City University London

Sustainability branding

Establishing sustainability as a pillar of university culture.

Environmental sustainability is a core value of City University London. In recent years, increasing its visibility has encouraged wider and more effective engagement with staff and students, leading to a steady rise up the influential People and Planet Green League.

The task of promoting the tangible benefits of sustainability falls to the University’s Sustainability Team. Our role, in turn, was to raise the team’s profile, ensuring that their work became more visible and that disparate strands of activity merged to form a coherent proposition. A clear agenda and a distinctive identity would help the team to increase general understanding and push specific initiatives into the spotlight, while consistent branding would optimise the collective impact of their activities.

Authoritative, informative, approachable and favouring practicality over ideology, City’s ‘sustainability sub-brand’ would need to engage and maintain contact with a broad audience that tended to confine its understanding of the subject to conventional green issues. It would need to act as a marque for flagship vehicles such as City’s annual Sustainability Report, and as a badge of validation for sustainable initiatives nominally owned by other parts of the University, such as research and curriculum development.

Working with the Sustainability Team, we created an identity that would bring a wide range of existing activities into line, while providing a solid foundation for future marketing collateral.

We also developed a tagline – Sustainable City – to further distinguish the team’s work. The identity has been rolled out across a range of printed and online materials, including the annual Sustainability Report.