Recently, there was a big scuffle at the university where I work: should the mountain in the logo be blue (as it is currently) or yellow? All sorts of complaints and tomfoolery, made unintentionally comic by several individuals’ use of the “reply all” button to emails that had been sent out to the campus-wide mailing list.
But with all the discussion and gratuitous character assassination, one point was ignored: if a brand is supposed to represent an entity, there has to be an entity to represent. A brand can’t do all the work of standardizing and unifying on its own.
There are many different ideas of what this particular university is, what “its” goals are (which begs the question of what is “it”), and what “its” goals should be, and these different ideas are protean, in flux, none definitively unifying the constituents.
If the brand had been designed to correspond closely to one of those identities, some people would be supportive, and others would dissent, but there would at least be an active correspondence, one that the supportive folks could leverage in their work and that the dissenting folks could rally around and against. But the brand is sufficiently vague so as to avoid choosing sides.
So it doesn’t brand.
To the outside observer, the university’s brand either fails to indicate and represent an identity, or it indicates and represents a failure to create identity.
As one of my beloved teachers likes to say, “How will you know you’ve gotten what you want, if you don’t know what it is that you want?”
At some level, I think branding is like a philosophy. You always have one even if you don’t know what it is. If you choose, you can discover your brand and work to change it and consistently apply the logo in those contexts to make a connection between the two so the logo can represent the brand. Or you can just let the brand drift and be whatever people experience when they interact with your organization and the logo will represent that brand. In the case of a large organization, its difficult to orchestrate a concise brand, but look at some of the Ivy League Universities, they seem to do a good job. I wonder what they do.