Global brand in mind, local brand at heart
Founded as a business academy in 1898, the University of St.Gallen (HSG) in St.Gallen, Switzerland, is best known today as a school of management, economics, law, social sciences, international affairs, and computer sciences. As one of Europe’s leading business universities, the HSG brand has represented the university’s core identity and reflected its reputation in all corners of the world from the start. With Frontify, the University of St.Gallen can ensure this legacy prevails for many years to come.
The University of St.Gallen stands for excellence in teaching, research and executive education. And this excellence must also be reflected in its most prized asset — its brand. But with 34 individual institutes and research centers currently comprising the HSG landscape, bringing everyone under one roof is no easy task. The university’s complex structure requires a strong brand identity that stands out and that all stakeholders must adhere to with every single touchpoint. When adding the over 200 international partner universities, numerous executive programs, and students from all over the world, the growing list of brand stakeholders expands this scope even more significantly — locally and internationally.
All organizational areas work independently, so it’s not easy to create a consistent brand experience.
With the last major rebrand over 20 years ago, back when the green color and logo became synonymous with the HSG, there had been very little evolution, and the brand “stagnated” a bit as a result. Before implementing Frontify in 2019, teams, assets, and tools were scattered across the HSG’s IT ecosystem, making brand management tricky, to say the least. The university’s corporate design was hidden on the intranet, and the teams often used outdated and incomplete versions, which led to misalignment and inconsistencies. The brand guidelines were very much focused on print, and a printed brand manual in PDF meant a complete lack of flexibility for the digital world, which did not meet today’s requirements anymore.
What we really needed to focus on was how do we make this new branding so fresh that it works.
Implementing Frontify as its brand hub gave the HSG brand that much-needed additional visibility, modularity, and modern touch to facilitate the transition from print to digital. This enhanced the brand’s ability to grow and evolve while reducing its reliance on external stakeholders for maintenance and updates. Furthermore, streamlining access and asset consolidation across the whole organization meant leveraging enormous efficiency gains, as HSG’s new brand hub offered users one central place, one single source of truth, to use and interact with the brand.
With this platform, we have a kind of standardization for our corporate design, which for us is so important. Now, we can act and speak as one brand.
One global brand. One central brand home.
By future-proofing its approach toward brand management and bringing brand closer to its users, Frontify enabled the HSG to work more efficiently while at the same time providing higher quality output. And this perfect match does not stop there. Both companies are located in St.Gallen and strive for excellence in everything they do. So, by sharing this global mindset with their stakeholders worldwide, the University of St.Gallen and Frontify also bridge a local connection that helps them stay connected. We look forward to many more years of close collaboration and can’t wait for this exciting journey to continue.