolment prospectus, Barker College engaged Leo Creative to develop a new advertising campaign. Before developing a brief and strategy, our first step was to review the school’s existing campaign through a visual audit.
Brand Discovery
Campaign Audit
The audit uncovered a number of issues including:
- visual inconsistency;
- message inconsistency;
- a lack of focus in messaging (too much copy), and
- the absence of a consistent single-minded proposition.
The audit also included a review of Barker College’s key competitors and outlined the opportunities for the brand in the new campaign.
A follow-up meeting to discuss the findings of the audit revealed a problem that Barker College had been wrestling with for many years – “What is our brand proposition?” The school had struggled with defining a single brand promise across its preparatory, junior, middle and senior schools. They had tried, having worked with other agencies, but had failed. As a result, their brand communication lacked strength and consistency.
Review of Existing Research
Barker had recently completed quantitative and qualitative research with Barker families at different stages of school life. From quantitative research, the top three drivers of school selection were:
- School Reputation
- Academic Excellence
- Values/Culture
Interestingly only one of these is tangible and measurable. If we define brand as a promise of value, then ‘reputation’ and ‘brand’ are one and the same. Furthermore, a direct correlation exists between an organisations values & culture which influence its behaviour, which in turn builds its reputation (or brand). This can be expressed as:
Behaviour = Brand = Reputation
These findings were similar to research commissioned by the Sydney Morning Herald, which also identified the importance of values and culture in driving parents perceptions about schools.1
In turning our attention to the qualitative research, we had one task – to discover Barker’s values and culture. We knew that this would be the key to revealing a compelling and authentic brand story.
Word clouds for values and culture were created for each research segment and key trends across the parent community were explored. This approach identified a long list of potential attributes to define the brand. These attributes were then ranked and mapped using a set of tools that we also use in a workshop process and the results presented for discussion with the client.
Brand Promise
In discussion with the client, a final set of distinctive brand attributes were selected and a brand promise was developed and approved. Barker’s new advertising campaign would be about bringing those attributes and the brand promise to life.
Brand Expression
From the beginning the project was approached with the following principle in mind:
‘We are not in the business of “selling” Barker College. Our task is to make it easy for parents who share the schools values, to identify Barker as the right school for their children.’
The campaign would be about raising the Barker ‘flag’, inviting those who are like-minded, those who share our values to join us.
A new brand theme: ‘A bigger picture’
A new brand theme (or proposition) was developed as a strong, simple and memorable expression of Barker College’s brand promise.
A new photographic style
Another issue identified in the visual audit was that photographs were too staged and did not capture real life in the school. We were able to persuade the client to give their photographer Gerrit Fokkema more freedom to work in a reportage style. It helped that we had worked with Gerrit before, confident that he would capture powerful images.
Note: Barker College’s Brand Attributes and Brand Promise were not disclosed as this information is considered commercially sensitive by Leo Creative