Langara College has been a fixture in Vancouver for 45 years, but when it came time to develop a brand identity, research revealed that consumers really didn’t know what the college stood for.
“When it was put up against all the competitors they knew of it, but it wasn’t top of mind,” said James Bateman, creative director at DDB‘s Karacters Design Group. “There were a lot of similar patterns happening in education; everyone looked fairly similar and no one was standing out and having a voice.”
Ian Humphreys, acting associate vice-president student development and marketing, said potential students often undervalue the education from a college and ignore things such as small class sizes, affordable tuition, university transferable courses and high academic standards.
“We wanted to convey that we take academics very seriously,” he said. “We are focussed on university level education and yet we are a college.”
The tag line became simply: “Langara. The college of higher learning.”
Bateman said competitors tended to use either a conservative blue or red so they chose orange to stand out and reflect the personality of the institution. “We kept it very simple–the opposite to what everybody else was doing,” he said.
An advertising campaign featuring dozens of different executions on the orange background is running in transit, print, collateral, through social media and a new website will launch in the spring.
The campaign is also popping up in unusual places around campus. There are posters in the lecture rooms that say “This is a room of dialogue not monologue,” notebooks say “My intellectual property,” and signs placed randomly on chairs saying: “You’re a student not a number.”
