UHI

Client: University of the Highlands and Islands
Sector: Education, university, college, research
Services: Strategy, brand, identity, marketing

University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) is a unique organisation. 13 independent academic partners, from local colleges to world-class research institutions. UHI’s distributed campus covers half of Scotland. We helped UHI rename, reposition, rebrand and relaunch.

Read

Discover

We learned that UHI is about equity, providing a world-class education regardless of place or context. As one workshop participant said “You may be walking through the doors of our Campbeltown building but you’re entering a campus that spans half of Scotland.”

Develop

UHI’s partnership model is what makes it unique. And the diversity of partners is its greatest strength – it enables UHI to offer students more. We repositioned UHI using that as the heart of an authentic, compelling and distinctive story – UHI is where learning means more.

Deliver

We crafted a new visual identity with the ideas of ‘more’ and ‘partnership’ embedded within it. And a strategy that provides a foundation for future campaigns. Audience testing showed a 300% increase in potential future students who said they would consider UHI.

We renamed University of the Highlands and Islands as UHI. Abbreviating removes some of the name’s inherent barriers and unifies the partners under a simpler identity, ready to be filled with meaning. We built a coherent naming strategy for the partners which redefines UHI as a partnership of equals.

The brand system is built to be flexible. Some partners use English, some are bilingual - one partner is 100% Gaelic. Some consider themselves full partners, others are independent but supported by UHI.

Flexible marketing built around a single proposition ensures that UHI can talk to any audience inclusively in their own language (sometimes literally, eg. Gaelic) and their own context.

“I think Stand have achieved the impossible here.”
Professor Todd Walker, Principal and Vice-Chancellor
UHI

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