Stanford's Graduate School of Business (GSB), consistently ranked among the top business schools globally, has been a leader in education since its founding in 1925. With its prestigious reputation and established brand, it was essential to maintain its integrity while infusing modern elements to the brand while engaging both internal and external audiences.
Our creative strategy, "We find purpose together," centers on four core competencies—Principled Leadership, Breakthrough Knowledge, Positive Impact, and Transformational Experience. We developed an expanded visual strategy and cohesive messaging to unify and amplify Stanford's brand and voice, ensuring an ever evolving representation of its legacy.
Drawing inspiration from our stunning surroundings, we landed on a concept using shapes derived from architecture and art around Stanford GSB’s Knight Management Center campus. To revive the existing color palette, we pulled bright, energetic, saturated colors adding a set of secondary colors to complement the existing palette, while providing a more modern approach on color theory.
Collaborating with the Stanford web & digital team we developed a user-friendly sitemap that acted as a bridge, slowly introducing the brand update to their audience while implementing the new branding globally. This flexible design system is now available for the entire GSB community in the MyGSB Marketing portal.
This effort led traffic to increase over 76% within a few weeks.
To pull in new audiences and engage loyal evangelists, we produced visually engaging materials, including revitalized social media, print, and advertising using dynamic movement and bright modern aesthetics.
We developed tools and templates to maintain a unified aesthetic, and thus, empowering users of different skill sets to interact with the brand and be an advocate.
Using a very hands-on approach, we found a common theme of shapes emerging from all experimentation that created a strong foundation for the brand to continue to grow from.
To visually capture the nature of this newly developed visual strategy & core messaging, we conducted a three-day photoshoot to add to our collection of marketing photos.
Our approach included research, brainstorming, surveys, analytics, and focus groups to refine our communication style and marketing strategy.
To energize and empower the institution, we led in-person training sessions that introduced and championed the visual activation of the Stanford GSB story.
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