Notes from the field

Once institutions understand that brand, marketing, and communications need unified governance, the next question is what that should look like. Part 3 breaks down how to move the conversation from preferences and personalities to evidence, benchmarking, decision rights, and the leadership questions that reveal whether your structure is built for clarity — or just inherited complexity.

If earnings become the primary measure of a degree's worth, what happens to the programs built around calling instead of compensation?

The org chart is never just the org chart. Higher ed institutions can say brand is strategic and marketing is essential, but without clear authority, access, and decision rights, the strategy is mostly decorative. This second post in the series looks at centralization, decentralization, hybrid models, and why goodwill alone cannot carry the weight of brand governance.

Higher ed loves a blurry line. And one of the blurriest is the line between brand and marketing. The two functions are deeply connected, but they do different jobs. Brand is how an institution becomes known for something. Marketing is how that meaning gets moved into the market. When the distinction gets fuzzy, voice fragments, campaigns drift, and the institution becomes harder to understand. This first post in the series makes the case for clarity before activation.

This time of year, someone is going to pull up last year's messaging and ask: are we still saying this? Before you answer, it's worth understanding the patterns that show up again and again in higher ed enrollment marketing — what makes them tempting, what they unintentionally signal, and how to make them work harder without starting over.