How important is your institution's brand? Is it believable and compelling? Is it strong and focused? Does it center on your values?

If not, keep reading.

In the introduction to The Real U: Building Brands That Resonate with Students, Faculty, Staff, and Donors, Robert Moore writes, "A well-managed brand combines brand messaging and lived reality that, handled correctly, becomes powerfully defining for the individual, the group and the institution."

This comes easily for institutions with top-ranked programs, large endowments and years of history, but is often harder to define for many colleges and universities. In The Real U, Moore discusses how to identify a brand story and shape it to meet stakeholders' interests, values and needs.

The Real U presents the theory and application of branding principles in a higher education context and incorporates case studies from colleges and universities. Numerous sidebars contains perspectives from marketing and communications professionals in academe, corporate and consumer branding experts, marketing professors and others.

The book also provides guidance on how to:

• build on-campus support for branding initiatives,
• assess an individual institution's market position, 
• differentiate its core "offer," and 
• build a sustainable branding program.

You can order The Real U through the CASE Store.

Moore is the CEO emeritus of Lipman Hearne and is CASE's vice president of marketing and communications. Moore will be presenting "Brand Building in Education: A Practitioner's Method" at APAC 2018. He will also be featured in the May/June issue of Currents, with "The Power of Place."