Branding & Storytelling
Get a Partner Who Gets What Makes You Different
Behold The Power of Human Creative
Viv helps you find your real points of difference, elevate them with a big idea, and build beautiful brands, campaigns, and content that helps the right people feel connected to your institution. Sorry robots, it’s a human thing.
Higher ed marketing performs better when research, strategy, messaging, creative, content, and media work together.
Who We Are
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Flannery Burdickin Colorado Springs, CO -
Chris Pellingin Brighton, UK -
Jackson Millerin Hardwick, VT -
Kjirstin Camposin Minneapolis, MN -
Kayla Farrisin Hattiesburg, MS -
Brandon Rosasin Parnell, IA -
Cinthya Sotoin Los Angeles, CA -
Colleen Sabatinoin Lancaster, PA -
Paul Withamin Reading, MA
Work That Makes You Feel Something
Explore how Viv’s higher education branding services turn strategy into creative systems, stories, websites, and assets that help institutions sound more distinct, look more connected, and move audiences toward action. Viv can help you establish an emotional connection with prospects in the fraction of a second before their next swipe. The right higher education branding agency can distill audience goals into core emotions, make your institutional differentiators easier to understand, and help you build a brand that’s easy to remember.
Branding & Positioning
Clarify what makes your program, school, college, or institution distinct, then build the message system, value propositions, audience insights, and psychographic elements to support stronger recruitment, advancement, or growth. Whether you need a higher education branding strategy or a sharper campaign platform, we help the real difference come through.
Print & Digital Design Systems
Create flexible design systems that make campaigns, content, and communications feel connected across formats. Viv’s higher education creative services help teams bring consistency, energy, and clarity to the pieces prospects, families, faculty, alumni, and partners actually see and remember.
Web Design, UX & Copy
Build web experiences that show you at your best and help users understand your value, find what they need, and take the next step. Our work in higher education website design and UX connects brand, user experience, copy, search visibility, and conversion.
Video Storytelling
Turn student, alumni, faculty, and institutional stories into compelling video concepts, scripts, interviews, and content packages. We use story to make the strategy visible, specific, and emotionally credible.
Student & Alumni Stories
Capture the human proof behind your value proposition through stories that show outcomes, belonging, momentum, and transformation. Strong student and alumni stories help prospects understand not just what you offer, but what it feels like to grow there.
Faculty Storytelling & Thought Leadership
Translate faculty expertise into accessible stories, articles, toolkits, quotes, and other types of content that build authority and trust. For a university branding agency, this work matters because faculty perspective can make academic value easier to understand and harder to copy. Your faculty are inherently differentiating and personal.
Content Strategy
Map what to say, where to say it, and how each asset supports the full journey from awareness through enrollment or engagement. A higher education content strategy gives your team a clearer system for turning insight, proof, and story into useful marketing.
Viewbooks, White Papers & Downloadable Assets
Create high-value print and digital assets that support recruitment, lead generation, nurture, and yield. We make sure each asset has a job to do in the larger decision journey and is usable in long and short formats across many channels.
The team brings an excellent combination of design talent, copywriting prowess, and higher education expertise. They very quickly learned the complexities within the unit and are champions of our brand and messaging consistency. I have watched as they graciously and confidently respond to the often shifting needs of our market segments, always acting as strong strategy consultants.”
Sarah Biggers
Associate Director of Continuing Education at School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University
Growth Marketing Has More Fun
Not just better stories. Better-connected marketing. Bigger end-of-enrollment-cycle party.
Viv connects brand and storytelling to the rest of the growth marketing system, so your message is consistent at each stage—and memorable. As a higher education branding agency, we build the strategy, assets, and activation plan to help your story work across diverse channels and decision points, while remaining radically human.
A higher education branding agency shouldn’t hand you a concept and walk away. It should help the story work across the funnel, from the first search to the final decision. That’s the difference between a higher education branding agency that makes work look better and one that helps it perform better. That means your higher education branding services are not isolated from media, search, websites, analytics, or enrollment operations. The big idea is built to travel.
What makes an effective higher education brand strategy?
An effective higher education branding strategy starts with what is true, distinctive, and meaningful to the people you need to reach. It connects to their hopes and worries. A higher education branding agency can help clarify your position in the market, give internal teams a shared message system, and make it easier for prospective students, families, alumni, donors, or partners to understand who your institution is and how you can provide a transformational experience.
How can a college differentiate its brand from competing institutions?
A college can differentiate its brand by moving past generic claims and identifying the specific proof, culture, outcomes, academic strengths, student experiences, and values that make the institution different. A college branding agency can help translate that evidence into messaging, creative, content, and campaigns that feel both true to the institution and clear to the audience.
How should universities use student stories in marketing?
Universities should use student stories to show the human proof behind their value propositions. Strong stories do more than quote happy students. They reveal starting points, doubts, support systems, academic experiences, outcomes, and moments of change so prospects can see themselves in the journey.
How can faculty thought leadership support university marketing?
Faculty thought leadership can help university marketing by making expertise more visible, accessible, and useful to the audiences an institution wants to reach. Articles, interviews, toolkits, explainers, videos, and quotes can build authority while giving prospects a clearer sense of what they will learn and who they will learn from. Instead of an “institution,” you suddenly become a community of people working toward something big together.
What makes higher education storytelling effective?
Effective storytelling in higher education connects real people, specific proof, and a clear strategic purpose. The best brand storytelling higher education work helps audiences understand what an institution believes, what it does especially well, and why it’s important.