Known for Everything, Remembered for Nothing

Ask a college or university what makes it special, and you’ll usually get a long list. 

Academic excellence. Faculty who care. Career preparation. A close-knit community. Hands-on learning. A transformative student experience. Personalized support. A strong sense of belonging. A great location. Preparing students for lives of purpose.  

And usually, all of it is true.  

That’s the problem.  

Institutions want to differentiate. But they also want every meaningful strength, experience, and priority to have a place in the brand.  

The more we try to make room for everything, the harder it becomes for anything to stand out.  

Because differentiation requires choice.  

What deserves to lead? 

This may be the hardest question we ask in brand strategy work.  

Not what’s true? There are usually a lot of good answers to that.  

Not even what matters to prospective students? We can research that.  

The harder question is: Of all the things that are true and important, what deserves to lead?  

This is usually where the conversation gets uncomfortable.  

• “But where are academics?” 
• “I don’t see enough about community.” 
• “Shouldn’t career outcomes be a pillar?” 
• “What about our beautiful campus?” 

All fair questions.  

But this is also often the moment when the strategy starts to lose its edge.  

And it usually happens with one perfectly reasonable request at a time. We add something. We broaden something else. We create another pillar so an important idea has somewhere to live.  

None of those changes seem like a big deal on their own. But add enough of them, and they can blunt the very thing we worked to sharpen.  

Eventually, everyone inside the institution can find themselves in the brand.  

But can anyone outside the institution remember it? 

So how do we make the choice? 

We have to understand what matters to the audiences we need to reach, what we learn about the institution from the people who know it best, and what’s happening across the competitive landscape.  

Then we have to decide what to make of all of it. What rises above the rest? Where is there an opportunity to stand apart? What is true enough to be credible today, but has enough stretch to reflect where the institution wants to go? 

A strong brand strategy shouldn’t just capture who an institution is right now. It should give the institution something to grow into without getting so far ahead that the promise no longer matches the experience.  

And standing apart doesn’t necessarily require finding one magical thing no other institution can claim. In higher education, I’m not sure that thing exists very often.  

Sometimes the difference is in the combination. The emphasis. The way a few familiar things come together to mean something more.  

In one recent engagement, we heard a lot of familiar strengths: hands-on learning, strong student support, a great location, career preparation, and a deep commitment to serving others. All of them were true. Most were also things other institutions could credibly claim.  

What became more interesting was the thread running through them. Students weren’t just learning about consequential issues. They were drawn to doing something about them. Hands-on learning gave them opportunities to turn purpose into practice. Their location connected them to opportunities well beyond campus. Support helped them develop the confidence to act.  

The opportunity wasn’t to choose one of those strengths. It was to recognize what they meant together: this was an institution for people who wanted to engage with the world as it is and have a hand in shaping what it could be.  

And that choice has consequences beyond the strategy itself. It gives creative something sharper to bring to life and prospective students something clearer to recognize and respond to. Instead of asking people to remember ten good things about an institution, we can give them a compelling idea that pulls them in, gives them a reason to explore further, and ultimately helps move them toward action.  

And increasingly, clarity about what deserves to lead matters in another way, too. AI tools are interpreting and summarizing institutions. If we haven’t made clear what deserves to lead, we can’t expect those systems to figure it out for us.   

Some things define the position. Some support it. Some prove it. And some are simply things students expect from any institution.  

Being important and being the brand aren’t the same thing. 

Choosing what leads doesn’t mean everything else goes away. It means those things find the places where they’re most relevant.  

If academics aren’t in the positioning statement, that doesn’t mean academics aren’t important. They may be some of the strongest proof that the positioning is true.  

If career outcomes aren’t a pillar, that doesn’t mean careers disappear. We can still talk about outcomes in recruitment messaging, program-level communications, student and alumni stories, and anywhere else they help tell the story.  

And something that doesn’t make it into the brand platform at all may still be exactly the right thing to emphasize for a particular audience, campaign, or moment.  

The brand platform isn’t a list of everything an institution is allowed to say. It helps us decide what leads, what supports it, and how all of those things add up to something people can actually understand and remember.  

That won’t capture everything there is to know about an institution.  

It shouldn’t have to.  

People are never going to know everything we want them to know about our institutions.  

The question isn’t, “Did we get everything in?” 

It’s “What do we want to be known for?” 

And that changes the conversation. Instead of asking where every important idea appears, start asking what deserves to lead. What supports or proves it? What matters most to the audiences you need to reach? And, maybe hardest of all, what are you willing not to make part of the central position? 

It’s easy to agree that your institution needs to stand for something.  

The hard part is choosing what that something is.