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In March 2005, Tim Robertson of the Canadian design firm Robertson+Partners was invited by an economic development agency to create a branding program for the Nizhny Novgorod Commercial Institute (or NKI, the Russian acronym). Nizhny Novgorod is Russia's third-largest city, and NKI is one of the leading business schools in the Russian Federation. Created about 10 years ago, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, it offers degree programs in financial, legal, and commercial areas of study and has more than 7,000 students. But like any school, NKI was facing changing times and economic pressures. Once it was entirely state-funded; now it receives only 10 percent of its budget from the state. Competition for students has become tougher. And despite the fact that NKI boasted an excellent record of job placement success and salaries for professors, marketing studies showed that parents thought the college was limited to just a few areas of study and that it was primarily a "trade school."
Robertson found the project quite daunting at first. He had only a month in which to come up with a complete program. There were few English-speakers, so he had to use an interpreter for almost every conversation. He was unfamiliar with the marketplace, and only a few people he encountered had a good idea of what branding was. On the plus side, the college's marketing director was not one of these. He had spent several months going through numerous logo designs and advertising slogans, and was happy to get some help. He gave Robertson all the market feedback he had and made his staff available.
As he would for any other project, Robertson followed what he calls "my standard procedure of investigation"-an examination of the brand's values, promise, personality, and icons. Through interviews with executives, marketing staff, administration, students, and professors, Robertson began to get an idea of the values that were most important to the school: quality, mobility (which in this context meant job placement), and success (students who were enrolled in NKI's program rated it number one in comparison to competing institutions). He also found that the college had a long history of firsts. It was first in job placement success, first in professor salary levels, and first in establishing international credentials and partnerships. His conclusion was that the core brand message was: "First in so many ways; higher education for a secure future."
Higher education spoke to a perception of the college as going beyond the bounds of a trade school. Another way of dampening the trade school perception was to de-emphasize the word commercial in the school's formal name. Since everyone in the community simply called the school NKI, Robertson chose to emphasize those three letters in the new logo.
The results have been encouraging. Since the new brand's inception, awareness in the Nizhny Novgorod region has improved, enrollments are up, and international awareness has also grown. The school has agreed to launch a joint MBA program with a German institution, and agreements have been signed with other western universities for cooperative teaching and student exchanges. And when Robertson left NKI, he left behind quite a few people who now can speak quite knowledgeably about the importance of a brand.
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