Making a statement

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Creating campaigns that would mark a real change for Anglia Ruskin University

The starting point

When a university goes through a rebrand, they need to make sure all of their communications and marketing align to their new positioning. Anglia Ruskin University went through a rebrand in the spring of 2019. In addition to developing a new corporate marketing campaign to reflect their new brand, they also wanted to make two subject areas stand out – nursing and engineering. We knew that this change could help ARU not just in attracting more students, but to stand out against the other universities.

With an evolved visual identity, and a new logo, their goal was to move to an aspirational brand position that communicated their new brand statement: discover your strength.

Creating the Extraordinary

We started by developing a new central student recruitment campaign highlighting how students are given the opportunity to fully realise their potential with the support of ARU. The ‘Do The Extraordinary’ campaign used the new brand identity of the Heron as a central graphic alongside current student models whose images were presented using a double exposure style. This helped to launch the prominent Heron logo whilst also giving the concept a human face.

Separately, we were also tasked with developing campaigns for two of the University’s leading subject areas, Nursing and Engineering.

Our challenge was to change perceptions of these subjects and professions.

The Nursing campaign used striking and provocative imagery to highlight the critical and meaningful nature of a career in Nursing. We used the line of ‘A job. For life.’

For Engineering we focused on world challenges that the subject can help us answer, to encourage curious people to step up to the challenge.

This was all pulled together with a final line of ‘Build a better future’.

These two strikingly different creative treatments present a difficult truth of the job, and build an emotional connection with prospective students. The campaign evokes the aspirational brand position of ARU and takes a step towards crafting their distinctive space in a crowded market.

We’re continuing our work with ARU to activate their new brand across more of their engagement touch points and are excited to see where it takes us.

Results

The main ARU undergraduate campaign, along with the Engineering and Nursing campaigns, were executed across channels and devised using our audience understanding, analysis of historic activity and delivered whilst being monitored and optimised throughout.

We saw particularly strong campaign results, however the key to any campaign is the number of students who enrol each autumn. In ARU’s case, they saw significant year on year growth in 2020, far outperforming their competitor set and the market as a whole.