Schools can Build a Brand Platform for Success!

Just like the Fashion Week event I attended last night to promote major designers brands, a school brand can shine!

Your school’s brand will be the home for innovative thinking that brings new language.

Education has its own language of Standards, PLC’s , IEP’s to name a few. Learning new terms to communicate the brand initiative is part of your early adoption of being Brand-ed. You’ll need new terms that are familiar to the branding and marketing set, but not to educators, so spend some time getting familiar with “brandspeak”. Adding concepts and their terms will easily become part of your own Brand-ed journey.

Begin by thinking that a strong brand starts with a “Brand Platform”. And soon you’ll know what a Brand Platform is and you’ll communicate it to your team, no MBA required! Innovation always brings its touchstones, and language is one of them. Since the elements of Branding flourish with communication, focus on understanding terms and speaking the language for sure communication. As you read more of the branding conversation online through rss feeds, you’ll build familiarity with use. One of the early jobs for a leader who is building a branding momentum is teaching. Employ the same definitions business created years ago and hone the conversation around your brand.


BRAND PLATFORM
To sustainable loyalty to your school’s brand and differentiation from other schools, your school organization can embrace a brand platform. Because the appearance of the brands from the outside comes from the strength of the brand on the inside of the organization, building a strong brand on the inside starts with your commitment to building a recognized brand platform. As a strategic tool, a school brand platform has a wide range of applications. It can be articulated in different forums to appeal to broad constituency within an organization. A brand platform is communication.


• BRAND PLATFORM: The brand platform focuses the organization on building value-added relationships with the community. Once the brand is known, key strategies for delivering value to the community must be developed inhouse. The platform is about messaging the community regularly with the kind of communication that supports the school brand. Web presence, face to face presence, social media presence supports the brand platform. At the heart of the platform is the understanding by every employee of the school that they must consistently behave in ways that support the school brand. A brand platform is designed to provide uniformity in the way the organization interfaces, in every way, with the targeted market and also as a practical, usable tool to guide all members of the organization on how to support the brand through words and actions.