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What you’ll get: a real, eight-year playbook for rebuilding university brand trust after a major transition, drawn from a conversation with Meloney Linder at the University of North Dakota, plus the specific moves you can start this week.

The brand on paper that nobody believes

In 2018, Meloney Linder walked into a retired logo and a community that hadn’t yet decided its new brand was true.

She joined the University of North Dakota as Vice President for Marketing and Communications during a historic brand reset. The Fighting Sioux logo was gone. A new positioning, “Leaders in Action,” had been set the year before. And nobody had fully bought in.

Her job wasn’t to invent the brand. The research was already solid. Her job was harder. How do you make this real?

Most universities have a brand document sitting in a shared drive. It means almost nothing until the day a faculty member, a student, or an alum says it back to you without being prompted. That gap between the document and the belief is where most higher ed marketing dies.

This post breaks down how Meloney closed it. If you lead marketing at a college, a university, or any mission-driven organization coming out of a transition, the moves are transferable. Steal them.

Why being new was an advantage

Sometimes the best person to rebuild trust is the one who wasn’t there for the fight.

Meloney joined a year after the logo change and the budget cuts. She carried none of the scar tissue. That fresh perspective bought her grace. People were willing to wait and see what her ideas were, instead of relitigating old arguments with her.

If you’re stepping into a role right after a hard transition, that’s leverage. You can ask the obvious questions. You can treat the reset as a starting line instead of a wound. You don’t have to defend decisions you didn’t make.

The catch: you still have to earn it. New gets you a short window of patience. What you do inside that window decides everything.

So what did she do inside hers?

The athletics trap, and how to climb out

For a lot of universities, athletics quietly becomes the brand. The logo on the helmet is the thing people feel. The community gathers around the team. That’s real, and it builds genuine affinity.

Then the logo changes. And suddenly the thing carrying the brand isn’t carrying it anymore.

Meloney named this plainly. Athletics is amazing. It builds community. An institution of higher ed is also much bigger than its athletics mark. When the mark changed and lost full buy-in, she had to give people other reasons to believe in UND.

The wrong way and the better way

The wrong way: argue with people about the old logo. Try to talk them out of their affinity. Treat their attachment as the problem.

The better way: honor the affection, then widen the lens. Athletics is great. Here are the other reasons to be proud. The aviation program. The students working on NASA-related research. The UAS ecosystem UND helped pioneer. The med school. The arts and humanities work nobody outside the building had heard about.

The brand became the base. The stories became the proof.

The day the brand became real

You can’t fake the moment a brand turns real. But you can recognize it when it shows up.

For Meloney, it showed up in spring 2022. UND kicked off a new strategic plan, built from the bottom up. Seven working groups. Surveys. Nearly a thousand people across faculty, staff, students, community members, and alumni shaping it.

Throughout that process, people kept reaching for the same word. Leaders. They kept describing themselves through the Leaders in Action idea. Not because the marketing team told them to. Because that’s who they decided they were.

Her words: “It wasn’t my team that suggested it. It was our community.”

That’s the tell. The brand stops being something you push and starts being something they say. When the language you seeded comes back to you organically, through people who don’t work in marketing, you’ve done the job.

It mirrors how we think about strategy work at Tellwell. We get credit for the ideas. Most of the time we’re taking the words and feelings a community already carries, shaping them into a framework, and handing them back. The recognition that follows is the community seeing itself clearly. That’s what makes it real.

A logo is not your brand

This is the line worth printing and taping to a wall.

“A logo is not your brand, and a tagline isn’t who you are. A brand lives in your DNA.”

Meloney draws a clean distinction that most organizations blur. A marketing campaign might last six months, a year, two years. A brand is foundational. It runs deeper and moves slower. And the way you build real traction in a brand is consistency over time.

There’s a warning attached. Don’t do things that counter your brand, because then people lose trust, or they think you’re having an identity crisis. Who are you if you change all the time?

Brands can change. They usually evolve rather than swap out. A campaign changes far faster than a brand ever should.

So if you’re tempted to chase a fresh look every quarter because the old one feels stale to you, stop. You see your brand every single day. Your audience sees a fraction of it. What reads as repetitive from the inside is barely registering on the outside. Consistency is the strategy.

Consistency without going stale: the tonality move

Here’s the question that always follows. If consistency is the strategy, how do you keep things fresh? Prospective freshmen, adult learners, and corporate partners don’t want the same voice.

Meloney’s answer is one of the most useful ideas in the whole conversation. Think in tonality, not new brands.

Her metaphor: a brand can have different tonalities the same way a paint color has shades. You can have pink, and there are many shades of pink. At UND, the green is always Kelly Green. Always. There’s no other shade. But the way they speak shifts depending on who’s listening.

Talking to high schoolers sounds different from talking to a current student. An adult learner hears something different from a corporate partner or an alum. The brand holds. The tonality flexes.

This is how you escape the false choice between boring repetition and constant reinvention. You keep the DNA fixed. You adjust the register for the room. Same brand. Different shade.

Building a data culture from zero

Every marketer knows the meeting. Someone senior says “I don’t like that billboard,” and suddenly you’re defending a creative decision on taste alone. Your opinion against theirs. Nobody wins.

Meloney rewired that whole dynamic with data. And the reason it worked at a university is worth understanding.

Why data was the right language

Faculty are researchers. They like to sift and winnow toward the truth. Data is their language. So data became the way she built credibility with the hardest internal audience she had. Without data, she points out, you have her opinion against someone else’s, and no way to advance either. Data grounds the conversation.

She didn’t start big. UND had no tracking systems in place when she arrived, so she started small. Test something. Learn from it. Build on it. You don’t go from zero to 180 overnight. She reports out every semester, shows the numbers, and takes questions.

