At Ithaca College, we believe that our brand is collective reflection of our remarkable community. Our brand is and will continue to be shaped by practice, informed by experience, and refined over time. Rather than imposing rigid constraints, we see our brand as an evolving framework that grows alongside our community. Our brand guide is not a static rulebook but a dynamic tool, continuously adapted to meet emerging needs while staying true to our core identity. Through intentional, incremental updates, we ensure our brand remains authentic, relevant, and responsive, empowering our campus community to communicate with clarity, consistency, and creativity.
Iteration and Learning
Our Journey
Brand Evolution Milestones
2019: We embarked on a journey to identify and articulate our distinctive brand position that would reflect and reinforce our core identity and meet current market needs and challenges.
At this time, we conducted research with SimpsonScarborough, expert partners in higher education marketing, and we also enlisted the expertise of other leading marketers, including Courageous, Ologie, and Carnegie Dartlet. Our partners at Human Capital worked with us to identify Ithaca College’s strongest competitors and comparative institutions. The identified institutions are either positioned similarly to us in the market or may yield students who were also accepted at IC. We also held numerous campus sessions to directly hear from our community, asking them what makes Ithaca College special, and seeking feedback on messaging we felt captured IC's core philosophy and experience.
2022: We expanded our visual identity system. These newly added design elements added cohesion across all touchpoints, such as our website, social media, print materials, and signage, making Ithaca College more recognizable and reflecting our core identity.
2025: Ithaca College worked with Quick Study to reaffirm our strategic identity and update our positioning through a relevance lens to meet our audiences at this moment in time. In a world where attention is scarce and choices are many, relevance is what makes a message land. For Ithaca College, relevance means showing up with clarity, distinction, and real meaning, especially for prospective students deciding where to place their future.
This process included mixed methodologies rooted in custom research, including interviews, surveys, audience profiling, secondary source review, search trend analysis, and social media review.
Co-Created
Hundreds of faculty, staff, students, and alumni from our community have participated in the growth and evolution of the Ithaca College brand including:
- Faculty and staff representatives across all schools (i.e., Roy H. Park School of Communications; Health Sciences and Human Performance; Humanities and Sciences; Music, Theatre, and Dance; and Business), as well as the Exploratory Program
- Representatives from offices across campus (e.g., Admission/Enrollment Strategy, Marketing Communications, Athletics, Student Affairs and Campus Life, Residential Life, Student Financial Services, Campus Center, Facilities, Dining, and Advancement)
- Governance Councils: Staff, Faculty, and Student
- College-Wide Strategic Planning Committee Co-Chairs and Action Group Co-Chairs
- Representatives from Board of Trustees
- Senior Leadership (Vice Presidents, Deans, Associate/Assistant Deans)
- Current Students
- Parents of Current Students
- Prospective Students
- Prospective Parents
- Alumni and Donors
- Former Staff