Uniting and promoting an institution under one master brand might feel daunting to CMOs, but it’s a challenge Johanna Lowe has met with enthusiasm. As current Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at the University of Sydney, Johanna has built a strong brand foundation and marketing strategy that has led to success, even as the role of advertising continues to change within the industry.

Johanna has been at the University of Sydney for 9 years and leading the marketing and communications team for 5 of these. Before her stint in higher education, Johanna worked with Ernst & Young, a professional services firm that taught her the value of marketing and how to advocate for its role whilst interacting with many different stakeholders. This experience also laid the groundwork for her ability to build campaigns from the basics of branding and marketing.

‘Ernst and Young were a terrific organisation for me to really understand relationship marketing, a lot of the business development, sales and market interaction, the role of brand reputation and having a local brand with a global footprint, and a global brand. And obviously a lot of the soft skill development in an environment like that, you really sharpen your ability to build relationships with stakeholders, it’s not a typically brand-driven or marketing-driven organisation’.

With this valuable work grounding her professional experience, she joined the University of Sydney during a period of centralisation and had the opportunity to build her team from the ground up. It’s clear that she’s passionate about her working environment, as she explains the importance of higher education at the University of Sydney:

‘No two days are the same, it is definitely a content-rich and issues-rich environment [. . .] [we have] fabulous teaching and research to help tell the stories of, and it’s a terrific team that I’m privileged to lead for a fabulous brand’.

With this enthusiasm for both institution and team, Johanna’s story of bringing the University of Sydney’s brand vision to life is inspirational. With the understanding that any united brand vision has its own set of complex and difficult negotiations to navigate to get it off the ground, Johanna’s determination to get the architecture of the project right from the start ensured a united identity across the institution. With the gift of timing and circumstance, she captured the perfect moment to unite the brand.

‘There had been some really significant work to bring the brand together at Sydney as a branded house and work under one master brand.  That was obviously a complex negotiation with multiple parts of the institution, and similar to my experience in the professional services sector, you need to manage a range of stakeholders .  It was about getting everybody on the same page about one Sydney brand, and it came at the time that our then Vice Chancellor was talking about the sense of one university and there was a trend around coming together under one roof in lots of different ways for the organisation. The brand was one of the beneficiaries of that’.

With this mindset and strategy, Johanna’s breadth of knowledge about the role of advertising in a vast sea of tools for brand building is both impressive and knowledgable. As institutions find their marketing and advertising budgets shrinking, the need to use every bit of allocated money smartly – and being accountable for this spend – should be in the back of any CMO’s mind.

’The role of advertising is such a fraction, it’s almost the tip of the iceberg, of all of the other things that we bring to the mix so often. In thinking about what the role of advertising is versus brand-building, it needs to do both. We are universities, we are dealing with taxpayer funds and every dollar that we spend in a marketing sense could be dollars that we spend on teaching and research. So our marketing spend needs to be grounded in clear purpose and objectives that support the university’s goals’.

Johanna believes in having the data-driven insight to back up any marketing strategy or content production plan. In an era when leadership hesitates to invest in marketing and branding, being able to justify spending is important when many would rather invest in teaching and research. Always asking how campaigns ultimately connect with the purpose of the master brand is vital. This level of accountability ensures that all levels of the institution benefit together.

‘How do we ‘raise the tide for all boats’?  Part of it is having the master brand approach rather than a bunch of sub-brands and different identities. And it is how our content – our always-on content, our social content – on a range of different channels, how does that help pay back to our brand purpose?’

As a marketing leader, Johanna had the opportunity to create a campaign with her teams to launch the University of Sydney’s new and revamped undergraduate curriculum. Advertising had a distinct role to play in this campaign to build awareness with multiple audiences. Coupled with striking creative assets and content, the campaign called back to the master brand with much success.

‘We built a campaign that was [. . .] more advertising heavy because we needed to build awareness, and so our “unlearn” campaign was quite provocative, it needed to cut through. We had a not-massive media budget so we needed really striking creative to stand out for us, we won a couple of awards for it, and we got a couple of unhappy emails from some different people who thought it was a little too provocative! But the purpose there was using advertising to make sure that all of our communities knew we were doing things differently in our curriculum’.

With an award-winning campaign under her belt, the University of Sydney has built layers of their brand on top of advertising campaigns to lend a distinct feel to the institution. Johanna is no stranger to the challenge of highlighting what makes a university unique (the so-called ‘distinctiveness challenge’) and that a united, master brand helps to achieve this both internally and with external stakeholders and their perceptions.

‘In higher education we get to the conversation of distinctiveness sooner or later, and it’s one of the most challenging things in our sector. It’s more than just a colour, although colour can be such a powerful tool. [. . .] That’s why I use the phrase “raise the tide for all boats” as often as I can because people understand it internally, externally people think we are one, united, connected organisation and those internal structures [are] difficult to interpret externally. Presenting one united university is really important in ensuring we’re giving the brand the best payback’.

How can leaders continue to innovate for change whilst always looking to uplift the institution as a whole? Johanna’s outlook is one of constantly challenging herself in order to stay at the top of her game. As today’s digital world continues to evolve, the need to be agile and responsive is important for universities and its leaders alike.

