Liberty University brand

Brand Management: Liberty University Brand
Name
Institution
Brand Management: Liberty University Brand
A brand is a crucial feature designed for an institution or an organization recognition. In most case, the brand serves as an art defining a powerful and compelling story about an organization (Rosenbaum-Elliott, Percy, and Pervan, 2015). The artistic features range from logos, symbols, terms to taglines stating the reputation of the institution. Liberty university brand tells more than just a brand designed by logos and colors. The brand represents the university storyline showing their determination, purpose, vision, and how much the university has and is ready to persevere through its course in transforming what people consider to be impossible into reality. The design of the brand indicates that the school has made a step further away from running its operation based on the competition that exists in the society to something that makes them stand out from other institutions. Unlike its competitors, the university describes its mission in offering learning and training services to Champions of Christ both to the students and the employees within the school.
Moreover, the brand is created from unique visuals that make the university standout and be easily recognized among other brands. It contains elements such as the name of the university, monogram, a seal, colors, wordmark, and athletic logo. The brand colors include Blue, Red, light blue and charcoal gray. The light blue and the charcoal gray color act as accent colors.

The font through the brand is like contributing significantly to making the identity consistent throughout the brand image. Moreover, the selected font in the brand makes it recognizable and distinct when placed amidst other university and academic institution brands. The name LIBERTY UNIVERSITY is written using the font TRAJAN PRO which is also identifiable and stands out. The tagline, Training Champions for Christ since 1971 reflects the university history and vision to continue as an institution that offers learning and training services that draw people closer to Christ (Liberty University Branding, n.d.).
Som and Blanckaert (2015) state that a brand describes a history that moves along with a product or organization throughout its way into the future. Liberty University based on its brand identity is an institution focusing on training students based on Christian values. Some of the features to add to the brand that focuses on the University’s Christian customer-base include demographics, psychographics and ethnographic that related to the Christians lives. The brand identity can consist of the famous bible verse “For God so love the world that He gave…not perish but have eternal life” John 3:16. To minimize the space usage, the verse John 3:16 can be written below the brand’s tagline. The verse is familiar to most Christians and once seen on the company’s brand, customers who are Christians will quickly associate themselves with the university. Furthermore, the character “T” in the word LIBERTY can be written in a form that projects into a cross-like feature to relate the university and its activity to the ways of Christ as signified by His death on the cross.
Non-believer hardly understands or recognize teachings or images related to Christianity and their Christ associated practices (Hanson, 2016). According to 1 Corinthians 2:14, the unbelievers do not understand things related to spirits. Therefore, it is essential that the university brand does not parade the Christian picture and images that may make the unbeliever confused or even turn them off and losing them as customers. However, the non-believers live in accordance to some ethical practices in the society that relate to what is contained in the word of God and Christian beliefs. Therefore, the brand can have an image of a dove that has almost similar meanings to both Christians and non-believers. In both cases, a dove signifies peace and purity. The word “Christ” in the tagline “Training Champions for Christ since 1971” can be removed as it speculates that the university only accommodates Christians. Instead, the tagline can be written as “Training Champions to uphold ethical practices in the society since 1971”. In the case, the tagline shares almost a similar means and does not deviate from the fact that the university mentors students, both believers, and non-believers, into becoming people emulating the ways of Christ in the lifestyle.
References
Hanson, B. O. (2016). Branding Faith: Do Christian Ministries Reach Millennials With Branding?. Liberty University.
Rosenbaum-Elliott, R., Percy, L., & Pervan, S. (2015). Strategic brand management. Oxford University Press, USA.
Som, A., & Blanckaert, C. (2015). The Road to Luxury: The evolution, markets, and strategies of luxury brand management. John Wiley & Sons.
Liberty University Merchandising. (n.d.). Retrieved February 01, 2018, from http://www.liberty.edu/index.cfm?PID=11636