Activate Your Differentiators by Aligning Campus Action and Experience
March 25, 2026 | Michelle Mulder
Strengthening your brand is one of the most effective ways to keep your campus resilient and prepared for what’s next. Brand equity—the value your brand holds in the minds of your audiences—is how you understand and grow that strength over time. Brand experience is the aspect of brand equity that assesses if a brand provides unique value and lives up to its promise. Knowing and measuring brand experience enables you to evolve messaging to reflect what the brand delivers, deepening loyalty and trust.
Brand Experience
Brand experience details how prospective students, admitted students, and families experience your brand, what they say about it, and whether or not they believe your brand provides unique value. It includes the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes audiences maintain about your brand.
The experience aspect of brand equity helps you lean in to only what your brand delivers, rather than messaging that could apply to any brand in your category.
Why Brand Experience Matters
Experience is a direct connection between behavior and action. Campuses deliver on brand experience when they meet student expectations, invoke a positive overall impression and emotional response, and build loyalty and trust.
Brand experience is also an opportunity to understand the impact of current or potential strategies on various audiences based on how they encounter your brand.
Social Intelligence Recognizes Unique Differentiators
Social intelligence analyzes the audience to amplify beliefs, attitude, and needs. The data and insights help you understand if your audience believes your brand provides the unique value you say you do.
Investigate perception. Analysis that investigates perception within specific audiences to identify audience-derived differentiators. The insights explore if there are gaps in your messaging and if or how they align with your brand pillars.
Evaluate market position. Use competitor analyses, benchmarking, and comparisons to understand your brand’s market position, empowering you to lean into the unique value that strengthens your brand and increases your differentiation.
Experience Insights Drive Action
Challenge Internal Assumptions
A medium-sized, highly ranked public university needed support identifying strategic marketing, enrollment, brand, and positioning opportunities to support increased student demand and yield. The university’s smaller size and close-knit community were differentiators that students positively described as similar to a private school atmosphere. The university believed they were perceived as “too rigorous,” but rigor didn’t negatively impact brand perception and was mentioned positively.
There’s an opportunity for the university to move applicants to enrollment by highlighting their market-defined differentiators at the top of the funnel, such as affordability and outcomes, and their unique, audience-driven differentiators at the bottom of the funnel, such as smaller size, community feel, and student research. Students are drawn to the research opportunities the university offers, but incorporating “whole self” messaging throughout the funnel provides a better understanding of their campus experience.
Find What Sets You Apart from the Competitive Set
A large public university in the South had a strong reputation and brand narrative but wanted to understand what set them apart from the peer institutions students most often compared them to. A value and perception assessment, benchmarked against their competitor set, surfaced three differentiators: athletics as a primary point of entry into the brand for prospective students, a reputation as a competitive, high-value option expressed through strong institutional pride, and a vulnerability—external scrutiny driven by state-level narratives and ideology rather than campus experience—that competitors weren’t facing to the same degree.
By focusing on the differentiators that consistently emerged relative to their competitor set, the campus built stories that resonated with both athletics and non-athletics audiences, leaning into what genuinely set them apart rather than messaging generic to the category. This gave the campus a chance to show audiences the gap between assumption and experience, and to activate the differentiators that mattered most to enrollment decisions.
Brand Equity Framework
Broader knowledge and understanding of your brand awareness prepares you to examine the rest of your brand equity and build a brand strategy aligned with your future vision.