New web site refines Wharton brand

Most higher education experts would refer to Wharton as a brand name — and with its new web site, the school is refining that brand.

The new site has more interactive components and showcases the school’s global activities and social impact efforts — all of which reflect an effort to strengthen the Wharton name, according to Wharton Executive Director of Communications and Marketing Ira Rubien.

Wharton has a “powerful brand name, but I don’t think we’ve managed it more carefully until recently,” said Marketing Professor David Reibstein.

For example, scrutinizing the logo on different Wharton products revealed that they were all slightly different, explained Reibstein. On the old web site, last updated six years ago, the Penn emblem appeared to the left of the words “Wharton” and “University of Pennsylvania,” while on faculty and staff business cards, the words are below the emblem.

Marketing strategy experts say that even minor details like these impact the consistency of a brand, Reibstein explained.

“Imagine each FedEx office doing their own thing in every city with different trucks, different envelopes, different logos — how much weaker would the FedEx brand be?” he said. “People can’t have a strong affiliation to visual symbolizations if they are not consistent, [and] the brand becomes less recognized.”

Wharton’s new web site reflects the school’s effort to create a sense of uniformity. “We tightened [the differences], to make it like one voice,” explained Rubien.

The new site has “bigger, bolder images and less text and clutter, just like Penn’s main web site,” Rubien said. “More integration is our goal.”

These visual changes also make visitors’ navigation of the site easier because “now they can find information quickly and easily,” Rubien explained.

On the front page of the site, Wharton has two new features — a “global portal” which displays Wharton’s worldwide presence, Rubien and Reibstein explained, and a “social impact portal,” which presents related academic and internship opportunities.

According to Marketing Professor and Vice Dean of Program for Social Impact Leonard Lodish, social impact was not strongly associated with Wharton before. These new features will cause “people to have different perceptions of what we can deliver,” he said.

These changes heavily impact admissions, since “students from Paris, Singapore, Detroit and any kind of global environment that you can think of” learn about the school via its web site, explained associate director of MBA Admissions and Financial Aid Kathryn Bezella.

The addition of videos and interactive features that showcase students and faculty “help those who are interested in Wharton to understand the value of the brand, not just from the abstract perspective, but from the story perspective,” she said.

Bezella added that the new web site will “attract a diversified student body, students that might be interested in social impact instead of traditional banking careers.”

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