Rick Barry Creates Brand Platform For Bond University, Merging Ambition With Belonging

Bond University has launched a new brand platform, ‘Ambition Loves Company’, embodying the spirit of Australia’s first private university, where driven individuals can amplify their potential.

The platform is one of the first handful of projects from creative studio Rick Barry, led by ex-BMF and The Monkeys execs Alex Derwin and Hugh Munro, since it launched last year.

Comprising two TVCs and an out-of-home campaign, the platform replaces the ‘We Exist for You’ platform, which launched in 2022. It was created by VML (then known as VMLY&R) and followed by an ambient outdoor campaign later that same year.

Rick Barry chief creative officer Alex and chief strategy officer Hugh said conversations with Bond students, staff, and alumni informed the campaign.

“From early interviews, we knew there was something different in the water at Bond, but it hadn’t made its way beyond the campus walls,” Hugh said.

Beneath any effective brand platform, Hugh says, is a tension between being distinctive while also maintaining “broad appeal”. The challenge of articulating something “that just had to be experienced first-hand” was "irresistible" to the studio.

“We discovered this challenge is heightened for a brand like Bond that needs to cut through amongst big-spending competitors while also appealing to prospective students, staff, researchers and partners, not just locally but from around the world,” Hugh said.

“We were pleasantly surprised to find that Bond’s uniquely ambitious culture is just as resonant for a university dean from Queensland as it is for a Canadian postgrad law candidate.

“That’s when we knew we had something special in the idea of ‘Ambition Loves Company’.”

Hugh added while concepts like ambition and belonging may seem incongruous, at Bond, they naturally coexist.

“In fact, it’s the very collision of ambition and belonging that makes Bond such a unique, valuable and rewarding culture to learn within.”

Bond University vice chancellor and president professor, Tim Brailsford, said ‘Ambition Loves Company’ captures the university’s origin story, as well as its culture.

“When you think about the story of this university, it was a very ambitious story,” he said.

“The institution and the founders of the institution had this great ambition for Bond University to be something really special.

“‘Ambition Loves Company’, to me, is this special ingredient we have here at Bond University, which is how we join together and push each other to achieve things which we would not otherwise be able to achieve on our own.”

Bond University director of brand and marketing, Shannon Tricklebank, added the brand platform sums up Bond’s unique campus culture and personalised teaching and learning model.

“We all know that feeling of being surrounded by passionate and motivated people. It stirs something inside you,” Shannon said.

“‘Ambition Loves Company’ works so well because it speaks to that special thing that happens here at Bond and was so beautifully captured and elevated by Hugh and Alex.

“I’m confident that ‘Ambition Loves Company’ will be a long-term brand platform for Bond. It has the potency, authenticity, and flexibility to last the distance.”

She added the university has since enlisted its own academics to explore the thinking behind ‘Ambition Loves Company’, and how the people around them shape one’s goals and motivation.

The campaign images and moving portraits were shot by photographer Jo Duck, who Alex previously worked with on Tourism Tasmania’s ‘Come Down For Air’. Studio Paradise’s Jay O’Neill led the visual identity evolution.

‘Ambition Loves Company’ is part of a busy first year for Rick Barry, whose recent work for industrial hose brand Pirtek is accompanied by work for travel business Luxury Escapes, coffee roaster Toby’s Estate, and a whisky range they co-created with Tasmanian distillery, Lark, within its first year.