What is the Brand Squad?

Background

The Brand Squad is a group of top Spears School of Business students at Oklahoma State University who have been trained and certified to assist our OSU students with their Name, Image & Likeness (NIL) efforts. Each Brand Squad member is matched with students to help them generate deal opportunities, assist with their social media, and work on ideas to monetize their NIL. 

Currently, The Brand Squad assists 100+ Oklahoma State students with their Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL). NIL is a new opportunity for NCAA students to profit from their brand, popularity, and presence in college athletics. Oklahoma State is the first university in the country to create this opportunity for our students. 

As a student organization that was created a little over a year ago, we are in need of monetary help with our NIL education efforts. With your help, we will be able to gain the necessities needed for our members to properly help our athletes, and continue their NIL education. This is with the long-term goal of continuing to be ahead of other universities and setting a good example for student ran NIL organizations.

Training

Once a student joins the Brand Squad they are required to complete a series of trainings. These personal branding training courses are a baseline of the NIL education that is required to be paired with a student. After the training is completed the student is paired with a student who has opted into the Brand Squad. That student helps the athlete evaluate and develop their personal brand. This is through a series of brand audits and conversations. Once the playing field is set for the athlete they are then to create a logo and implementation plan for the student. Many of our students are so passionate about NIL that they opt into additional training courses. 

This training was developed by our Academic Advisor Dr. Maribeth Kuzmeski. She has 2 courses that she currently teaches at the university to both students and student-athletes. This fund will provide our Brand Squad students with the opportunity to receive scholarships to further their NIL education. As we are a business school student organization it is of the utmost importance to remain professional. We require our members to purchase a uniform that includes a polo and a name tag. Currently, the students are paying those expenses out of their pocket and we hope that with this fund we can take that financial burden off of their shoulders. 

Purpose

The reason we need your help with our NIL education efforts is that the Brand Squad has multiple initiatives within the student organization with that comes organizational expenses to keep our organization running to its fullest potential. We have our own Podcast which is easily the most important aspect of our organization. Along with Community Relations, Fundraising, Deals, and Sponsorships initiatives where they are tasked with reaching out to local businesses with the goal of finding opportunities for our athletes. We have a Social media and Marketing team, and also have a Recruitment initiative where they go through interviews to accept students to become members of the Brand Squad and reach out to student-athletes to join the Brand Squad to get assigned to a student to work with.

We are extremely strict on training, we want to make sure our members are properly trained when helping these students with potential deals. We make sure that there is a strong relationship and trust between the student and the Brand Squad representative because the Brand Squad representative is supposed to help their student with making deals potentially and helping create a social media presence which we have found in this process that is the most important thing in order to gain potential deal opportunities. All students are required to sign an NDA which states that they will not share any sensitive information divulged by the student. 

From the Brand Squad, we really appreciate your help with the Brand Squad NIL Education Fund. Your help will help this student organization grow into something special for students at Oklahoma State!