Armini, the university’s senior vice president for External Affairs, offers insight during a panel featuring Northeastern student entrepreneurs.
Michael Armini has learned a thing or two about brand building. From his early days as a press secretary in the frenetic world of Capitol Hill, to posts overseeing central marketing and communications teams in higher education, many of the lessons learned carried over.
“A campaign for public office is the ultimate personal branding challenge because you are selling yourself,” says Armini, senior vice president for external affairs at Northeastern, during a panel discussion hosted by Northeastern’s student Entrepreneurs Club.
Whether you’re in charge of a global business overseeing a multi-billion-dollar budget, or a solo content creator on TikTok, the nuts and bolts of brand building — identity, consistency, authenticity — still apply.
On a panel featuring Northeastern entrepreneurs, Armini elaborated on some of those key tenets:
The work of building what Armini calls a knowledge brand, he says, is a “brick-by-brick process.” Once the core aspects and values of your brand — what’s often described as brand “pillars” — are clearly defined, it takes on an identity.
Simply put, brand identity is who you are. Brands often undergo changes (rebranding) and adopt new tools as technology evolves. But fundamentally, the core ethos stays the same.
“Obviously, the tools change all the time,” Armini says. “But who you are shouldn’t change that often.”
It goes without saying: when it comes to your brand interacting with customers or the broader public, authenticity is key. “If you’re faking it, nobody is going to buy what you’re selling,” Armini says.
Another way to think about authenticity is trustworthiness, a measure of the degree to which a brand’s messaging is perceived to be in line with its products, actions and ideals. The way to build up that brand trust, Amini suggests, is through consistency and repetition.
In the case of Northeastern University — a knowledge brand built on ideas — Armini emphasized the importance of storytelling in forging brand authenticity. He says the university does that work through earned media coverage and in-house organs such as Northeastern Global News, marketing campaigns and social media.
“We don’t do this work randomly, we really have a couple of key differentiators that we focus on: experiential learning, research and being global in all that we do,” Armini says. “If you hammer those themes, and do it repeatedly, the brand can become solidified.”
When an organization expands, it can be difficult to coordinate teams across space and time. That is where brand governance comes in, or the way complex organizations try to ensure that all of the parts are working in harmony to advance the brand.
To keep pace with Northeastern’s growth across its 13 global campuses, Amini and his colleagues have tried to harmonize messaging and operations as much as possible to ensure consistency.
“If you’re working with a really big organization, this is one of the biggest challenges you’re going to deal with,” Armini says. “It’s important to remember that, no matter how you’re set up internally, to the outside world your organization is one entity — one brand. The world doesn’t care about your org chart.”
“You never get better at the things you don’t measure,” Armini says. “And we measure everything.”
It’s true: the availability of digital analytics has provided brands with the means of assessing performance, tracking goals and adjusting strategies. “Before, it was all impressionistic,” he says.
It’s another truism in brand building: “The more you build, the more you have to protect.” And crisis management is just a fact of life in a world of digital branding.
As brands look to try to head off negative publicity, Armini cautions them not to get ahead of themselves: “Don’t break into jail.”
“What that means is: don’t do things that inadvertently publicize a crisis,” Armini says. “If there is a contained crisis happening, and maybe 500 people know about it, don’t send an email out to 50,000 people, effectively notifying them.”
During a crisis, one measure of success is “how quickly can you get the facts,” and “how clearly you get your message out there.”