One Connecting Thread Across a Brand Relaunch

Belmont Christian College came to us for a full brand story project, and what made this one particular was the way we organised the whole thing, which came out of their own situation. They were in the middle of rewriting their values, and as we started thinking about what that meant at an organisational level, we ran into a complication. The two things you’d normally anchor a brand to, the vision and the mission, were locked. They weren’t up for negotiation, and they weren’t as relevant to where the school had got to as they once were. So we needed something else to hold it together.

That’s where we leaned more heavily on the idea of purpose, connecting it directly to their values. (We didn’t build experience principles into this one, because the values had been written separately, before us, so they were already there and we just helped breathe life into them.) Purpose became the thread we could run through everything.

I wouldn’t necessarily start that way with a school that came to us only for story or messaging work, because it was a response to Belmont’s particular situation. But the principle underneath it held: connect all these different artefacts with a common thread, and one story gets told whether you’re looking at a billboard on the side of the road, reading the prospectus or the orientation book or the website, or sitting in assembly as a child hearing about the power of perseverance. We worked hard to keep all of it in the same frame: shaping people the world needs.

That came out of years of working with Belmont and coming to understand their DNA. The relationship was particular to them, but the thing it taught us, run one thread through everything, is what we now reach for with any school.