Andrew Gutman
Editor in Chief
“Great Ideas Are Born Here,” is a slogan that Springfield College says loud and proud. Basketball? That seems to have gone over well. Humanics? Not a bad concept, and while ideas like these will forever be deeply rooted in the history of the college, they aren’t our only history.
Springfield is currently going through a rebranding, run by Ologie, a marketing and branding company based out of Ohio. The rebranding is targeted at, not changing the school, but highlighting what Springfield is about.
“[We are] the birthplace of basketball; that is a valid part of history that we want to claim. We also want to claim that the first person to ever graduate from this institution is an African American man,” said Bri Hill the student appointed to the rebranding board to aid in the process. “It is very hard. That’s why we have been in this marketing and branding need for so long.”
With the competition for schools becoming more and more of a reality, Springfield is hoping that the rebranding is something that will help the school stand out.
“Competition is more fierce, due to a lot of reasons: the demographics, and the decline of graduating high school students in the northeast,” commented President Mary-Beth Cooper. “You have a population that is on the decline, and the number of universities and colleges has stayed the same or increased.”
Springfield is hoping to not only better define itself, but set itself apart from competition.
“I think it (Springfield College) is a regional treasure, but for us to be more competitive nationally we need to ensure that our message about who we are and what we do is accurate and crisp,” Cooper said.
“We don’t have a logo, so we need to create that. We also need to create a tagline to go by. We also need to make sure that our mission, and our statement as an institution is represented in that,” commented Hill. “We are working with Ologie to get all of these points across.”
The College has a perception of being an “athletic school,” but with 711 students being involved in intercollegiate athletics, where does that leave the other couple of thousand students that aren’t?
“Our strong health science majors give off the warning signs that we are athletic, and that you have to be a jock to come here. The majors that aren’t health sciences; business, communications, dance… people don’t come here for those majors,” said Hill. “They come here and find those majors. We want to change that, and let it be known that we have all of them.”
Springfield will always be Springfield, and the rebranding will help to bring everything it has to offer to the surface. We know how great we are… it’s about time others do as well.
SC does have a logo, the inverted triangle. And while the birthplace of basketball Has a nice ring to it, I don’t it’s a major Draw in this competitive the climate. SC has always been about developing Community leaders, whether they are teachers, YMCA leaders or the many Other people helping professions. That is what should be captured in the tag line.
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The triangle is in fact our crest, not our logo. Because there has been an absence of a logo, clubs have been using the triangle in its place.