What’s Your Superpower?
Louise Simpson • July 10, 2025
As higher education consultants, we are often asked to help universities think through what their brand is, what areas of excellence should they communicate to their audiences to be noticed, attract students and academics, and improve their reputation. Building a brand requires paring down, an exclusion of the ‘hygiene factors’ that make a university boring, and a focus on your ‘superpowers’.
In internal interviews to understand the brand strengths, staff often tell me they have an incredible community spirit, a unique personality, or an exciting new focus on interdisciplinarity. But none of this is very effective for brand building. In reality, most universities are great places to work, students tend to love their time there, and staff and students see themselves as fostering a special community spirit. The aspects of a university’s personality tend to be generic to all universities – interesting, quirky, collegiate, creative, full of bright, argumentative people, passionate about their work, working in gothic towers and brutalist labs. And telling the outside world that you have just discovered how to work in an interdisciplinary way is a bit like my mother telling me she has just worked out how to use an iPad.
Research, however, is a different matter because that is where a university is trying to solve the world’s problems, fix things, find solutions, and be creative. Suppose you can tell a story of how your academics solved a problem, and why that matters, and what problems still need solving, then that all feeds into brand building. There are great stories behind how The University of Leicester cracked the technique of genetic fingerprinting, why the University of Cambridge is at the forefront of cancer therapies, and how The University of Manchester discovered graphene. These now sound more like superpowers, skills that could save the world, performed by people who are special and inspire us mere mortals. This is the stuff of brand building.
Arguably, research strengths are built organically around academic prowess, but a research brand can also be built strategically and enhanced through clever marketing and communications. When I visited the University of Chicago to learn about their reputation management, they told me they hold an annual conference and a big party for international economists and business academics around the time of the Nobel Prize was announced in this field. If they did win the Nobel, the party was ready, and if they didn’t, the party and conference still reinforced their reputation as a University that was preeminent in economics.
The University of Manchester also started a concept of ‘research beacons’ in 2015, because when they won a Nobel Prize for graphene, they suddenly realised it had a halo effect for their reputation across the university, supporting the arts as well as the sciences. So, they created ‘research beacons’ in five other research areas with real-world impact and powerful leaders - and put more communications and marketing effort into those. And it’s done them proud in supporting their brand, with rises in rankings and brand recognition.
If you can build up a sense of your university being the best in a few authentic areas, then this is a strategically smart move for academic impact, but it also helps with reputation. We use a mix of H Index, Clarivate highly cited researchers, and other citation metrics to get a strong picture of which researchers are really pulling their weight and driving the research. But citations alone don’t cut it. You have to factor in many things – qualitative word of mouth reputation, big grant awards, European Research Council grants, and rankings. Plus, qualitative research with external and internal stakeholders.
So in summary, follow the evidence to choose a handful of flagships (five good, three better), and if there are any that are neck and neck, consider who are the best storytellers with global influence, most likely to engage in amazing research and tell the human stories about why these flagships matter. Create a budget to support the marketing and communications of these flagships. Think about your version of the University of Chicago economics conference and party. And persuade your leader to stay firm, as they will be lobbied by all the people whose subject isn’t the focus. As always, reputation building lives or falls on leadership support and decisiveness. If you want to be known as having a superpower, you have to have a super leader who is prepared to be bold and reject the Captain Allrounder t-shirt.