Elements of the Brand Promise

Gannon University is a caring institution for motivated students who want intellectual, professional and personal development.

Caring Institution
A brand promise statement is intended to identify qualities that can be experienced across the breadth of the institution. Gannon students can count on their education to be delivered in a caring environment focused on their individual experience. During research and testing, it was the attentive nature of the collective Gannon community toward its students that consistently and overwhelmingly scored high among all audiences. This idea is reflected and powerfully reinforced in the University’s Mission Statement and Gannon’s caring nature permeates across all aspects of the campus experience and refers to all constituencies.

Motivated Students
Intentionally, three of the final seven promise statements that were tested with the broader Gannon community used the word “motivated” to describe students, and two others used “goal-oriented.” Clearly, the notion of Gannon’s students being highly active and engaged in the academic and co-curricular experience was embraced throughout the brand clarification process. Motivated students do particularly well at Gannon.

Intellectual, Professional and Personal Development
In describing what students want from their Gannon experience, it was agreed early on that our expectations—both current and aspirant— should reflect high-quality academics and the impact they have on successful outcomes. At the same time, data and discussions suggested that the campus community felt we shouldn’t limit the “high-quality” perception to classroom and lab activities. During the brand summit, “intellectual, professional and personal development” became a favorite phrase of the University’s Marketing task force. This belief was reinforced during the campus-wide testing, and again during the Web-based promise testing that involved members of the University community.