Branding en el sector educativo
Building brands for major educational experiences is a genuine challenge, because we never stop learning. That's what our product designer, Ada Fàbregas, said on Solublabla Podcast. The digital world moves at cruising speed, and education is one of the sectors that's traveled, and has traveled, an intense path.
Traditionally, this market was dominated by a few large players, but digitization and crisis moments have multiplied the supply in recent years. Thanks to their expertise, many professionals started training other people, and education became a highly attractive business. This breeding ground continues to offer endless opportunities to lead communities and grow in many directions.
At the same time, it's a reality that brings with it fierce competition, highly heterogeneous—by model, by price, by niche—that means knowledge alone is no longer enough. To truly capitalize on this red ocean business, you need one key tool: brand. Solid, congruent, and activated with precision. Ready to walk through the role of branding in education together?
Making the match through brand
For any student or professional who has decided to pursue training, the consideration phase is crucial. Searching, comparing, and searching again to find that perfect course is as common an experience as it is logical. It's in this moment that brand becomes a necessary asset to reach the brand personas we know will be a perfect fit.
Projecting our essence and getting them to identify with us is the first step to grab attention, own top of mind, and build a loyal community that serves as the foundation to consolidate first, then grow. We know this because we accompanied Codely on a very similar mission. This online learning platform for programmers has nothing to do with a conventional academy, neither in substance nor in form. Its great why is enjoying themselves while advancing in the world of programming.
A powerful idea that, worked from strategy and complemented at the identity level with, for example, fantasy elements—we're even talking about prints with flamingos or pineapples—helps them be clear in their value proposition to people looking for knowledge about 'development without the BS', the big creative concept of their brand. The target audience will definitely swipe right.
Standing out and being consistent
Our experience in the education sector has also revealed to us that digital and offline touchpoints usually coexist in education: a classroom, perhaps virtual, a teacher and also other elements that make a difference—for better or worse—, like the learning platform, the emails a student receives and even the payment gateway to enroll.
Everything is brand. That's why a well-defined strategy will help make the right decisions and be perceived as we really want to be. First impressions matter, and a lot, but then you have to live up to it.
That was, precisely, our objective when working alongside IESE, global leader in MBAs and Executive Education. Its educational offering is excellent, and so is its physical campus. That's why the digital experience had to be at the same level. We worked on My IESE to make it a platform with carefully crafted onboarding, a live and effective dashboard, and a design system that allows its team to grow without any brand leakage.
Drive sales
All these paths ultimately show one reality: brand drives sales and student satisfaction in a market marked by saturation. Not just by clarifying rational benefits, but also by showing and confirming what goes beyond the purely rational: values, the study experience, purpose… Intangibles that add significant value and help create the desire that's key across every stage of the funnel.
Every teacher has their own way, and often we value the teacher not so much for what they teach us but for what they manage to see and draw out of us in the learning process itself. In other words: going beyond a specific product or course and delivering an experience consistent with what was promised will raise satisfaction and enable brand equity to transfer across all programs.
Drive repeat enrollment, enable scalability
A brand with deep roots is therefore the only path to move beyond individual people and capture all the attributes that make a student choose to study at one organization over another. And that also translates into greater repeat enrollment.
This was the case with DevExpert and its creator, Antonio Leiva. His purpose, latent at that moment, was to guide developers toward the bright side of development, and he recognized the need to work on the brand so the project wouldn't be constrained. We helped him distill its essence and shape the identity, both visual and verbal, all the way to the website, empowering the team along the way.
With this process, it's only a matter of time before the brand speaks and represents itself across every touchpoint—personal, physical, digital—without varying what's being said or how it's said. And that's where the ability to scale without risk lives. But the truth is we're assuming an important journey will be traveled, the longest one: activating the brand.
Consolidate and leave no loose ends
Strategic work helps identify the phases of our students' decision-making, experimentation, and recommendation processes, and that will allow us to be more effective. Knowing what we need to talk about, and also where and how to talk about it, makes content generation easier and maximizes return on investment. Working the brand so that the educational offering looks as good as it actually is. Activating it so value reaches the right people and using it as leverage to consolidate and scale.
