Brand, MarComm, & the Messy Middle - Part 1: Brand Is Strategy. Marketing Is Motion. Comms Builds Trust.

Higher ed loves a blurry line.

We blur the line between strategy and tactics. Between collaboration and consensus. Between shared governance and “we’re not totally sure who is actually allowed to make this decision.”

And one of the blurriest lines on campus is the one between brand, marketing and communications.

A quick note before we get into it

I should say this up front: I did not set out to become someone who writes about organizational design. That was not the plan.

My work has always lived at the intersection of enrollment, marketing, communications, student experience, and strategy. But over time, especially through partnerships with institutions willing to look honestly at their structures, I kept running into the same reality: brand, marketing, and communications challenges are often not just creative problems, message problems or campaign problems. They are structure problems.

I have been fortunate to work with partners who trusted me to bring third-party research, benchmarking, data analysis, and an outside perspective into those conversations. That work pushed me to read more, learn more, ask better questions, and think more deeply about how institutions organize the functions responsible for reputation, enrollment, trust and visibility.

So no, I am not claiming to be an organizational design expert. But I have learned that if you care about brand, marketing and communications in higher education, you eventually have to care about structure.

This series is built from that learning — not as the final word, but as a practical ways for institutions trying to think about the why and make better decisions before the org chart quietly becomes the strategy.

That context matters because this series is not really about defending one perfect structure. It is about making the distinctions clear enough that institutions can make better decisions about the structure they actually need.

So let’s start with the confusion.

The confusion is understandable. These functions are deeply connected. They often sit near each other on the org chart, share staff, share budgets, and show up together in the same visible outputs: Websites. Campaigns. Emails. Stories. Social media. Events. Advertising. Media statements. Presidential messages. Crisis updates. Publications.

And all the other things people point to when they say:

“Can marketing take a look at this?”

Which, depending on the day, can mean strategy, copywriting, graphic design, crisis response, web governance, reputation management, enrollment communications or “please make this PDF less terrifying.”

But brand, marketing and communications are not the same thing.

And when institutions treat them as interchangeable, the consequences compound quietly over time. Before long, the institution is not managing one brand. It is managing a collection of loosely related interpretations.

This is not a turf war. It is a clarity issue. (And if you know me, I love clarity.)

Brand defines what the institution stands for. Marketing makes that story known. Communications gives it clarity, credibility and trust.

That distinction may sound simple, but it changes almost everything:

✔️ Who owns institutional voice

✔️ Who governs the websit

✔️ How enrollment campaigns get built ✔️ Who manages reputation ✔️ Where crisis communication lives

✔️ How creative decisions are made

✔️ How an institution protects long-term reputation while still meeting short-term enrollment goals

And in an environment where colleges and universities are under more pressure than ever to prove value, drive enrollment, retain trust and stand out in a crowded market, that clarity is not optional.

It is infrastructure.

In this post

We’re going to break down several things:

✔️ Why brand, marketing, and communications are different disciplines

✔️ Why all three hold strategic value

✔️ How they inform one another

✔️ What institutional voice actually is

✔️ Where enrollment marketing fits in the messy middle

1. Brand, marketing and communications do different jobs

Let’s start with the cleanest version.

Brand is strategy.

Brand is the work of defining who the institution is, what it stands for, how it wants to be understood and what meaning it wants to hold in the market.

It includes positioning, institutional narrative, visual identity, voice and tone, reputation strategy, audience perception and the standards that help the institution show up coherently.

Marketing is motion.

Marketing takes that brand foundation and turns it into action. It builds campaigns, segments audiences, buys media, generates leads, supports enrollment and advancement goals, promotes programs and moves people toward a decision.

Communications makes meaning public.

Communications expresses, explains and protects the institution’s meaning across audiences and moments. It includes public relations, media relations, internal communications, crisis communications, presidential communications, institutional storytelling, issue response and reputation management.

These disciplines overlap constantly. But they are not interchangeable.

Function	Core job	Primary value
Brand	Defines institutional meaning, positioning, identity, voice, and reputation strategy	Creates clarity, recognition, trust, and long-term value
Marketing	Activates brand strategy through campaigns, audience segmentation, media, CRM, and conversion work	Creates movement, engagement, demand, and action
Communications	Expresses, explains, and protects institutional meaning through PR, storytelling, internal communications, crisis response, presidential voice, and reputation work	Creates understanding, credibility, consistency, and trust

A campaign can be clever, beautifully designed, and well-targeted, but if it is not rooted in a clear brand strategy, it is just activity. Maybe even high-performing activity in the short term. But activity all the same.

A press statement can be accurate and approved. But if it sounds cold, defensive, generic or disconnected from the institution’s values, it may protect the institution legally while damaging it reputationally.

An enrollment email can generate clicks. But if it feels like it could have come from any college in America with a campus green and a stock-photo student holding a laptop, it is not building distinctiveness. Misunderstanding this puts us in sticky situations:

• We want marketing to solve problems that are actually brand problems.

• We ask for better campaigns when the real issue is unclear positioning.

• We ask for more leads when the market does not understand what makes us distinct.

• We ask for a new tagline when the institution has not made hard choices about what it wants to be known for.

• We ask communications to “get the message out” when leadership has not actually decided what the message is.

And then we wonder why the work feels scattered.

2. Higher ed is treating this work more strategically

This is not just a philosophical distinction. The sector data is moving in the same direction.

