Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) competes against larger and better-funded institutions with solid reputations. Offering a complete suite of undergrad and graduate programs in varied fields, UQAM struggled to shake-off its “left-leaning-communitarian” reputation: a place for hippies interested solely in Social studies.
But UQAM’s peculiar didactic-style constituted its most powerful USP: an institution that approaches university-level education in an innovative and creative way. This provided us with the prospect of freshness in a category that struggles to innovate both on the product-side and in its communications.
So we challenged ourselves to develop a campaign that would embody the brand message of “innovation and creativity” instead of only delivering it.
The «Inspired by UQAM» campaign - with its art-gallery themed narrative - disrupted the formulaic “testimonial” approach: visual artists where tasked with creating a visual piece representing their own vision of a faculty after visiting it facilities and meeting some of its students.
The entire project is still hosted at: http://7portraits.uqam.ca
Results:
Individuals exposed to the campaign perceived UQAM as primarily being “Creative” (75%), with other leading attributes being “Artsy” (58%), “Audacious” (24%) and “Innovative” (22%).
On top of generating media coverage from industry and generalist media, locally and internationally, it rallied every single faculty deans, which had never been achieved before.
