King’s College London

Rethinking student recruitment campaigns

Campaign strategy
Campaign identity
Campaign assets
Campaign guidelines
Art direction
Tone of voice

Client

King’s College London is an internationally renowned university, dedicated to delivering exceptional education and world-leading research. Their commitment to driving positive and sustainable change in society is reflected in their vision to make the world a better place.

Brief

King’s asked Rose to create a strategic recruitment campaign that could bring their brand to life and appeal to prospective students and influencers, across all of its subject areas and levels of study. The campaign needed to differentiate King’s from other universities offering the same courses. It also needed to help prospective UG and PG students understand why gaining their degree at King’s College London will help them (and King’s) fulfil a shared ambition to help make the world a better place, in addition to providing the best foundation for a future career.

Solution

Through sector analysis and audience research, Rose discovered the competitor landscape was bland and saturated with me-too offerings with little, if any, differentiation. Rose recognised that student recruitment (in the midst of a global pandemic) would be tougher than ever and King’s needed to stand out, for the right reasons. King’s wanted to help make the world a better place by helping tackle the many challenges the world is facing and will face in future. They wanted to attract prospective students who felt the same way.

So Rose created a strategic proposition for the campaign that held a mirror up to prospective students, to reflect the challenges we are all facing – real-world challenges, the type of which we see in the media everyday. The campaign quite literally asks if students considering studying at King’s are prepared to accept the world as it is, or question if it can be made better?

Result

In the year following the student recruitment campaign, King’s College London saw a record number of applications for their courses. This enabled them to fill all their available places without needing to offer any through Clearing or Adjustment, in addition to seeing a rise in student figures of 7.7% on the previous year to 35,918 students.¹

¹ King’s College London, Financial Statement 2022