CASE STUDY
Elevating a
brand to inspire
bilingually
WORK
Colorado Mountain College
PROJECT
Brand Evolution
SERVICES
PROVIDED
Brand strategy
Brand architecture
Verbal identity
Design system
Campaign
Multicultural expertise
Transcreation
The need
Colorado Mountain College (CMC) is Colorado’s first Dual-Mission college, offering students everything from bachelor’s and associate degrees to specialized certificates through a mix of liberal arts programs and hands-on career-skills training. Additionally, they are also a federal government designated Hispanic-Serving Institute, with a Latino student body of 25% or more.
Because of these two new classifications and changing demographics, CMC discovered that its existing tagline and brand position weren’t resonating with their new audiences. While the brand’s design system was well received, the general market felt the tagline of “Do something MAJOR” was generic and uninspiring, and Latino students identified that the double entendre got lost in translation. On top of those concerns, CMC realized its brand ethos needed to better articulate CMC’s positioning in the market and how they wanted to be perceived.
What we did
Evolving a brand vs. creating one from scratch takes a different set of skills and nuance—especially when many of the brand’s current components need to be integrated into the new iteration. CMC was a perfect example of this. After conducting primary–audience research, Heinrich evolved CMC’s brand strategy, new verbal identity, manifesto and tagline. We also created a new brand architecture complete with a visual system to differentiate and organize various academic and career communities—including color designations for each program—while respecting legacy assets and executional needs of CMC’s multi-campus footprint. All in both English and Spanish.
The Results
To deliver on this ask, Heinrich knew it would need Spanish-speaking experts as a part of our CMC taskforce. Lucky for us, our multicultural team, Hispanidad were at the ready and worked hand-in-hand with our strategists and creatives to contribute their knowledge, expertise, and, of course, transcreation skills to take our work from asi-asi to perfecto.
As for the results? For us, seeing our work in the wild is great confirmation of a job well done. Since completion, our efforts have been integrated into the college’s website and other promotional channels, including video and recruitment integration.
THE FULL
story
A solid foundation for a new brand house
By conducting interviews, deep diving into research and tapping into our tool, Resonate, our strategy team provided the foundation we needed to inspire our creative work and evolve the CMC brand. This foundation outlined CMC’s top three priority audiences, their positive perceptions and existing perceptions to change and universal reasons to believe. That information was used to create an updated brand house and three strategic territories that were used as directional guides to help the creative team find the best angle when developing verbal and visual updates.
A dual-language tagline for Colorado’s first dual-mission college
One of the major components of the CMC brand evolution was coming up with a new tagline that resonated with audiences in both English and Spanish and stood out from the many higher–education institutions in Colorado. Through much deliberation, research and collaboration, we landed on the powerful “Elevate your future” or “Eleva tu futuro,” inspired by the fact that CMC is a dual–mission school, which alone shows they are innovative and looking to help push their students and the overall future of higher education forward. According to our client, this tagline “resonated above and beyond all other possibilities we tested by a large margin—especially with our Spanish–speaking respondents.”
A visual connection for CMC’s career communities
The final piece CMC requested for their brand evolution was to create a visual system for their new brand architecture, design building blocks and a modular copy and design system that would add to their existing assets and support a range of channels and communication objectives.
Using a secondary color palette, we created color designations for each program that differentiate and organize the various Academic and Career Communities. These designations also help create:
- Easier organization of what they call their Community-specific materials in the recruiting office.
- Clearer on-campus navigation and color-coded wayfinding.
- Opportunities for students to develop a bond with their own Community color and for Colorado Mountain College to leverage that pride in on-campus and online events.
We also provided CMC with full brand guidelines including these new visual components which outlined their new photography direction and graphic elements created to help the brand stand out.