Curry College Case Study
From Brand Strategy to Award-Winning Digital + Creative
The Challenge.
Faced with the demographic cliff in the hyper-competitive market of Boston, MA, Curry College struggled with enrollment for years. As a small, private college with a new president, they knew they needed a bold vision and to start telling their story in a new and differentiated way.
The Strategy.
Curry decided to partner with Carnegie to develop and implement a modern and impactful brand strategy. Along with utilizing Carnegie’s proprietary archetype system to discover their brand personality, they also utilized Carnegie’s groundbreaking psychographic student segmentation process, called Darts. With a highly engaged campus, Carnegie’s inclusive brand process was critical. Through research, workshops, and consensus-building, Carnegie identified Curry’s unique market position, developed a new institutional logo, created student personas, designed a compelling creative campaign, and launched an expansive digital campaign to reach new markets. Creative assets, including photo, video, print collateral, and website updates, accompanied a marketing plan to serve as the ultimate roadmap for implementation.
The Results.
Curry was recognized in a Boston Globe article for its rebranding innovations, and the campaign commercial “Made for You” won People’s Gold at the Telly Awards and a Communicator Award of Excellence 2024. The digital retargeting ads also won a Silver at the 39th Annual Educational Advertising Awards. Curry is now equipped with a brand standards guide, message platform, comprehensive marketing campaign, and tools to segment marketing communications for prospective students. With an eye toward increasing enrollment, they have expanded their digital advertising across multiple states, able to tell their story in a focused and compelling way based on exactly who Curry is.
“What I appreciate most about Carnegie is that they invested time and effort in really getting to know us. It’s unusual to get that level of engagement and integration from a vendor. The research was incredibly valuable, and the branding process galvanized our community around a common voice and challenged us to take a bold position in our very competitive market.” Jay Gonzalez
President
Curry College
Visual Identity Development
The Curry College seal was actually not intended to be used in conjunction with the wordmark. However, without the icon, staff felt the logo looked incomplete and felt compelled to add something official to it. Unfortunately, the old-school seal added to the wordmark's dated feel and helped form an incorrect brand impression in the market.
Brand Strategy + Expression
Carnegie’s consensus-driven brand development process, followed by a three-day immersive creative summit (Blitz), formed the rock-solid foundation for multiple visual brand assets and empowered Curry to tell an award-winning brand story. Carnegie also collaborated with Curry on higher ed best practices to ensure the institution had the operations infrastructure and marketing internal processes needed to execute the brand consistently and effectively. This included increasing communication personalization through psychographic segmentation of prospective student audiences (Darts) to maximize engagement.
Digital Marketing Success
After completing a campaign concept based on the new brand strategy as well as student psychographic segmentation (Darts), Carnegie was able to put the research to work through multiple digital strategies focused on building brand awareness and reputation. Infusing banner ads with the new campaign concept resulted in a 492% PoP change in Display CTR. The new brand anthem video increased the YouTube TrueView rate from 55% to 62%. List-based strategies where segmented Dart messaging was deployed, such as IP Targeting and Snapchat, quintupled Carnegie’s CTR benchmarks. According to Google Analytics, 22% of site sessions from October 2023 to April 2024 were attributed to Carnegie campaigns, and site sessions overall increased 28% over the previous year.
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