Growing up in Winnipeg in the ’80s and ’90s, Paul Lacap remembers always eating meals surrounded by extended family. A first-generation Canadian whose parents immigrated from the Philippines, Lacap says the dinner table was where his mother, his father and his titas and titos (“aunties” and “uncles” in the Filipino language Tagalog) impressed the deeply held value of a post-secondary education on him and his cousins.

Today Lacap is SAIT’s Associate Vice President, Marketing — a journey reflecting his family’s focus on working hard to get ahead, and their determination to help make life better for others.

“It was very much a ‘nobody gets left behind’ mentality,” he recalls.

“There were always four or five families per household. We had food on the table, but we didn't have much else. And the message to us kids was that it didn't matter what you had — you had to invest in yourself. Improving yourself through education was the only way we were going to get where we wanted to go as a family.

"That's why a lot of my relatives took the risk moving from the Philippines to Canada — because of that hope.”

“I came to understand no one was there to push me in one direction or another,” he says. “Higher education gave me the opportunity to choose the opportunity to design my life.”

Resolute on finding his way, Lacap became the first in his family to obtain a degree in Canada, earning a Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) from the University of Manitoba (UM).

“I realize my story is not new, but it's the reason working in post-secondary is so important to me,” he says. “Stories like mine happen again and again. If institutions like SAIT don't work to showcase what higher education does for the world, I think we fall short in helping society.”

The journey to SAIT

Lacap spent almost a decade as a marketing agency director with big global brands. In 2017, he returned to his alma mater as a technology and marketing executive, leading one of Manitoba’s largest digital transformations and the launch of UM’s new brand online. And once he felt his work was done, he set his sights on SAIT.

Lacap knew SAIT was an institution looking for someone to strengthen and clarify its brand, building on work that had started with the launch of the Institute’s visual identity during its 2016 centennial year.

“Brand goes well beyond logo, colours, visuals,” Lacap says. “A brand is not about creating something you're not — it's really understanding how to articulate who you currently are. It's authentic.”

Lacap quickly realized part of SAIT’s challenge was a slew of mixed messaging taking place across campus departments and schools, a problem he has a lot of experience in solving.

“I worked with Disney, I worked with Nike, I worked with Pepsi,” Lacap says. “These are all organizations of very clearly defined brand narratives. They know who they are. And if you connect with any one of their hundreds of thousands of employees, you can’t tell if you are working with their customer service team, their marketing team, their comms team, the producer — everyone is in sync.”

He says assessing SAIT’s brand is critical to the Institute’s long-term success. It’s a process that involves exploring economic changes, shifts in student demographics and expectations, and the current post-secondary landscape.

Most of all, it’s about listening, so SAIT engaged its community through market research, consultation with stakeholders, workshops and one-on-one interviews.

Everybody’s brand

Since it launched in March 2024 — and concurrent with the ongoing development of SAIT’s next five-year strategic plan — the brand evolution process has involved a diverse range of employees from across campus.

Angela Castro (pictured right) — a New Media Production and Design graduate (’19) and former international student — is one of those employees.

“SAIT’s brand was always a sense of familiarity and kind of validation,” she says. “When you're an international student and you're considering different institutions, you do a lot of research. The brand is the first touch point — not only the logo, but also the website and the messaging around the brand. You rely on them as a source of truth.”

As Design and Publications Specialist with SAIT’s Marketing team, Castro’s day-to-day primarily involves developing visuals for the Institute’s recruitment initiatives, such as publications and digital assets. Which means she works with SAIT’s current brand — a lot.

In 2017, Castro left her first career in industrial design in the Republic of Colombia to attend SAIT as a mature student. She says her journey from being a student of the Institute to now working as a digital designer in its Marketing department has made her keenly aware of the need for a unifying message and clear brand persona.

“This is a great opportunity for the institution to start fostering a greater sense that SAIT’s brand doesn’t just belong to Marketing — it is everybody's brand.”

Envisioning a fight for the obvious

Lacap’s goal, he says, is not to redefine SAIT, but rather focus on what it is already doing really well.

“What makes SAIT different? What makes SAIT unlike every other organization? The brand process is really to try and pull that out,” he explains. “It is more of a fight for the obvious.

“SAIT’s really good at the things we do. But how do we make sure people realize what those things are?”

Lacap says the success of any brand is driven by the philosophy of a “bottom-up approach” — which means talking to everyone from school counsellors to prospective students and their parents; from industry and business insiders to donors and alumni.

“We have to listen to the people who are actually being served by SAIT. I strongly believe that the bottom-up approach is what makes a difference between brands that work and brands that don't work.

“Compare a focus group of 10 people coming straight from high school with a focus group of 10 people who are mid-career — their needs are very, very different,” Lacap says. “And this process is very much about listening to and understanding their perspectives.

“We can't just assume we know what is actually driving the thinking, the behaviour, the lifestyle of the people we're helping.”

Embedding the brand

As LINK goes to press, the brand project team has completed its initial research and is now in a brand strategy refinement phase, which means paring down 80 pages of results into a succinct document that can be easily absorbed by every employee.

“We are going to embed those results into every single thing we do, starting from the time we get approval on the direction to our brand launch date,” says Lacap. “By the time it gets launched, people will go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the SAIT I know.’”

The refreshed brand strategy is expected to launch officially in spring 2025.

“Part of this brand process is to articulate SAIT’s culture and mentality in such a way that everyone who touches the organization can understand it, can internalize it and realize the difference we're making.

“One key theme we’ve heard again and again is that people say their time here has helped them find their path; helped them build really good careers and lives,” Lacap says. “There’s a nobility to that — something that makes working on SAIT’s brand more of a mission for me than just a job.”