With almost 20,000 students in five locations (four campuses in the metropolitan New York area and a Graduate Center in Italy), St. John’s University is among America’s top private, Catholic universities.
Anticipating the need to strengthen its identity in the educational marketplace, St. John’s brought in BrandLogic to create a major branding and identity platform. According to the university, the efforts have paid off, moving St. John’s into a period of significant growth and transformation.
An audit of St. John’s publications (right) showed disparate messages, colors, typefaces, and a lack of coherent “personality.”
The team’s research indicated that competitive universities typically fall back on promises related to personal growth and/or career development. Although St. John’s was confident it could offer those benefits, its most powerful and distinguishing “business case” – finding a higher purpose in life and working for a better world – was at its doorstep, inspired by the university’s Vincentian mission.
The new St. John’s identity touched every aspect of the institution, from positioning and messages to numerous applications, such as signage, publications, Web and stationery.
According to St. John’s director of enrollment management, “The branding initiative has given a sense of consistency and purpose to the university’s communications. Because of the design and guidelines that BrandLogic created, we feel more confident. You hear it across the board.”
Total applications to St. John’s grew at a rate that is above the national average. And online applications are up by more than 35 percent. Plus, this year, St. John’s was included in Princeton Review’s “Best College Rankings” for the first time – an honor that can be traced to better ratings from guidance counselors in local and national research efforts, as well as increased awareness and positive perceptions.
Says the director of web development and technology at St. John’s: “We’ve hit every target objective. We’re connecting. And we’ve reduced the need for specially trained administrators and shortened the training period. It’s so easy. There’s practically no learning curve, and we can do a lot more work in-house.”
St. John’s also replaced thousands of unique letterheads and personalized memos and fax covers with one standard sheet, that is automatically personalized and formatted correctly by the BrandLogic Document Manager application, that integrates with PC-embedded template systems; this helps make personalized letterhead and fax creation easy, straightforward and seamless with Microsoft® Office applications. ( See case study on automated stationery systems.)
St. John’s rolled out the program with seminars across the university community, and in four “tiered” pieces aimed at different audiences:
In addition to the usual logo guidelines and design templates, St. John’s also includes editorial guidelines, key positioning messages for specific audiences, attribute words, photo style guides, and many other unique applications.
According to St. John’s, the BrandLogic-developed collateral templates and an online image library resulted in savings of approximately $250,000 in just the first nine months.
Working with the Modulex system by Lego, BrandLogic was able to economically create the look and feel of a custom-built signage system using mostly “off-the-shelf” components.