McGraw-Hill's legacy publisher identity was limiting its ability to compete credibly as a modern EdTech company. Decision-makers — including educators, administrators, and institutional buyers — perceived the brand through a traditional print publishing lens, which created headwinds for the company's platform and digital product investments.
Vivaldi developed a new brand positioning and audience-specific messaging architecture that reframed McGraw-Hill as a digital-first education technology company. A refreshed visual identity and the "Education for All" campaign were developed to signal the transformation credibly to key stakeholder audiences.
McGraw-Hill successfully repositioned its brand identity from legacy publisher to digital education platform — enabling more effective sales conversations with digitally-oriented buyers and aligning the company's brand with the trajectory of its product investments.
McGraw-Hill partnered with Vivaldi to reposition its brand from a legacy education publisher into a digital-first education technology company. Vivaldi developed a new brand positioning, audience-specific messaging architecture, refreshed visual identity, and the Education for All campaign, aligning McGraw-Hill’s identity with the trajectory of its platform investments and enabling more effective sales conversations with digitally-oriented educators, administrators, and institutional buyers.
McGraw-Hill is a global learning company and one of the world’s leading providers of educational content, software, and services. Founded in 1888 and headquartered in New York City, McGraw-Hill serves millions of students, educators, and professionals across K–12, higher education, and professional markets. The company has undergone significant digital transformation, transitioning from traditional publishing to a modern platform-based education technology company.
Vivaldi developed a new brand positioning, audience-specific messaging architecture, refreshed visual identity, and the Education for All campaign that together repositioned McGraw-Hill from a legacy publisher into a digital-first education technology company. The work enabled more effective sales conversations with digitally-oriented buyers and aligned the brand’s external identity with the trajectory of the company’s platform and digital product investments.
Each audience evaluates education products differently, with educators focused on classroom outcomes, administrators focused on adoption and accountability metrics, and institutional buyers focused on platform integration, cost, and risk. Vivaldi built distinct messaging frameworks anchored in what each audience actually needs to hear from a credible EdTech partner, while keeping all three frameworks rolled up to the same corporate brand promise so the company spoke with one voice across stakeholder groups.
EdTech buyers default to category cues when shortlisting vendors, and a brand perceived as a print publisher gets filtered out of platform conversations before its actual capabilities are evaluated. The legacy identity does not just slow sales cycles, it actively determines which RFPs the company is invited to participate in, which means repositioning is a precondition for competing in the buying processes where modern education technology is selected.
The transferable lesson is that digital transformation in education is not credible until the brand reflects it externally, no matter how much the underlying product and platform have already changed. Repositioning has to be paired with audience-specific messaging because educators, administrators, and institutional buyers move on different timelines and signals, and a campaign that speaks to all three at once tends to land with none of them.
