ULisboa
The largest university in Portugal and one of the largest in Europe. It brings together diverse disciplinary areas, 472 courses and 19 schools covering every field of knowledge, with more than 50,000 students, including around 9,000 international students from over 100 countries. It is an institution with centuries of history, immense symbolic capital, and a learning ecosystem unmatched anywhere in the country.
Challenge
Every great institution eventually faces a defining question. What makes us relevant for the world ahead? For the University of Lisbon, the challenge wasn’t just visibility, it was also coherence. How do you unite 19 schools, thousands of voices, and centuries of heritage into one powerful, forward-looking strategy?
During the research, a clear tension emerged: the strong individual cultures and identities of each school often spoke louder than a shared ULisboa culture, leaving the master brand searching for a single voice. Many staff expressed a desire for a mission that felt closer to their own values, and internal stakeholders, while seeing real potential in a more united ULisboa, were unsure how to build it together. Externally, there was a sense that the university’s many achievements were not yet being fully communicated.
Outcome
This was a community project. We collaborated with students, faculty, researchers, staff, alumni, and external partners to produce a deep systemic diagnosis of ULisboa, both internal and external, that grounded a new brand positioning and a coherent communication strategy.
We also created a Micro Branding specifically for the project, built to invite participation throughout the research. Entitled Projeto 2525, the brand concept centred on defining contours. ULisboa is made of many parts whose boundaries were still blurred, and the contours of those parts were revealed in the process of translating research findings into strategy.
Our role and goal
A community project to turn thousands of voices into one shared strategy
→ Conduct large-scale research with students, faculty, researchers, staff, alumni, and external partners, from contextual research and immersion to culture diagnosis, brand architecture and identity analysis.
→ Map with rigour the perceptions, pains, and aspirations of the entire ULisboa ecosystem, giving the community voice and turning it into a shared mission and a strong institutional strategy that guides the schools.
→ Reposition ULisboa as a university that leads the future of education and amplifies its role within society.
ULisboa is the university with the largest learning ecosystem in Portugal, where the intersection of fields, cultures, and perspectives generates solutions for society’s most pressing challenges.
Research
Approach
We immersed ourselves in the institution
Runned internal labs with the three major groups, namely the rectoral team and executive directors, the directors of the 19 schools, and students, faculty and staff, to surface insights across the community. We observed academic life across five university spaces to read how the brand shows up day to day, conducted 17 in-depth interviews with key internal and external actors, and launched a large-scale survey covering values, satisfaction, belonging, pains and future aspirations. We ran a brand architecture and identity analysis to assess the consistency of the brand experience across every touchpoint, and benchmarked other universities to understand how they structure and communicate themselves.
These results materialised into a belief system (a strategic document uniting brand strategy and culture), a positioning and a communication strategy that now guides how ULisboa speaks to itself and to the world.
Results
We mapped the full University of Lisbon system, connecting every actor, strategic theme and finding that surfaced during the project into a single systemic relational map. It makes visible the complexity of connections at play in every decision, where no part can be understood in isolation from the whole.
Strategic clarity revealed ULisboa’s true differentiator. By leveraging its unique learning ecosystem of 19 schools across diverse fields, genuine interdisciplinarity emerges as its superpower, where different forms of knowledge and perspectives actively converge to co-create solutions for society’s most pressing challenges. This is innovation with purpose, centred on people. Not isolated specialisation, but integrated collaboration that breaks traditional academic silos.
