Our Brand Story

OUR BRAND (SLOGAN) STORY

What is the power of a Porterville College education? Is it the power to reach higher, to go farther, and achieve more? Is it the power to dig deeper, succeed faster, and dream bigger? It is all these things, and more.

For students, a Porterville education is about rising to the challenges that confront them, it is about overcoming obstacles with grit and determination, and it is about digging deeper so they can set their sights higher. For those who are the first in their families to go to college, Porterville’s small size turns the intimidation of going to college into an opportunity for intimate connections and growth. 

For administrators, faculty and staff, Porterville is all about going the extra mile to provide the personalized support that students need to achieve their goals. If students are ready to set their sights on the horizon, Porterville faculty, staff, and administrators are there to help them rise to the challenge. At Porterville, student focused services and small class sizes provide the perfect setting to nurture big dreams. 

Just as the city of Porterville stands as the Gateway to the Sequoias, so Portville College has stood as as a gateway to greatness for tens of thousands of graduates. Like the giant Sequoias to its north, Porterville College is a symbol of growth and of change to its community, but also of persistence, memory, and tradition. Yes, Porterville is a small town but that doesn’t mean its residents don’t have big dreams.  

At the same time, like the fertile soil of the Central Valley, Porterville College’s modest size provides the perfect medium for growth. Though its environs can be hard and challenging, its well-tended fields are proof of the harvest that comes from hard work. For with every new Porterville student a new seed is planted, and in that seed is a dream of something better, something brighter, and something bigger.

Like a seed, this dream starts small. All it needs is to be nurtured and that is exactly what Porterville does. It takes something small and shows it the greatness that lies within. 

 

WHY OUR TAGLINE WORKS

“Start Small. Go Big.” is a simple and aspirational construction that comes directly from student survey responses. Verbatim comments from Porterville’s student survey suggest that its small size is one of its greatest assets and something that sets it apart from its larger, more impersonal competitors. It is this intimacy that creates the opportunity for nurturing and caring that so many of your students are drawn to. At the same time, “Start Small. Go Big” is about change and challenges its audience to grow by reaching higher, going farther, and achieving more than they had ever imagined was possible.
 
“Start Small” takes what might be seen as a liability and turns it into a key value proposition that differentiates Porterville from its competition and is especially attractive to the many first-generation students who make their starts there. For these students, being small means being perfect. Perfectly unintimidating. Perfectly manageable. Perfectly close-to-home. And perfectly Porterville. For many students, starting small means college can be intimate and not intimidating. By claiming its size as a matter of pride, this phrase helps Porterville take ownership of who it is while capitalizing on the common idiom that, “great things come in small packages.”  

Contrasting “Start Small,” the compact rallying cry and call-to-action “Go Big” sets our sights on achievement and opportunity. By itself “Go Big” is a colloquialism that means to do something on a grand scale or with great ambition, two ideas that perfectly capture not only what it means to go to college, but also what it means to succeed in Porterville and beyond. 

Taken together, “Start Small. Go Big” highlights the change and growth that come with a Porterville education. In just 4 words it tells a complete story—if you are ready to start, Porterville College will help succeed. In this way, it captures a key idea from the research—the belief that Porterville stands as a bridge to opportunity. 

In this way, “Start Small. Go Big” turns key elements of Porterville’s place and personality into a unique and effective rallying cry that works on both literal and metaphorical levels. It captures the nature of a giant sequoia as it grows from a pinecone to one of the largest trees on Earth; it captures the nature of a field of vegetable seeds planted and nurtured until harvest; and most importantly, it captures the nature of Porterville itself, a small-town college filled with students who aren’t afraid to dream big. 

From a marketing standpoint, “Start Small. Go Big” is a compact rallying cry that everyone can understand that can evolve into any number of engaging and effective iterations. This makes it not just aspirational from a marketing and communications standpoint, but also practical. Notice how in the following examples, the headlines and value propositions extend the “Start Small. Go Big” tagline into a variety of emotionally engaging themes giving you an almost infinite pool of possibilities.