Over the past year, UDM’s Department of Marketing and Communications (MarCom) was charged with initiating a three-phase marketing research and rebranding process to replace the “Build a Boundless Future” brand with a more emotive and connective brand that all UDM stakeholders will use with pride. This process entails an innovative strategy that does not follow the traditional mode of branding and research higher education institutions historically leaned on for the past 30 years or more.
As part of this process, UDM is working with GreenHouse::Innovation, a firm that works to help connect organizations with thought leaders focused on social innovation to identify and tackle the hardest problems and design new models, frameworks and strategies for measurable change. Members of the GreenHouse network are well equipped to have the “un-have-able” conversation; to challenge biases and overturn assumptions to help an organization see the true conditions of the problems it faces.
GreenHouse utilizes a process called designed thinking, which helps organizations break free of cognitive patterns that resist and undermine innovation and works from the ground up in an organization. In January 2024, UDM held an introductory strategy session conducted by GreenHouse with members of the University Leadership Council.
The purpose of this session was to:
- Subvert norms and take a very close look at the institutional identity crisis
- Start to develop a new mindset, new behavior
- Identify actions (“work that you can really use”) that befit a major league school charting a new future
- Work in the short term/enhance in the long term
- A new narrative to live…starting today
Since January 2024, several other strategy sessions have taken place with our neighborhood community and internal stakeholders. Soon, UDM community members will be invited to participate in more strategy sessions with GreenHouse. The goal is to solicit your thoughts, ideas, input and perspectives about our institutional identity, future of our university and a future brand. Additionally, MarCom reps hope to visit departments, offices and individuals to present details on the rebranding efforts and to engage everyone in this work.