What comes to mind when you think of Ashland University? Home? Excellence? Accent on the individual? This year, Ashland University is hoping to change the university’s brand, in order to bring about change.

The new branding initiative began over the summer. Surveys were conducted for both students and alumni. Also, at the beginning of this year, President Fred Finks sent a campus-wide email containing a video of himself urging students, staff and faculty to get involved with this new change. The survey has also been sent out throughout the year encouraging more people to participate.

Kelly Hyland, service leader of Marsh, and her company were hired to partner with AU. They are helping Ashland rebrand, and Hyland said the surveys were conducted to get an understanding on how students feel about Ashland University.

“We’ve done some upfront works, and some discovery works to try to understand what makes AU unique,” she said.

There were 938 students that participated in the survey, and 91.8% said they would recommend AU to others. Given the five options of excellence in academics, talented faculty, personalized education experience, preparation for life beyond college and prestigious education, personalized education experience scored the highest for what students thought represented AU. The top three words for “what comes to mind when you think of Ashland University” were home, expensive and personal.

Finks said the goal of this new brand is for people to associate something special with AU. He said the “Accent on the Individual” began as a slogan, and eventually became a core value.

“It was a slogan for a campaign but it stuck because Ashland University was a small college, it had an impact on students’ lives, there was an investment in the student,” he said. “And so that became kind of an initiative that really became a philosophy. So, in essence, that’s part of our brand. If you talk to any alumni anywhere, across the country today, they will talk about Accent on the Individual.”

Because this concept is important to AU, Finks said they are not changing this. The current brand for Ashland University was instituted about three years ago: “I am Ashland.” Finks said the brand was more of a tagline, but didn’t really stick as well as they would have liked.

“The difficulty with that was it really wasn’t tested on the student body, it wasn’t tested on the campus,” he said. “And I don’t think that it caught on because… there weren’t enough people that had input into it that said, ‘yeah this is something that we want to focus on.’”

Hyland agrees. She said the goal of the new brand is to find something special for AU. She said the best thing to do for any brand is expand, and that is their main goal.

“I think that ‘Accent on the Individual’ was a very successful kind of way to talk about the university,” she said. “But just like every brand, you want to evolve. So, ‘I am Ashland’ was the last kind of initiative that happened here… and how unique is it?”

Finks said it is common to look at and test your brand every three or four years, which is why they are implementing this new change now. However, Finks said they wanted to do this one differently.

“This time we wanted a lot more input,” he said. “We wanted to test it in the student body. We want students to tell us what were issues or what were ideas that were coming to them when they talked about Ashland University that meant something special to them.”

Hyland agrees. She said that students have a huge impact on the new brand, considering their importance to the university.

“I think that students are a large part of the university,” she said. “I mean, they’re one of the main audiences. If you think about who the university is talking to, they’re talking to prospective students, and they’re talking to students that are here.”

Finks said that most people associate “Accent on the Individual” with AU, including himself. Their goal is to keep this value a part of Ashland University, and that people continue this association with the university.

“I often say it changed my life,” he said. “I was a student here in the 60s, and I had access to faculty, people knew me by name and so it’s that point of really belonging. So, when I think of Ashland, I think of ‘Accent on the Individual.’ That could be the very branding that continues, and says ‘this is what Ashland’s all about.’ We don’t know – that’s why we’re going to test it.”

Hyland said that implementing a successful brand is AU’s main goal, and that is accomplished through student, faculty and staff input, as well as research.

“Part of what makes a brand successful is really finding what makes them special, and then talking about it,” she said. “So, that’s our goal.”

Students can be involved in the branding initiative by visiting www.ashland.edu/brand2012 or by talking to Sue Heimann.