‘Keeping yourself sharp and challenging yourself to keep thinking ahead is a great reason to get out of bed in the morning. Certainly the pandemic threw a few curveballs everyone’s way! Obviously the role of our digital performance team and all of those skills that everybody needs to have now, it’s not just one particular SWAT team. Digital has changed the very nature of our day-to-day work and the ability to bring data and insights about our audience into conversations with our stakeholders is really powerful.’

Remaining in conversation with academic and other stakeholders in the university community, is of utmost importance, as is the understanding that the brand itself will sometimes need to flex. Johanna explains the brand strategy works to encompass the University of Sydney’s varied departments, faculties, centres and institutes. Creating local-level, branded assets that can be used by everyone allows for a level of flexibility that still connects back to the unified brand.

‘We’re a comprehensive teaching and research institution, so when we’re going out to market we try and make sure that our campaigns and our creative reflects the breadth of our programs so that there are identifying messages for health, for business, for the arts, for science and engineering, for the creative arts. Partly because [. . .] we don’t have the kind of budgets that would support extensive sub-brands to have the kind of recognition that they would need.’

Johanna also looks outside the higher education sector to other brands for inspiration, where strong creative campaigns deliver to the brand’s purpose:

‘I love emotive, brand-led work and creative that makes you feel something about the brand, but it’s got to be backed up by the experience on the way through. [. . .] In higher ed, how do we make sure the research work that we’re doing is made relevant for the issues that the government is trying to solve for example, or industry is trying to tackle, rather than us trying to talk about what we’re doing. How do we translate these issues that we see, into what we can bring to the table? I think that’s where the work of higher education marketing is and should be rather than just thinking about what the creative is’.

There’s a real opportunity for the higher education sector to capture the public’s imagination and attention as we emerge from the pandemic, and institutions articulate their value and impact to society.

These twin marketing and branding challenges continue to be undertaken by visionary leaders despite budget tightening, and Johanna is more than up for the challenge ahead:

‘What is the sum brand total of being a teaching and research university, and  how do we combine the benefit of research with the role we play in educating the next generation? How we stitch those things together and articulate the value for society and the communities that we serve I think is a great challenge’.

If you would like to explore how you can strategise your brand campaigns for maximum impact and success, get in touch with us here at The Brand Education. We offer thought leadership and workshops and we’re always excited to hear from you.

Listen to Johanna’s full conversation with The Brand Education CEO Zeenat Fayaz here:Uniting and promoting an institution under one master brand might feel daunting to CMOs, but it’s a challenge Johanna Lowe has met with enthusiasm. As current Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at the University of Sydney, Johanna has built a strong brand foundation and marketing strategy that has led to success, even as the role of advertising continues to change within the industry.

Johanna has been at the University of Sydney for 9 years and leading the marketing and communications team for 5 of these. Before her stint in higher education, Johanna worked with Ernst & Young, a professional services firm that taught her the value of marketing and how to advocate for its role whilst interacting with many different stakeholders. This experience also laid the groundwork for her ability to build campaigns from the basics of branding and marketing.

‘Ernst and Young were a terrific organisation for me to really understand relationship marketing, a lot of the business development, sales and market interaction, the role of brand reputation and having a local brand with a global footprint, and a global brand. And obviously a lot of the soft skill development in an environment like that, you really sharpen your ability to build relationships with stakeholders, it’s not a typically brand-driven or marketing-driven organisation’.

With this valuable work grounding her professional experience, she joined the University of Sydney during a period of centralisation and had the opportunity to build her team from the ground up. It’s clear that she’s passionate about her working environment, as she explains the importance of higher education at the University of Sydney:

‘No two days are the same, it is definitely a content-rich and issues-rich environment [. . .] [we have] fabulous teaching and research to help tell the stories of, and it’s a terrific team that I’m privileged to lead for a fabulous brand’.

With this enthusiasm for both institution and team, Johanna’s story of bringing the University of Sydney’s brand vision to life is inspirational. With the understanding that any united brand vision has its own set of complex and difficult negotiations to navigate to get it off the ground, Johanna’s determination to get the architecture of the project right from the start ensured a united identity across the institution. With the gift of timing and circumstance, she captured the perfect moment to unite the brand.

‘There had been some really significant work to bring the brand together at Sydney as a branded house and work under one master brand.  That was obviously a complex negotiation with multiple parts of the institution, and similar to my experience in the professional services sector, you need to manage a range of stakeholders .  It was about getting everybody on the same page about one Sydney brand, and it came at the time that our then Vice Chancellor was talking about the sense of one university and there was a trend around coming together under one roof in lots of different ways for the organisation. The brand was one of the beneficiaries of that’.

With this mindset and strategy, Johanna’s breadth of knowledge about the role of advertising in a vast sea of tools for brand building is both impressive and knowledgable. As institutions find their marketing and advertising budgets shrinking, the need to use every bit of allocated money smartly – and being accountable for this spend – should be in the back of any CMO’s mind.

