UOWD 2020 Career Path Campaign
The second part of UOWD marketing campaign was launched in January 2020, was introduced to highlight career paths. UOWD team used a design thinking methodology to focus not on degrees, but on career paths and the affect our students wanted to have on the world.
They wanted to use no stock photos, no real people and not alienate any of our 108 nationalities, making this campaign truly international by using icons, infographics and aspirational messaging.
UOWD needed to stand out from the crowd. They benchmarked against 20 universities in the UAE and the top 20 universities in the world. They saw that these universities all shared many marketing conventions that meant none of them really stood out.
UOWD’s inspirations were to be bright, colourful, whilst still adhering to our branding guidelines and using their pantone colours, so that although new and innovative, the campaign would be instantly recognizable as “UOWD”.
Part 2 of the campaign focused on highlighting a hero career path for each degree. This is an aspirational future for any person opting for one the degrees at UOWD. Theyr wanted students to “Choose their Hero”, almost like in a video game or story. They left the icons to be faceless, without nationality or any defining characteristics, so that the students could imagine themselves in these careers.
They then made a guide, which used the icons from phase 1, to show how they linked to the career paths in phase 2, asking the simple question “Where will your career path take you?”
We then rolled out these icons across all social media channels, bus wrappings, rollup banners, exhibition stands and more. The goal was to tell a story from phase 1 to phase 2 and show a common branding and visual language across all marketing channels.
Result of the Campaign:
Since the campaign launched, we have received a strong uptick in social media engagements and followers, as well as an increase in student numbers.
- The campaign resulted in a 5-year high spike in admissions, with enrolments increasing by 35% (https://www.uowdubai.ac.ae/news/university-wollongong-dubai-reports-35-surge-student-enrolments)
- We achieved growth across social media channels by 171% and growth in engagements by 72% by end of 2019.
Credits
- Copywriting: Brendan Vyner
- Project Lead: Brendan Vyner
- Marketing Team: Rajesh Prema, Lorraine Manoj, Jynor Khan, Etresia Wolmarans, Karan Pillai
- Designer: Farida Natour, La Mesa Creative Fusion
