Crafting a Personal Brand as an Academic: Why It Matters

As brand designers, we approach every project with the same foundational process: identifying the key messages that define a brand in any context, and distinguishing them from those tailored to specific audiences or situations. Academics, in particular, often wear many hats; teacher, speaker, researcher, even salesperson, and when their work spans multiple themes or projects (such as sustainability, social innovation, or global development), maintaining clarity can be a challenge. In this blog post, we’ll explore how developing a clear academic brand early on can help it grow without losing focus, using Dr. Timothy Whitehead, Head of School of Design and Architecture at the University of Lincoln, and Professor Elizabeth Stokoe, Academic Director of Impact at LSE, as case studies.

What do you want to be known for?

With highly specific funding bids and internal pressures from departments, it’s easy to take on projects that fall outside your ‘sweet spot’. Over time, this can blur the sense of what you want to be recognised for. While this variety can open up exciting career opportunities, taking the time to define, and periodically refine, what you want to be known for is invaluable. It brings clarity not only to your own work but also to everyone who engages with your research.

The branding process is often described as having two stages; brand strategy and brand identity. The brand strategy stage essentially gives time to explore these questions; who are you speaking to, what is your primary message, what do you want your audience to feel when they think of you.

There are many ways to develop an academic brand, and this blog post will explore two distinct approaches. First, we’ll look at Tim Whitehead’s brand. As a product designer, Tim works across a range of projects—each with its own stakeholders, messages, and outcomes. He needed a personal brand that could unify these diverse projects and create a consistent narrative running through them. In contrast, Liz Stokoe took a different route: she built her personal research into a standalone brand, using it as a platform to amplify and connect her wider body of work.

How Dr Timothy Whitehead used an umbrella brand approach

One of the challenges in academic / research branding is that you often host multiple related but distinct projects. The umbrella + sub-brand model helps:

• Umbrella (personal) brand: Your name or persona, a unifying theme, visual system
• Sub-brands (project brands): Distinct identities that extend the umbrella brand but have their own elements

The advantage of this approach is that it allows you to launch new projects without needing to reinvent your core identity. It also gives you room to experiment, some projects can adopt more playful or distinctive visual styles, while helping your audience clearly distinguish between your primary research focus and your secondary or exploratory work. Tim’s projects span a wide spectrum — from developing a handbook for 3D printing in low-resource countries to designing wheelchairs for schools in the UK. While all share the central theme of using product design to benefit communities, the diversity of these communities means each project’s sub-brand must be tailored to reflect its specific context.

As a result, Tim’s personal brand needed to be deliberately pared back, clean, clear, and focused. Its purpose was to communicate his expertise and emphasise the core skills he brings to any project, no matter how diverse the context. To achieve this, we developed a restrained colour palette that feels professional yet approachable, and combined serif and sans-serif typography to create a balance of authority and modernity. Attention to small details — such as spacing, alignment, and subtle visual cues — ensures the brand feels considered and precise, reflecting the care Tim brings to his work. This minimal, thoughtful approach allows his projects to shine individually while remaining clearly connected under a cohesive personal brand.

How Professor Liz Stokoe grew CARM

CARM began as Professor Elizabeth Stokoe’s research into conversation analysis, studying how people actually talk in real-world interactions. What started as a scholarly method became a recognisable, named approach that could be communicated clearly beyond academic circles. The acronym CARM itself is a branding decision: short, memorable, repeatable.

CARM demonstrates how effective branding enables research to scale beyond the university. By establishing a clear and coherent identity — logo, colour palette, name, and visual style — the work could be packaged into training programmes for a wide range of professionals, including mediators, doctors, police, sales teams, and call handlers. Because the core brand is deliberately simple, the method can be flexibly applied across multiple contexts without diluting its identity.

Liz is a naturally gifted communicator and is frequently invited to speak at prestigious events. As a result, the visual language needed primarily to support the spoken word. The brand we developed had to reinforce and clarify her key messages in the brief moments they appeared on screen. At a dozen eggs, we chose an illustration style that could adapt to a wide range of scenarios, whilst maintaining anonymity. Always professional and appropriate, whether addressing suicide negotiation or call centre interactions.

The colour palette is similarly restrained and professional, with cooler tones and high contrast ensuring clarity at all times. The central challenge of Professor Stokoe’s brand was not invention, but consistency: ensuring the identity was applied rigorously and coherently wherever it appeared.

The branding path an academic takes is often shaped by both their discipline and their personality. Dr Whitehead works within the field of design and is constantly exploring how design can be used to solve problems. As a result, his portfolio is diverse, spanning different audiences, contexts, and messages.

By contrast, Professor Stokoe, working within psychology, focuses on a single core message that she applies across multiple contexts. She has developed a robust approach that can be used repeatedly, illuminating different situations while remaining consistent in its underlying principles.