A New UniversityBacked by anEstablished Legacy

COMPLEXITY

Vidyashilp Education Group, an established name across Bengaluru's schools, aimed to expand into higher education with a new institution, Vidyashilp University. A new university starts with no track record, the one thing parents, faculty and regulators normally use to judge trust. ABND's research across stakeholder groups, including interviews, focus groups and surveys, compared student discipline preferences from 2012-13 against 2019-20 and found the pattern largely unchanged: Arts, Engineering, Commerce and Science still led. The reason wasn't a lack of ambition.

It was the absence of focused, future-facing courses to choose instead. Vidyashilp had already built Psychology, Economics, Digital Business, Data Science, Decision Sciences, Communication Design and Legal Studies into its curriculum. What it lacked was a brand equal that showcased how it aimed to reinvent higher education in India.

CLARITY

ABND's research identified two kinds of universities operating in India: those built to preserve a discipline as it stands, and those built to keep questioning what a discipline should become. Vidyashilp had always intended to be the second, without yet having language for it. ABND named the position directly: education sculpted for the student, not the student shaped to fit the institution. Each part of that position did specific work. It put the student, not the institution, as the subject of every claim, carried through the line WITH YOU, so the university read as a support structure rather than an authority to submit to.

It gave the seven new-age disciplines a shared logic, framing them as evidence of the position rather than a product list. It extended into how the university hired, with founding faculty recruitment framed as Leaders and Luminaries, built to attract people who wanted to shape a discipline, not administer one. And it justified an identity with no shield or crest, an unusual choice in a sector where those marks signal legitimacy, while still carrying the parent group's legacy forward through tone and continuity rather than iconography. The scope ran from research and positioning through naming architecture, visual identity, launch communication and photography direction for the university's founding assets.

Vidyashilp University's brand launched in 2021 at an event attended by the Governor of Karnataka and the state's Minister for Higher Education, IT and BT; ABND's partnership with the group now runs past five years.