The same growing K to 12 Christian school on the NSW coast as the audit, and the audit’s first recommendation made real: a brand strategy. The school had nearly doubled in five years and its story hadn’t kept pace with what it had become. We built it differently from our usual approach, and the new methods have stuck.
The biggest shift was getting away from top-down brand strategy and building bottom-up. We didn’t change the school’s values. We didn’t touch the vision or the mission. We focused on the experience of the school. The thinking was simple: if this brand is going to show up in the school every day, it should be like holding a mirror to what it’s like to be there.
So the work started with listening. We ran workshops with the executive team, with students, and with parents, all about extracting the language, the stories, and the experiences that make the place special to them. And we road-tested ideas with them along the way, everything from mood boards to taglines to specific types of language, asking how it made people feel. By the end we’d captured so much that the strategy doubled as a record of the school’s own language and stories.
It was also the first time we built experience principles and signature offers into a brand strategy, and we’ve used both since. Experience principles are the lived truths about what it’s like to be part of the school. Signature offers are the concrete things the school does that families can actually point to. The messaging pillars were built directly from both, which means the way the school talks about itself traces straight back to real experiences and real offers. We deliberately left out some of the usual strategy furniture, the purpose statements and the competitor positioning, because the story didn’t need them.
When I presented the story back for the first time, the business manager had tears in his eyes. It wasn’t the writing. It was seeing his school’s own experience reflected back accurately.
A brand strategy built bottom-up from workshops with the executive team, students, and parents, with ideas road-tested with them along the way.
The first outing of experience principles and signature offers, with messaging pillars built directly from both, and now part of how we do messaging and story work.
A strategy that doubles as a record of the school's own language and stories, drawn from the community rather than imposed on it.
Belmont’s vision and mission were locked and no longer quite relevant, and they were mid-rewrite on their values, so we leaned on purpose as a connecting thread through it all.
Belmont’s purpose statement was written to scale. It expands up into a manifesto and shrinks down to two words, and it threw off whole messaging moves, “people the world needs” and “this is where it all begins”. A purpose statement that generates rather than restricts.
