The power of brand in the world of higher education
A brand strategy and playbook that reclaimed ‘technical’ for Brunel and united its teams behind delivering it.
By Industry Unlimited Strategy Studio
A brand strategy and playbook that reclaimed ‘technical’ for Brunel and united its teams behind delivering it.
"We’re living in an age where AI can increasingly deliver knowledge on demand, so universities have to sell something different. No one’s buying what you’ll teach them. They’re buying what you’ll make them capable of" Emma Perrett, 'The new rules of university branding' Transform Magazine, Oct 2026.
The brief
Brunel University London was founded in 1966 on exactly that premise: a technical university, named after Britain’s great engineer, where knowledge is made rather than received. Sixty years on, ‘technical’ still describes precisely who Brunel is, yet Britain has never fully understood what a technical university is for. Meanwhile the ground is moving. Lifelong learning funding arrives in 2027, Generation Alpha arrives in 2028, employers are dropping degree requirements, and a university sitting between the elite and the disruptors has to prove why physical presence and a formal credential are worth the fee. The brief was three questions: how do we own and give meaning to ‘technical’? How do we make brand the business driver rather than the wrapper? And how do we build real differentiation in a sector where everyone says the same things?
The idea
'Question Everything, Build Anything'. One organising idea, rooted in technē, the Greek understanding that mastery comes from living inside the problem. It takes ‘technical’ away from engineering and makes it a method for every discipline: a criminologist builds cases, a designer builds experiences, a business student builds ventures. It claims the space between critical thinking and practical application that no competitor owns, and it tells students both how they’ll learn and what they’ll become. We built it as an operating system, not a strapline: a brand playbook that organises the portfolio by the transformation it delivers rather than the department that delivers it, gives five income strands one growth story, and sets behavioural guardrails a team can decide with: brutally honest, powerfully systematic, beautifully functional. The test throughout: if it can’t kill a project, it isn’t strategy.
The impact
The playbook became Brunel’s own with professional services and marketing academics working side by side on it: the kind of crossing of silos that brand work in higher education rarely achieves.
Leadership described the playbook as having reinvigorated internal teams and given them clear direction. That is what a strategy should want: not a document admired on a shelf, but an idea a university can build with.