The “I don’t see your marketing” reframe

The payoff comes in a specific recurring moment. Eight years in, someone still tells her, “I don’t see any of your marketing. What are you actually doing?”

Her answer is a masterclass in reframing. She walks through the tactics, then says: you’re not my target audience. You work here. You’re not a prospective student. If you’re seeing all my marketing, I’m wasting my money.

The complaint becomes a teaching moment. And the conversation gets objective.

Fail fast, but turn the wheel slowly

There’s a tension buried in how Meloney runs creative, and it’s smarter than the usual “fail fast” advice.

On testing, she’s aggressive. UND tests creative constantly. They run brand health surveys every few years and test language and creative elements inside them to learn what’s resonating right now. In the current environment, she won’t wait six months to find out if something works. Fail fast. Modify quickly. Double down on what’s working and make it better.

On change, she’s patient. When UND evolves the brand, it moves gradually. She doesn’t wipe everything out and shock the market. Small changes, watched closely, so the organization is never caught flat-footed.

A real example from the conversation: a couple of times she thought UND was ready to introduce new elements. The internal community was ready. The external community, prospective students especially, wasn’t. It wasn’t resonating yet. So she scaled back and moved more slowly.

That’s good to learn, she said. Fast feedback, slow turns. The combination keeps you from both stagnation and whiplash.

The sandbox beats the desert

One idea deserves its own header, because it solves a problem every marketing leader has: how do you get useful input from non-marketers instead of vague gripes?

Send someone into a desert and ask for ideas, and they freeze. No frame of reference. No place to start. You get “I don’t like it” and nothing actionable.

Give that same person a sandbox, a defined frame around a specific program, and the input gets sharp. At UND, faculty started feeding the marketing team real material. Did you know this about this program? Have you talked to this student? This faculty member is doing something incredible. That’s purposeful contribution instead of armchair criticism.

Meloney adds a Midwest grace note that’s pure UND. When faculty feel awkward bragging, she tells them: we’re Midwest modest up here, so let my team do the bragging for you.

Boundaries don’t shut people out. They give people a way in.

Selling the value of higher ed in a TikTok world

Higher ed is in a strange moment. An enrollment cliff is coming. Tech CEOs are telling kids they don’t need a degree. A four-year investment has to justify itself against a culture of instant everything.

UND is fighting that and, by the numbers, winning. So how does Meloney tell that story?

She doesn’t make the case herself. She lets the people who lived it make it. Students talking about how they grew. Alumni across the state who came through UND, or earned a degree online while raising a family because that’s what worked. The people who got the degree are the most believable spokespeople for the value of higher ed.

There’s a generational reason this works. Younger people question authority more than previous generations did. The media questions higher ed leadership too. So peer-to-peer communication carries weight that an official statement never will. A student believes another student. Few believe a press release.

That’s the whole through line of her approach, pulled into one sentence: let the community speak for itself.

Feedback is a gift

The conversation closed on a leadership idea that reaches past marketing. Meloney heard it in a seminar years ago and now repeats it to everyone.

“Feedback is a gift.”

Her reasoning: people only give you truly critical feedback when they care about the work, or they care about you. If you’re lucky, both. Hold it that way, and receiving hard feedback gets easier, because you know where it’s coming from.

The flip side matters just as much. When you give feedback, give it as a gift. Express it so the person knows it comes from care.

On the podcast, Max connected it to Adam Grant and Kim Scott’s Radical Candor, and added the part people miss. We assume the vulnerability sits only with the person receiving feedback. It sits with the giver too. Sharing something that isn’t going well is an act of trust. When both people are exposed and the intent is transparent, the relationship gets stronger and the feedback gets richer.

For a marketing leader managing internal critics, this reframe is a tool. The faculty member who says “I don’t see your marketing” might be handing you a gift. Treat it like one.

Your 7-day action plan

Pick the moves that fit your situation and run them this week. Time-boxed so they actually happen.

This week (2 hours)

Audit your last six months of communications for consistency. Are you holding one brand and flexing tonality, or quietly launching a new look every campaign? Write down the one thing you keep changing that you should lock.

This week (90 minutes)

Find your version of Kelly Green. Name the two or three brand elements that never change, no matter the audience. Then list the audiences where your tonality should shift. Map them.

Next 30 days (one meeting)

Build one small test. One campaign element, one piece of creative, one subject line. Define what success looks like before you launch. You’re building the muscle, not the masterpiece.

Next 30 days (ongoing)

Start a “sandbox” conversation with one program lead. Give them a defined frame and ask what stories you’re missing. Capture every name they hand you.

This quarter (recurring)

Schedule a standing report-out to your internal skeptics. Show the numbers. Reframe the “I don’t see your marketing” complaint before it becomes a budget conversation.

Resource Hub

• University of North Dakota — See the Leaders in Action brand in the wild, including the student-in-action storytelling Meloney’s team produces.
• Meloney Linder on LinkedIn — Connect with Meloney directly. She’s generous with how UND approaches this work.
• Radical Candor by Kim Scott — The framework behind care-plus-challenge feedback that came up in the episode.
• Adam Grant — His work on feedback, vulnerability, and rethinking is the backbone of the “feedback is a gift” idea.
• Start with Story — Max’s newsletter on human-first storytelling for mission-driven organizations.
• Tellwell the Podcast — The full conversation with Meloney, plus more interviews with nonprofit leaders and higher ed marketers doing the real work.

Want help finding your story?

Tellwell Story Co. helps universities, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations find the story already living in their community and tell it well. If you’re coming out of a transition and the brand still feels like a document instead of a belief, that’s exactly the work we do. Start the conversation at wetellwell.com.