The IC Global Café: From Strategy to Strength: Making Brand Measurable

Our next IC Global Café will be an invaluable session to join if you want to understand more about how universities can translate brand strategy into measurable strength. Also, do invite your colleagues to benefit from this session which will explore how brand strength can be measured.

Reputation is often seen as the ultimate ambition for universities. But reputation is an outcome. Brand strength is something institutions can actively shape and measure.

We will examine how brands move from being seen, to understood, to chosen. First, institutions must achieve visibility and salience in competitive markets. Second, they must be clearly understood for what makes them distinctive. Finally, they must create sufficient relevance and connection to drive active choice.

In an environment of intensified competition, recruitment volatility and growing scrutiny on return on investment, understanding what drives awareness, differentiation and selection has never been more critical. From sharpening positioning and aligning internal stakeholders, to tracking brand metrics over time, this conversation will focus on the practical levers that turn strategy into sustained performance.

Expect a grounded discussion on how to move beyond intent and build brands that are visible, distinctive and preferred.

We are delighted to collaborate with SMRS to bring you our next IC Global Café.

Facilitator & Expert speakers

Facilitator:

• Sirin Myles, Co-founder and Director, The IC Global Partnership

Expert speakers:

• Aimee Kleinman, Education Marketing Consultant, SMRS

Aimee Kleinmann is an Education Marketing Consultant at SMRS with more than 15 years’ experience in higher education marketing, communications and student recruitment. She delivers strategic consultancy to universities, applying both established and emerging business models to strengthen brand, positioning and recruitment performance.

Previously, she led strategic communications at UCL, transforming how the university understood and engaged its audiences through brand development, multi-channel campaigns, leadership communications and digital innovation. She has also led UK and European recruitment strategy at King’s College London and Middlesex University, delivering high-profile campaigns including King’s first large-scale Clearing entry, major open events and digital acquisition initiatives.

• Simon Pride, Director of Brand and Marketing, University of Reading

Simon Pride just about remembers a life before HE Marketing. He started his first career as a Graduate Trainee at J Walter Thompson, and had stints at other large agencies including BMP DDB Needham (now Adam and Eve) and Havas, working mostly on big brands in the FMCG and Automotive sectors, in the UK and internationally.

Foreshadowing a move to the public sector and HE, his last advertising role was as Integrated Campaigns Project Director for the 2011 Census, working across advertising, media, PR and BME specialist agencies and ultimately, helping to reverse a four-decade decline in Census completion rates.

After the Census, Simon started work at Arts University Bournemouth, winning multiple creative and effectiveness awards – for the university website, innovative new prospectus formats (House of Cards and Instagram) and brand campaigns. Including winning the Innovation Award and the Grand Prix at the CIM Marketing Effectiveness Awards in 2015 for a social media app called kscope that sparking creative curiosity, built communities and started conversations. He has also helped Harper Adams University find a more contemporary brand narrative to support the institution’s ambition to build a more diverse and highly qualified student body.

He is proud to be Director of Brand and Marketing at the University of Reading, and with his team, is embarked on a project to build a distinctive, engaging and relevant brand proposition to underpin the university’s Strategy 2040 which will be launched along with new campaigns later this year.