CASE STUDY / BRAND STRATEGY · CONSUMER INSIGHTS · INTEGRATED CAMPAIGN
Making the Case for a System, Not Just Four Campuses
How reframing four separate campuses as one cohesive system shifted Colorado's perception of the CU System's value.
CLIENT University of Colorado System (via Greenhouse Partners)
ROLE Perception Research & Content/Media Orchestration
DISCIPLINES Consumer Insights · Brand Strategy · Integrated Media Planning · Stakeholder Interviews
RESULT 86% favorable shift in brand perception
01 / The Challenge
Higher education broadly was under pressure — rising skepticism about whether a degree was worth its cost was reshaping how families evaluated schools. The CU System was caught in that same current, but with an added problem: even people who valued higher education didn't have a clear sense of what the CU System, as a whole, actually delivered to Colorado — its communities, its students, or the state's standing nationally.
THE BUSINESS
Enrollment, retention, and fundraising all depend on the public believing in the value of the institution behind the degree.
THE TENSION
The System wasn't struggling because its individual campuses were weak. It was struggling because nobody perceived them as a system at all.
THE QUESTION
How do we shift perception — and with it, retention, enrollment, and investment — when the real problem isn't a lack of quality, but a lack of a coherent story connecting the parts?
02 / The Insight
Each campus was being seen as its own island, not as four paths toward the same mission.
The initial annual perception survey surfaced three consistent pain points: cost, the perceived effectiveness of a degree, and the System's national recognition. But the deeper discovery came from looking at why those perceptions existed — audiences didn't have a mental model for how CU Boulder, CU Denver, CU Colorado Springs, and CU Anschutz related to one another. Without that connective tissue, every campus was fighting its own perception battle alone, and the System's collective weight — the thing that should have made it more credible, not less — wasn't showing up anywhere.
WHAT IT MEANT The fix wasn't louder messaging about individual campuses. It was giving people a reason to see the System as one thing.
03 / The Strategy
"All Four:One" — clarify each campus's distinct role, then connect them into one shared story.
01 / Defined what made each campus distinct
The traits, focus areas, and communities each campus uniquely served.
03 / Connected the four into one narrative
Positioned the campuses as four different paths serving one shared mission, rather than four competing brands.
02 / Backed each distinction with proof
Real interviews and case studies with students, faculty, and community members demonstrating each campus's specific impact on Colorado and beyond.
04 / Built consistent, integrated touchpoints
Social, OOH, print, and CTV, so the reframed story stayed top of mind long enough to actually shift the System's dated perception.
04 / The Work
The campaign ran on real research, not assumption: an initial perception survey identified the core pain points, and follow-up interviews with survey respondents added texture to what "cost," "effectiveness," and "national recognition" actually meant to different audiences. That research shaped a content plan built around campus-specific stories, each one placed across the media channel where it would land hardest — then activated through a coordinated mix of social, OOH, print, and CTV.
One example: a print piece built around a series of conversations with Dr. Huntington Potter, Director of the CU Anschutz Alzheimer's and Cognition Center — covering the Center's cross-campus collaboration, its research into Alzheimer's prevention and treatment, and its long-term goal of curing the disease. It's a direct answer to the "national recognition" and "effectiveness" pain points the survey surfaced: instead of asserting that CU does important work, it let a leading researcher's own work make the case.
05 / My Role
I helped orchestrate the perception study, both the initial wave and the follow-up, and personally conducted follow-up interviews with key survey respondents to dig deeper into their responses. From there, I helped shape the content built to address the specific perception issues the research surfaced, working with the team to determine which channel each piece of content would perform best in. I coordinated directly with media vendors — and in some cases owned the channels outright — to get placements live, then met with those vendors on an ongoing basis to review results and optimize toward what was working. The agency team was 5–6 people, the client team 3–4, and vendor teams ranged 4–6 people each.
06 / The Impact
86% — favorable shift in brand perception
$3M — integrated campaign, spanning social, OOH, print, and CTV
Systemwide enrollment held at record levels throughout this period — not something this campaign alone can claim credit for, but consistent with the kind of sustained perception work that keeps an institution's momentum from stalling.
The shift wasn't just in how people described the CU System — it changed the underlying story people had to tell themselves about why the four campuses mattered together, which is what perception research had shown was missing in the first place.
07 / The Takeaway
The instinct in a perception problem is to talk louder. The actual fix here was structural: give people a coherent story to hold onto, back it with real proof, and the perception follows. Four strong campuses telling four disconnected stories will always underperform one system telling a connected one.
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