William Tyree: Welcome to the Brand Intelligence Podcast, the show where we pull back the curtain on some of the world’s smartest brands. I’m your co host, William Tyree, and today we’ll speak with marketing leaders from Utah Valley University about their recent brand campaign . Utah Valley University launched the second phase of a multi year branding initiative to bolster the university’s image.

The University recently won a Brandie Award for Best Rebrand or Brand Update for a Public University. Matt Serrao is the AVP of Marketing, and he’s joined by Jody Burch, the Senior Director of Integrated Marketing at Utah Valley University, aJohn Kung, the Senior Director of Creative Services. Matt, Jody, John, welcome to brand intelligence.

John Kung: Thanks for having us. 

William Tyree: It’s good to see you. All right. Before we dive into your amazing story, we like to ask guests to give us a theme song. So if you were walking out on stage today to give a keynote address, what song would that be? And I think we’re going to start with Matt.

Matt Serrao: Definitely. My music tastes go in segments of time. And so right now I, my, my answer would probably be something around in with Jay Z. That’s like what I’ve been listening to, but I’ve chosen to not to do that. And I just heard the song recently, it’s called Hope by NF. And It’s great. It’s great lyrics about pursuing your dreams. So that would be mine right now.

William Tyree: That’s aspirational. I love it. Cool. All right, Jody.

Jody Birch: I’d have to say 9 to 5 by Dolly Parton.

William Tyree: Nice. Nice. Dolly Parton’s is definitely one of my, one of my all time favorites. That’s definitely a pump you up song. .

All right, John.

John Kung: My design team actually gave me a theme song two weeks ago because my name is John. Whenever I walk out my office, they want to play the John Cena song. It’s the John Cena entering the ring song. It’s called It’s Our Time. It’s,

William Tyree: Entering the ring of combat.

John Kung: yeah,

William Tyree: Those are great picks.

You won a brandy award for best rebrand brand update campaign for the university’s brand initiative called a place for you before the campaign. What was the perception of Utah Valley University and what prompted the initiative to begin?

Matt Serrao: Utah Valley University has been around as a university for about 15 years prior to that community college before that technical college. So a lot of history there. And in being a university We’re trying to change the perceptions of what UVU is. Meaning a lot of people here still see UVU as either that community college or technical college that it was.

When it first started with the A Place for You campaign, we really wanted to help people see all the great things that are at UVU, that we are a, for lack of better words, a grown up university that we have students who win awards, that our faculty, wins awards, and really getting that story out there was important to help people understand we’ve come a long way.

The University, in different iterations has been around… Jody, you’re going to have to help me with this. 83 years?

Jody Birch: 83 years.

Matt Serrao: 83. Yeah, so actually a lot of history there. But most recently 15 years as a university and that was the reason why we wanted to have that campaign is to help people understand, we’re not, again, like I said, that we’re not the technical college that we were when we started 83 years ago, but we are a university that Is the largest in the state of Utah.

William Tyree: Positioning is so important, isn’t it? And I think that for people who don’t deal with a lot of higher ed marketing, they don’t really think about how important positioning is maybe to universities. But honestly, it’s everything because I think it really helps shape the kind of students that you can attract, sometimes the kind of talent that you can attract even on your faculty.

And more and more, I think, Getting talented administrators is really important. So I can completely understand why that would be so important. I remember when I read about the campaign for the first time, there are also a lot of other. Objectives as well. And I thought, man, this is really ambitious.

So it was everything from boosting enrollment to building bridges with donors and things like that. And all those things that universities need to do. Can you talk a little bit about how you decided on the campaigns overall objectives and why some of those things were so important aside from positioning?

Matt Serrao: The police for you campaign at its core, as we’ve talked about is a at first branding and reputation campaign. It helps to drive advocacy across the university amongst many different audiences, knowing that we have a lot of different.

Functions across the university with enrollment with our institutional advancement and donors. And each of them are trying to achieve objectives within their area. We see this campaign as that first step into understanding more about the university. That high level brand and reputation that will pull people in to get to take an action.

So whether that is through our donor audience that our message resonates with donors who want to help. Support the mission and vision of the university that they’ll be driven to donate for prospective students. They’ll see hopefully that the university is providing exceptional care, exceptional education.

That they’ll want to attend school here. And really driving that

That we hope from those different audiences even with our faculty and staff is another audience, and with that objective we work closely with our HR, people and culture department in helping to have Faculty want to teach here help to retain our faculty and staff even our staff to also want to work here that at the highest level with all these different audiences, we, this campaign really is to help drive that brand and reputation so that our, university partners can do their jobs more effectively as well.

Listen to the full episode to see even more great conversation between William Tyree, Jody Birch, Matt Serrao and John Kung…