Advanced degrees in branding:
A Minnesota college’s experience with The Vomela Companies demonstrates the value of a marketing partnership
When Concordia College alum Joshua Lysne took over four years ago as the associate vice president for communications and chief marketing officer at the Minnesota college, he was pleased to see that the campus had remained much as he remembered it: stately brick buildings surrounded by tall trees and set amid understated landscaping. But as an experienced marketer, he couldn’t help noticing what was missing: Concordia’s identity.
“It was ‘Minnesota modest,’” he says. “Beautiful scenery and facilities, but not well branded.
Branding a college or university campus requires a delicate balance. Too much intrusion on the setting can look tacky. But if there’s too little, the campus can be difficult for newcomers to navigate and forgettable for prospective students who might be visiting many schools. Lysne immediately saw two opportunities — portable backdrops for events, and images on a skyway that passed over a high-traffic road. He reached out to St. Paul-based The Vomela Companies, known for transforming ideas into memorable brand experiences.
“There are a lot of rapid print companies out there, but we are brand consultants,” says Mary McCahey, Vomela’s vice president for sales and corporate marketing. And like any good consultant, Vomela needs to fully grasp the client’s situation and goals before offering advice. “We walk the campus, take measurements, ask a lot of questions. For a school, the brand is more than just the colors or the mascot. It’s about culture and values, and we want to understand those things and how they want to express them."
Vomela provided backdrops featuring Concordia’s colors and logo, which were first used at the Minnesota State Fair. Lysne later ordered more, in different sizes, as various departments and student groups began to request them for their own events. They’re light and easy to assemble. The skyway was transformed into a road-spanning, Instagrammable welcome sign with vinyl images attached to the insides of the windows.
Lysne and his team also visited the Vomela office and factory, and that’s where he learned about the Magna-Mount, a system of magnetic tiles that attach to a wall-mounted frame. He immediately pictured it in Concordia’s Memorial Auditorium, which hosts sports, concerts, and other events. “We now have a variety of messages that we can swap in and out and reuse year after year,” Lysne explains. “And we continue to order more tiles.”
To date, Concordia has also purchased all-weather vinyl covers for the glass blocks on the façade of Memorial Auditorium; large, LED-backlit frames to replace dated, foam core-mounted photos in the atrium of the administration building; light-pole banners and navigation signage for roads and walkways around the campus; and a vinyl makeover for the hockey team’s locker room and exterior doors (the ice rink also hosts youth and high-school hockey tournaments, so many possible future Concordia Cobbers see it every year). The most recent project involved refreshing the skyway with a new design.
The scope of these projects required a range of print capabilities, and the Vomela Companies tapped into its extensive national network of print experts and installation teams. Still, McCahey says, in most cases the design and approval phase take just a couple of weeks, and production and installation a couple more.
Lysne says Vomela has been much more than a supplier and installer to Concordia; he considers his contacts there to be invaluable partners. They’ve even collaborated with him and his team on a strategic plan for additional branding initiatives over the next few years. The plan, Lysne adds, gives him more fund-raising options to pay for each new proposal.
“They have been an absolute pleasure to work with, very responsive to me and my team but also pro-active, in terms of ideating with us,” he explains. “It was a fantastic experience out of the gate and continues to be.”
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