How LSU athletics seeks to revolutionize recruiting with The Brand

On Monday, the LSU athletics department announced the launch of The Brand, a new department consolidating the creative units within the university’s athletic department and NILSU.

While LSU has already established itself as one of the most well-known college brands in the country, with a star-studded lineup of alumni, The Brand represents a new push to maximize the potential power of the LSU identity in attracting top-tier talent.

With the LSU image, The Brand emphasizes three main qualities: authenticity, aggression, and confidence.

“Authenticity is the priority,” said Zach Greenwell, who oversees LSU’s brand building and messaging. “We aren’t trying to manufacture any new image; we want to take what’s already there and make it the best version of itself. We are aggressive but confident. We believe in what we’re doing. We aren’t arrogant or cocky, but confident.”

Even the name itself reflects the confident mindset that LSU athletics holds about its brand power.

“We went back and forth on a lot of ideas, and none were bad, but we kept coming back to the fact that when people think of LSU, they think of how powerful our brand is,” Greenwell said. “So, we knew we wanted to include ‘brand’ in the name, and eventually, it clicked when someone said that LSU wasn’t just one of the premier brands in college sports, it is the premier brand. So, we kept it simple and called it ‘The Brand.'”

One of the most prominent aspects of The Brand is the newly renovated space in Tiger Stadium. Its walls feature colorful graphics, with the faces of Tiger legends peppered throughout, including an entire wall for Shaquille O’Neil. The space includes a new photography studio, podcast studio, and offices.

“It all has a wow factor depending on what part of the story you’re telling,” Greenwell said. “Each wall tells a story. If you’re standing outside the communications office, you’ll see interviews with student-athletes or images of them on College Gameday, showing the impact of the communications department. Go down to marketing, which has a graphic with billboards highlighting every sport, and you can see how the graphic design department can create a really special story.”

In telling those stories, The Brand wants to portray athletes as authentically as possible. The goal is to provide athletes with the platform and resources to thrive while being themselves truly.

“It would be very easy for us to box them into some kind of LSU image, but we instead want their personality to shine through, and we lean into that and try to bring it to a new level,” Greenwell said. “That’s why we have so many iconic individual brands amongst our alumni.”

The opportunity to build a strong individual brand is drawing in some big names. USA Today ranked the Tigers as the top college football team in transfer portal success, with the addition of No. 1 rated edge rusher Patrick Payton in December as a crowning off-season achievement. With the advent of The Brand, the sky seems to be the limit for the Tigers.

“We wanted to establish a campaign for the power of our brands,” Greenwell said. “Our athletes and alumni are always popping up in the news with the things that they do. We wanted to be able to tie that back to our sports and leverage the power of that.”

However, “The Brand” isn’t just about setting athletes up for immediate success at LSU. Another significant element is allowing athletes to develop themselves and learn skills that will help them succeed beyond college athletics. Besides helping athletes by providing physical resources, they seek to teach them communication skills and help them become more confident individuals.

“Sometimes athletes come in with their own brand and persona, like Flau’jae Johnson,” Greenwell said. “Other times, you have someone like Shaq, who struggled with public speaking when he came here but is now a media mogul. I’ve had athletes who could barely look you in the eye or form sentences on camera who can now do solo interviews or hour-long podcasts. That part, helping them transform, is the best part of The Brand.”

The Brand is one of the most comprehensive departments of its kind in college sports. While other colleges like Alabama and Ohio State have heavily invested in their brand departments in recent years, LSU hopes to thrive in the new era by taking a holistic and comprehensive approach to brand-building.

“We want to be on the forefront and not just have stuff come to us,” Greenwell said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty in college athletics right now, and we feel very prepared for however it goes. One of our big advantages is that the administration knows how important this is. Everyone from the top down knows that we have to push our brand; it’s about winning championships.”