Higher ed branding has a serious sameness problem. Visit the admissions pages of ten universities and you will find the same words: “world-class,” “significant,” “community,” “excellence,” “opportunity.” Strip out the logos and you could swap the copy between institutions without anyone noticing. That is not a brand. That is a category description. The institutions that…
Archetypal branding is a strategic framework that assigns a brand a recognisable character type drawn from universal human psychology, giving it a consistent emotional identity that audiences can relate to across every touchpoint. The twelve archetypes, rooted in Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and popularised in brand strategy through Margaret Mark and Carol…
The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, first published by Al Ries and Laura Ries in 1998, laid out a set of principles for how brands grow, defend, and destroy their own value. Some of those laws have aged better than others. But the core argument, that brand building follows patterns more reliable than most marketing…
Corporate branding is the strategic management of how an organisation is perceived, not just by customers, but by employees, investors, partners, regulators, and the public. It operates at a level above product or campaign, shaping the identity from which everything else flows. Get it right and it becomes a durable commercial asset. Get it wrong…
A brand portfolio is the full set of brands a company owns and manages, each serving a distinct role in the business. Done well, a portfolio lets you reach different customer segments, protect your core brand, and compete across price points without undermining what any single brand stands for. Done badly, it becomes an expensive…
Imagination branding is the practice of building a brand around a vision of the world your customer wants to live in, not just the product you sell or the category you occupy. It shifts the brand’s centre of gravity from what it makes to what it believes, and from what it offers to what it…
A branding pyramid is a strategic framework that organises the core elements of a brand into a hierarchy, from functional foundations at the base to emotional and aspirational qualities at the top. It gives brand strategy a logical sequence: you cannot credibly claim emotional resonance if you have not first established what the brand does,…
Brand architecture is the structural logic that organises a company’s portfolio of brands, products, and sub-brands into a coherent system. There are four primary models: the branded house, the house of brands, the endorsed brand, and the hybrid. Each carries different commercial implications for investment, clarity, and growth. Choosing the wrong model is not an…
Nike’s brand promise is the commitment to inspire and enable every athlete in the world, where “athlete” means anyone with a body. That single idea, first articulated by co-founder Bill Bowerman, has shaped every product decision, campaign, and partnership Nike has made for over five decades. It is not a tagline. It is a positioning…
A corporate rebrand is the process of changing how a company presents itself to the market, through its name, visual identity, messaging, or positioning, in order to better reflect its current strategy, audience, or competitive context. Done well, it realigns perception with reality. Done poorly, it spends significant budget to confuse people who already knew…
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