By SHANNON O. WELLS
In its 237-year history, Pitt has taken on a branding project exactly once, in 2019 and 2020, when the COVID pandemic and its resulting fallout put the brakes on it, along with many other projects and initiatives.
Rachel Richelieu, vice chancellor of communications & marketing since May 2023, is therefore eager to pick up where the previous effort left off and move forward with a brand campaign that emphasizes telling Pitt’s stories, but without changing its colors and logos. She shared the latest brand-enhancing concepts at the March 6 Faculty Assembly meeting held in Posvar Hall.
“Relatively speaking, (Pitt) is new at this, but it’s really important to build on this work, particularly given the impactful work that we’re doing,” she said, but it’s also important “that we be differentiated in how we are better understood (along with) the work and the research and the impact of our staff and students.”
Richelieu said the brand platform is “really going to help to position our consistent activation across the University” with an emphasis on strengthening Pitt’s brand positioning “which really means how we talk about ourselves … and how we show up visually (through) digital storytelling and so on. That’s really important.”
The project will involve building out an annual integrated marketing plan.
“A lot of this will be showing up at the beginning of the academic year,” she said. “So we’re really looking at how to meaningfully connect the dots with all of the different communities that we touch … so that people have a greater understanding and an emotional connection with the University.”
Following a request for proposals in December, which attracted close to 25 marketing agencies, the global company 160over90 was selected. Richelieu explained that the agency’s name is “meant to represent an elevated blood pressure, with the idea being that the work they do and help to create is really meant to be memorable and also highly engaging.”
The agency, she said, has a “healthy mix” of experience between higher ed and non-academic institutional branding.In addition to work with professional sports, entertainment and fashion marketing, 160over90 has been the “agency of record” for the University of Virginia for 10 years, including working with many of its individual schools. “So there was certainly a lot of similarities … in terms of the opportunities in some of our work and some of the complexity in our environment,” she said.
“They have a heavy capability around research and analytics, which is what we’ll be doing some work on here shortly.”
To further the brand effort from 2019-20, which involved engagement with more than 1,000 stakeholders, Richelieu said she wants to make sure “we’re calibrating the qualitative and quantitative insights,” through updating brand positioning, creating a differentiated messaging and storytelling framework and engaging in “standout bold, creative, visual storytelling.”
Along with refinements to brand identities, the project will examine usage of the Pitt script logo on items like business card templates, “especially when we have lots of complexity and job titles and other kinds of dimensions,” she said. “Really making sure that we can create some flexibility but also consistency there.”
The project is now in the “discovery” phase in which 160over90 received a “data dump” of Pitt information and research findings, “but we also worked very closely with the enrollment team and with alumni relations to really make sure that our agency gets a better understanding of us and a lot of our work.” Agency representatives visited campus in late February, interviewing student focus groups and meeting with Chancellor Joan Gabel.
A quantitative survey will include prospective students and their parents, along with alumni, Pitt peers and partners.
The most visible set of activities will happen around Welcome Week in last August, including high-impact video, digital and social media content, as well as “some immersive things on campus.”
Two virtual focus groups are planned to seek input and feedback from faculty. “It’s really meant as part of this effort to understand and hear from you directly,” she said to Faculty Assembly. “What makes you proud, what differentiates Pitt in your experience here? What are some of the things that you think are strong about how we talk about our story? What are ways that we should be thinking differently?
“It’s really meant to be a way to get a very diverse set of points of view,” she said.
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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