The brief sat on a question every group running multiple education brands eventually has to answer: how much equity do you preserve in the names you've acquired, and how much do you absorb into the parent?
Torrens had recently taken a portfolio of strong specialist colleges under its wing — Chifley Business School (business and leadership), Billy Blue School of Design (a name that means something to anyone in Australian creative industries), and William Blue College of Hospitality Management.
Internally known as the 'power brands', each had its own audience, its own reputation, its own pull. Pull them all under a single Torrens identity and you risked diluting the equity the group had paid to acquire. Leave them separate and the digital experience couldn't make a coherent argument to a prospective student.
We worked across three streams in parallel. Translating the existing offline brand work — identity, type, photography direction — into a digital system that scaled across every channel a student touched. Building the brand architecture that let Torrens hold the master brand without flattening the power brands beneath it. And designing the enrolment journey itself — the sequence of moments that turn a teenager comparing five universities on a phone in October into an enrolled student in March.
The commercial brief was specific: enrolments, conversion. The strategic brief was harder: a single digital experience that does justice to every brand the group has invested in.
Ian Howarth
June 6, 2020
WORK - Week one with PureMoto.
