Environmental branding tells UB’s story across the university

The UB brand is what sets us apart. It underscores what’s distinctive about the University at Buffalo, and establishes the visual and verbal language we use to tell our authentic and compelling story.

UB’s brand is also the experience the university creates for its students, faculty, staff, visitors and alumni. This is especially true in how UB approaches its physical spaces.

Creating a physical presence using elements of the UB brand elevates the university’s story and provides a context for inspired and purposeful work.

“A lot of people think about the UB brand as being a logo,” says Jeff Smith, associate vice president for marketing and digital communications. “It’s important to broaden that understanding.

“Over the past few years — and even preceding the launch of the UB brand strategy in April, 2016 — we have applied a wide-ranging mix of marketing concepts university-wide, using brand-related art and imagery,” Smith says. “The results have given the university community a way to impart UB’s story in ways that show the unity of the campus.”

“With environmental branding, we are taking UB’s brand attributes — purposeful ambition, global perspective, radical empathy and bold participation — and infusing them into spaces large and small, indoors and outdoors, around the campus, so people have a sense of what makes UB a great university,” says Elena M. Conti-Blatto, UB’s director of marketing.

Of course, UB’s three campuses all have different environments. “Adapting the brand to each environment is important if people are going to support it and unite around it,” explains Kelly Hayes McAlonie, UB’s director of campus planning. “Being consistent with messaging and colors is a key part of it.”

Preceding the 2016 launch of UB’s brand and identity strategy, McAlonie, together with Cheryl Bailey, associate director of campus planning, approached UC’s creative services team about creating a new set of standards to build the brand guidelines into large and small projects undertaken by Facilities Management across UB’s three campuses.

“At the time, there was no continuity,” Bailey notes. “For example, schools, departments and other units across campus chose whatever colors they wanted for either new construction or remodeling existing structures.

“Working together with University Communications, we all understood that color on a page, in print or in the media is very different from how that same color appears, and is perceived, in the built, physical environment,” she says.

McAlonie says campus planning wanted to provide members of the university community with a kit for infusing the UB brand — and its colors — into what they were doing. “Not to be proscriptive, or to dictate, but to offer guidelines. The entire campus community could support the brand in that way,” she say.

When the university launched its brand strategy nearly four years ago, one of the first steps taken with regard to environmental branding was to place the now-familiar blue banner on the outside of Alumni Arena and install new banners with the redesigned UB logo on light poles alongside campus sidewalks and roadways. “We made sure to include South Campus; the Jacobs School had not yet moved to the Downtown Campus,” says Conti-Blatto.

Since then, productive collaborations between UC, campus planning, and various units and academic departments across UB have been ongoing, says Rebecca Farnham, creative director/art director in University Communications.

For example, UC is currently partnering with the planning committee for the One World Café on internal concepts for the new building, and with the Business and Entrepreneur Partnerships on concepts for an Innovation Hub incubator within the Center of Excellence for Bioinformatics and Life Sciences.

Schools and academic departments also have asked for assistance.

“Faculty members in the Department of Chemistry had some pretty clear ideas of what they wanted when they came to us,” Farnham says. “We helped them create large signage and images depicting five different focal areas they wanted to illustrate and emphasize to students.  

“We mounted a series of graphic panels along the walls of a very long, white hallway near the chemistry department in the College of Arts and Sciences, where they reinforced the department’s place at the university, both visually and in messaging.”

Farnham says this type of art and imagery that is created for and displayed in the environment around campus works to expand on ideas and concepts to help deliver the messaging of the brand.

High-visibility collaborations are happening across campus on a wide range of environmental branding projects, including new designs for the UB mail truck fleet, wraps for elevator doors, window clings, UB bikes, coffee sleeves and a wide range of signage — indoors and out.

“We are also getting started on new outside signage for University Police on Bissell Hall,” says Farnham, “which is another example of people coming to us to provide some help in making their imagery and their appearance more current through branding in the environment.”

As new images and signage become more widespread across the university, environmental branding shows the unity of the campus and makes spaces more attractive to visitors and the university community.

But, Conti-Blatto says, it is not simply placing a logo, color or piece of signage on a building.  

“It is being thoughtful about it. After all, the university’s brand strategy came about as the result of a very deliberate process, careful research and discussion with many members of the UB community,” she says.

To be successful, environmental branding is a balancing act.

“We try to be consistent without over-saturating that environment with what we are doing,” says Smith. “The more people see, the more they are interested in what is being done and how it might work for their department, unit or area of the university.  We need to be able to demonstrate the impact of the work we do as a public research university.”

“People are now picking this up and running with it, which is something that we didn’t see earlier in the process of introducing the brand strategy to the university community,” Conti-Blatto adds.

Farnham says it’s like turning a ship. “And you see it gradually moving, changing direction,” she says. “One day I had just parked outside of Capen and there was a moment on Founders Plaza.

“There were blue UB buses, racks of UB-branded blue bikes, signage for our branding campaign, as well as signage we helped Facilities create for a sidewalk repair project there on the plaza. Plus students wearing UB shirts.

“And it made me realize, after working here for 30 years, I had never seen a moment like that — multiple elements visualizing UB, as a university, as a community,” she says. “It was amazing.”