Quacquarelli Symonds (QS)
Refining and aligning the brand of the world’s leader in higher education services.
Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) is the world’s leading provider of services, analytics and insights to the global higher education sector, operating on every continent with institutions, public and media organisations and students among its hugely diverse customers.
Famed for its QS World University Rankings – the annual benchmark for universities around the world – the brand has four areas under its B2B offering:
Student recruitment (events and enrolment services), higher education leadership (insight), institutional performance (consulting and analytics) and central investment (marketing coverage).
Before working with AgencyUK, QS had regional teams around the world running local activities with scant central oversight, resulting in inconsistent quality, style and frequency of communications, and a confused, fragmented brand identity.
Align and unify the business
Working closely with their in-house teams, we helped QS align the many corners of their offering under a single, consistent brand identity. A new look and feel and communications guidelines created much-needed clarity while still enabling local teams to flex messaging to reflect and respond to their regional audiences. This further helped promote a stronger sense of pride, unity and collaboration amongst employees throughout the company.
Ignite a new customer focus
The newfound brand unity acted as a catalyst for the brand to launch further initiatives internationally. We worked with the company’s senior management to develop a thorough and nuanced understanding of their different audiences, including university admissions staff and academics, international students and other stakeholders, helping us create detailed personas which have continued to shape ongoing communications strategies.
It also became clear that the QS.com website had long outgrown itself as new offerings and business acquisitions were tacked on over time, creating an enormous, difficult-to-navigate site that had lost focus on the key differentiators that had made QS into a global leader.
Redress the shop window
Our work with the customer personas and brand definition led to us being commissioned to create a new global website. We conducted a programme of stakeholder engagement and workshops from the C-Suite down, planning detailed user journeys and developing propositions for their diverse services and products.
We took the brand’s new B2B visual identity and developed it into the full site design, creating an online shop window befitting their global status. We brought clarity and expertise to the fore as key QS differentiators that had been neglected or lost, and renewed focus on the newly-defined solutions for institutions. Refining the brand was the spark that ignited the QS business to step-change its presentation and communications and align its people around the world.
We have since provided ongoing support across QS’s B2B (institutions) and B2C (students) channels, collaborating with their teams to create engaging social content and articulating the brand’s wide-ranging portfolio of services to many different audiences.
In this time, we have exceeded targets across the board, including a staggering 1,100% increase in engagement on the TopUniversities.com Instagram account between October 2022 and October 2023.
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