Programme teams going off-brand, a Dean who’s outpacing the strategic messaging, a rebrand that hasn’t quite landed – brand drift takes many forms. Here’s how to recognise yours.
Brand isn’t a project with a finish line. It’s a cycle – one that business schools move around in continuously, driven by leadership change, strategic shifts, market pressure, the accumulated effect of time and, let’s be honest, taste. The question isn’t whether your brand will need attention again. It’s where you are in the cycle.
At SIM7, the business schools we work with tend to follow a five-stage branding cycle. But it’s often tricky for them to acknowledge where they are; perhaps a recent rebrand hasn’t quite worked out as planned, or internal stakeholders have begun creating their own off-brand assets.
What matters is being honest about where you actually are – because the market is moving fast, competitors are repositioning, and the gap between where your brand is and where it needs to be has a habit of opening up quietly.
Brand drift
Are you seeing any of these?
* Programme teams are writing their own copy for recruitment materials – and it sounds little like the school brand.
* Programme directors are briefing agencies or freelancers directly, without involving central marketing.
* Stakeholders have developed their own visual styles: custom colour palettes, ‘adapted’ logos, typographic choices that sit outside the brand system.
* The Dean has evolved the school’s vision faster than your brand has kept up.
* Put ten pieces of content from across your school side by side. They don’t feel like they came from the same institution.
What this means
Brand drift is the trickiest stage in the cycle, because it doesn’t feel like a stage at all. Nobody decided to let it happen. It’s the accumulated effect of programme teams under recruitment pressure going their own way, of central marketing stretched too thin to enforce consistency, of a brand that hasn’t evolved to meet the school’s current needs – so people quietly stop using it.
The structural reality of business schools makes drift almost inevitable. Sometimes, programme teams are close to their product, accountable for their own numbers, and under enough time pressure that building their own assets feels faster than waiting on central marketing. It’s understandable. It’s also damaging to your hard-won brand.
By the time business school brand drift is visible externally – to prospective students, to rankings assessors, to peers at other schools – the internal work required to address it is significant. The earlier you acknowledge it, the easier it is to fix.
Full rebrand
Are you seeing any of these?
* A new Dean has arrived with a clear change agenda, and the existing brand belongs to a different strategic vision.
* The school has undergone a significant strategic shift – new focus areas, new markets, a new programme portfolio – that the current brand doesn’t accommodate.
* A major structural change – a merger, a new accreditation, a new location – has made the existing identity feel out of step.
* Competitors have repositioned in ways that have left your school looking like it’s standing still.
What this means
In business schools, the full rebrand is almost always triggered by a change at the top. A new Dean sets a new strategic direction, and the brand needs to follow. This is high-stakes work – new positioning, new visual identity, new messaging architecture – and it touches every corner of the institution.
Done well, it gives the school a platform to compete for the next decade. Done in a hurry, under political pressure, or without the right external input, it produces something that looks new but says nothing. The investment of time and process at this stage pays back many times over.
Post-launch refinement
Are you seeing any of these?
* The new brand has launched, but the hero messages aren’t landing consistently across channels or audiences.
* Some teams have embraced the new brand; others are reverting to old habits.
* The visual identity looks great, but the brand guidance isn’t clear.
* The visual system is proving restrictive or difficult to apply consistently across different teams and formats.
* You’re getting feedback – from faculty, from students, from programme teams – that something isn’t quite right, but you’re not sure how to fix it.
What this means
No brand launch is perfect. The business schools that get the most from their investment are the ones that treat launch as the beginning of the process, not the end. Post-launch refinement is normal, it’s manageable, and it’s significantly easier to address early than to leave until it hardens into drift.
The key is having the mechanisms to gather honest feedback and act on it – before the team that built the brand has moved on to the next project and institutional memory starts to fade.
Brand refresh
Are you seeing any of these?
* The strategy is sound and the positioning still holds, but the brand feels dated next to where competitors are now.
* The visual identity isn’t performing in certain environments – on social, on screen, in video, in print – in the way it does in others.
* The messaging was written for a different market moment and no longer reflects how the school actually talks about itself.
* New programmes, new research priorities, or a new strategic emphasis don’t fit comfortably within the existing brand framework.
What this means
A brand refresh doesn’t unpick the foundations. It updates the expression: modernising the visual system, sharpening the messaging, ensuring the brand still performs in the channels and contexts where it needs to work. It’s a meaningful intervention, but a bounded one. And it’s often the most cost-effective way to extend the life of a strong brand rather than replacing it.
The quiet refresh
Are you seeing any of these?
* You know the brand needs to evolve, but opening a formal rebrand process isn’t politically viable right now.
* A new Dean or strategy is pulling the school in a new direction, but there’s no appetite – or budget – for a full brand overhaul.
* The stakeholder landscape makes a formal brand process feel riskier than doing nothing – even though doing nothing isn’t really an option.
What this means
Brand in business schools is political. It touches everyone’s territory – faculty, alumni, governors, programme directors – and a formal rebrand process can quickly become a lengthy, contentious exercise in stakeholder management. At SIM7, we understand that. We’ve navigated it with schools more than once.
The quiet refresh is how you move the brand forward without triggering the committee. Rather than changing the brand officially, you change it in practice – through the work that goes out into the world. A brand campaign that repositions how the school is perceived. A new set of hero messages that reframe the proposition. A tone of voice evolution that happens through content rather than a guidelines document. Refined communications messaging that shifts the emphasis without abandoning what exists.
As an example, we worked with one school that had appointed a new Dean with a clear change agenda, but wasn’t ready to commit to a full rebrand. Instead, we developed a campaign that expressed the new strategic direction, a refreshed messaging hierarchy that put the right things front and centre, and a tone of voice guide that gave the communications team a clear steer – without requiring sign-off from every corner of the institution. Twelve months later, the brand felt measurably different. And no formal brand decision had been made.
Done well, the quiet refresh also builds the evidence base for more formal change when the conditions are right. The brand moves. And the stakeholder committee never convenes.
So where are you, really?
The business school brand cycle doesn’t stop. Competitors keep moving, strategies keep evolving, and the brand that was fit for purpose three years ago may not be doing the job you need it to do today. The first step is an honest assessment – not of what your brand looked like when it launched, but of what it’s doing for you right now.
That’s a conversation worth having. And brand work always takes longer than you think it will – so even if a proper exercise feels a way off, the smart move is to start the conversation now.
Talk to SIM7
SIM7 is a strategic creative agency specialising in brand, messaging, and campaigns for business schools and higher education. If you’d like a conversation about where your brand is in its cycle – and what to do about it – we’d love to hear from you.
Get in touch at sim7creative.co.uk