’The role of advertising is such a fraction, it’s almost the tip of the iceberg, of all of the other things that we bring to the mix so often. In thinking about what the role of advertising is versus brand-building, it needs to do both. We are universities, we are dealing with taxpayer funds and every dollar that we spend in a marketing sense could be dollars that we spend on teaching and research. So our marketing spend needs to be grounded in clear purpose and objectives that support the university’s goals’.

Johanna believes in having the data-driven insight to back up any marketing strategy or content production plan. In an era when leadership hesitates to invest in marketing and branding, being able to justify spending is important when many would rather invest in teaching and research. Always asking how campaigns ultimately connect with the purpose of the master brand is vital. This level of accountability ensures that all levels of the institution benefit together.

‘How do we ‘raise the tide for all boats’?  Part of it is having the master brand approach rather than a bunch of sub-brands and different identities. And it is how our content – our always-on content, our social content – on a range of different channels, how does that help pay back to our brand purpose?’

As a marketing leader, Johanna had the opportunity to create a campaign with her teams to launch the University of Sydney’s new and revamped undergraduate curriculum. Advertising had a distinct role to play in this campaign to build awareness with multiple audiences. Coupled with striking creative assets and content, the campaign called back to the master brand with much success.

‘We built a campaign that was [. . .] more advertising heavy because we needed to build awareness, and so our “unlearn” campaign was quite provocative, it needed to cut through. We had a not-massive media budget so we needed really striking creative to stand out for us, we won a couple of awards for it, and we got a couple of unhappy emails from some different people who thought it was a little too provocative! But the purpose there was using advertising to make sure that all of our communities knew we were doing things differently in our curriculum’.

With an award-winning campaign under her belt, the University of Sydney has built layers of their brand on top of advertising campaigns to lend a distinct feel to the institution. Johanna is no stranger to the challenge of highlighting what makes a university unique (the so-called ‘distinctiveness challenge’) and that a united, master brand helps to achieve this both internally and with external stakeholders and their perceptions.

‘In higher education we get to the conversation of distinctiveness sooner or later, and it’s one of the most challenging things in our sector. It’s more than just a colour, although colour can be such a powerful tool. [. . .] That’s why I use the phrase “raise the tide for all boats” as often as I can because people understand it internally, externally people think we are one, united, connected organisation and those internal structures [are] difficult to interpret externally. Presenting one united university is really important in ensuring we’re giving the brand the best payback’.

How can leaders continue to innovate for change whilst always looking to uplift the institution as a whole? Johanna’s outlook is one of constantly challenging herself in order to stay at the top of her game. As today’s digital world continues to evolve, the need to be agile and responsive is important for universities and its leaders alike.

‘Keeping yourself sharp and challenging yourself to keep thinking ahead is a great reason to get out of bed in the morning. Certainly the pandemic threw a few curveballs everyone’s way! Obviously the role of our digital performance team and all of those skills that everybody needs to have now, it’s not just one particular SWAT team. Digital has changed the very nature of our day-to-day work and the ability to bring data and insights about our audience into conversations with our stakeholders is really powerful.’

Remaining in conversation with academic and other stakeholders in the university community, is of utmost importance, as is the understanding that the brand itself will sometimes need to flex. Johanna explains the brand strategy works to encompass the University of Sydney’s varied departments, faculties, centres and institutes. Creating local-level, branded assets that can be used by everyone allows for a level of flexibility that still connects back to the unified brand.

‘We’re a comprehensive teaching and research institution, so when we’re going out to market we try and make sure that our campaigns and our creative reflects the breadth of our programs so that there are identifying messages for health, for business, for the arts, for science and engineering, for the creative arts. Partly because [. . .] we don’t have the kind of budgets that would support extensive sub-brands to have the kind of recognition that they would need.’

Johanna also looks outside the higher education sector to other brands for inspiration, where strong creative campaigns deliver to the brand’s purpose:

‘I love emotive, brand-led work and creative that makes you feel something about the brand, but it’s got to be backed up by the experience on the way through. [. . .] In higher ed, how do we make sure the research work that we’re doing is made relevant for the issues that the government is trying to solve for example, or industry is trying to tackle, rather than us trying to talk about what we’re doing. How do we translate these issues that we see, into what we can bring to the table? I think that’s where the work of higher education marketing is and should be rather than just thinking about what the creative is’.

There’s a real opportunity for the higher education sector to capture the public’s imagination and attention as we emerge from the pandemic, and institutions articulate their value and impact to society.

These twin marketing and branding challenges continue to be undertaken by visionary leaders despite budget tightening, and Johanna is more than up for the challenge ahead:

‘What is the sum brand total of being a teaching and research university, and  how do we combine the benefit of research with the role we play in educating the next generation? How we stitch those things together and articulate the value for society and the communities that we serve I think is a great challenge’.

If you would like to explore how you can strategise your brand campaigns for maximum impact and success, get in touch with us here at The Brand Education. We offer thought leadership and workshops and we’re always excited to hear from you.

Listen to Johanna’s full conversation with The Brand Education CEO Zeenat Fayaz on Apple Podcasts  and Spotify.