KCRag Forum

University President Kirk Schulz wants people to say "Kansas State" more to avoid confusion about what the "K" in "K-State" stands for. The K-State moniker works for athletics but could refer to different schools in other places like Kentucky.

http://www.bizjournals.com/wichita/blog ... rsity.html

You can still say, "K-State," but the university is planning on using "Kansas State" more.

This is a non-story.

http://www.k-state.edu/media/newsreleas ... ement.html

It sounds like the either Kirk Schulz underestimated the reaction he'd get from fans by not fully explaining what he meant, or the fans over-reacted to what Kirk Schulz told Sam Brownback.

Kirk Schulz had to make it clear on Twitter that they weren't dropping "K-State," just wanting to use "Kansas State" more.

It seems like the media overreacted.

Schulz tweets like crazy normally.

I think they're still working on standardizing the branding. There's stuff like IDs that are still printed with the old logo (the one that said "K-STATE" and had the full name below it), it's still on some websites, etc.

Edit: Went and looked through some stuff about the branding. There's a two year transition period that started a while back.

KSU began this rebranding campaign last year. K-State is and will remain the athletic brand. All academic branding will be Kansas State University. Hence, the football field and basketball court prominently display K-State in the endzone and baseline, but Kansas State University is also displayed at athletic events to represent the academic brand.

It's just like MIZZOU and University of Missouri.

It's kind of odd that alumni and fans would suddenly get upset over a rebranding campaign that has been going on since last year.

It's probably the erroneous news articles that places are still putting out even up to a couple of hours ago. Apparently the Lawrence WJ was the first one, so thanks for the publicity, KU grads. I'm pretty sure it's got nothing to do with the rebranding campaign. Heck, the Twitter account for Schulz is even "kstate_pres", so if they were really dropping it, he probably wouldn't have that name. AND most of the comments tweeted at him today are about how stupid the media handled it.

No doubt the news stories were very misleading. A Wichita TV station still has the headline, "Possible name change at K-State."
And the Wichita paper had the headline, "Kansas State wants to drop the 'K-State' name."

So, it's no wonder why people were confused. It's the media being the media, again.