Client description: For-profit online university

Practice area: Market Research and Analysis, Strategic Positioning and Planning

Geographic scope: US

Industries involved: Education

Services applied: Focus groups; brand strategy

Business challenge: Online university owned and operated a number of university brands; management desired to review the brand architecture with hopes of collapsing brands and renaming certain brands.

Methodologies: Focus groups; brand architecture

The result: We determined that the ideal brand strategy would be a validating brand under individual brand names with some collapsing of brands possible. We also determined that the proposed validating brand names did not resonate with end-users but through a laddering process of moderation we determined the attributes of a winning brand; many of them counter to the client’s hypothesis.