SimpsonScarborough’s 2023–2024 Higher Ed CMO Study, which includes responses from more than 250 institutions, shows a clear shift toward senior-level marketing leadership. The share of lead marketers reporting directly to the president increased from 49% in 2014 to 63% in 2023–2024. Cabinet membership rose from 57% to 71% over the same period.

That matters because reporting lines are not just administrative details. They reveal whether an institution sees brand, marketing and communications as strategic functions or service functions. And right now, the field appears to be moving deliberately toward unified, senior-level governance.

There is a reason for that shift.

Brand, marketing and communications do different jobs on different timelines and in different moments:

• Brand builds recognition, trust, reputation, and preference over time.

• Marketing activates that foundation with specific audiences, in specific channels, toward specific actions.

• Communications carries that meaning through the moments when the institution needs to be understood, believed, explained, defended or trusted.

  
  

That last part matters. Because brand is shaped by the admissions email, the homepage, the president’s message, the media quote, the crisis update, the donor story, the research announcement, the athletics post and the internal communication people forward to one another with a little too much commentary.

Les Binet and Peter Field’s work on marketing effectiveness is often summarized around the importance of balancing long-term brand building with short-term activation, with the well-known 60/40 principle frequently used as a starting point for that conversation.

That distinction is especially important in higher ed because short-term pressure is everywhere. Enrollment needs applications. Advancement needs gifts. Athletics needs attention. Academic programs need visibility. Presidents need reputation. Communities need trust.

None of those needs are wrong. But if every division is optimizing only for its own immediate goal, the institution can lose the larger thread.

That is why brand cannot be governed only at the level of short-term demand. And communications cannot be treated as a separate function that simply “gets the word out” after strategy has already been decided.

Brand, marketing and communications have to inform one another because they are all shaping the same institutional meaning.

CASE’s Framework for Brand and Reputation Metrics in Education points in the same direction. It treats brand and reputation as measurable institutional work connected to brand development, recruitment and retention, strategic communications, alumni engagement, philanthropy and external engagement/public affairs.

In other words:

Brand is not a campaign layer. It is institutional infrastructure.

And infrastructure needs ownership.

3. Brand is not the logo police

One reason this conversation gets muddy is that “brand” is still too often reduced to logos, colors, fonts and whether someone used the approved PowerPoint template.

And trust me, I have been called the 'brand police' to my face more times than I care to count. 😅

Don't get me wrong, those things matter. Visual consistency matters. A strong identity system matters. And yes, someone probably does need to gently intervene when a department stretches the logo, adds a drop shadow, and places it on a background color last seen in a 2008 campus brochure...

But brand is not just visual compliance.

Brand is the meaning people attach to your institution.

It is what prospective students think they are joining.

It is what parents believe they are investing in.

It is what alumni feel connected to.

It is what faculty think the institution values.

It is what donors believe their giving supports.

It is what legislators, employers, community members, and the press assume about you before you ever get to explain yourself.

That meaning is shaped over time through every experience, message, interaction, image, story and decision.

So brand management is not about making everything look pretty. It is about shaping institutional meaning with discipline and consistency.

A healthy brand function should help answer:

✔️ What do we want to be known for?

✔️ What audiences matter most to our future?

✔️ Where are we meaningfully different?

✔️ What stories reinforce our position?

✔️ What should we stop saying because it is generic, outdated, or not believable?

✔️ How do we express the same institution across very different audiences and channels?

That last question matters because colleges and universities do not have one audience. They are speaking to prospective students, current students, parents, alumni, donors, faculty, staff, employers, community leaders, elected officials, accreditors and the media — often all at the same time.

If there is no shared brand foundation, each of those audiences starts getting a different version of the institution.

4. Institutional voice is where the work comes together

Institutional voice is one of the most misunderstood pieces of brand management.

Too often, voice gets treated as a writing style: friendly but not too casual, confident but not arrogant, warm but not fluffy, inspiring but not cheesy. You know the drill.

And yes, writing style is part of it. But institutional voice is bigger than copy.

Institutional voice is the full expressive personality of the institution: how it sounds, looks, feels, and behaves when it communicates as itself.

It shows up in admissions emails, presidential messages, social media captions, crisis communications, research stories, alumni magazines, campaign videos, internal updates, media statements, web pages, donor appeals, athletics content and even the photos selected to represent campus life.

That is why voice cannot be reduced to “who writes the words.” Institutional voice lives anywhere the institution is being interpreted by an audience.

And that means it has to be governed.

Not controlled to death. Not routed through a 14-person approval process that somehow involves someone’s assistant dean, a committee chair, two vice presidents, legal and a person who “just has thoughts.”

GOVERNED. There is a difference.

Different audiences need different messages, and different moments require different levels of formality, urgency, emotion and detail. But they should all feel connected to the same institution.

That is the difference between flexibility and fragmentation.

Flexibility	Fragmentation
Adapts the message for the audience	Reinvents the institution for every audience
Uses shared voice principles	Depends on individual preference
Supports different channels and goals	Creates disconnected tones and identities
Feels varied but recognizable	Feels scattered and inconsistent
Builds trust over time	Makes the institution harder to understand

This is where the structure matters.

Can admissions communications, presidential communications, public relations, crisis communications, advancement communications, athletics communications and academic storytelling all involve different people, teams, or reporting lines?

Of course. In most institutions, they already do. The problem is not distributed execution.

The problem is disconnected governance.

If every unit has its own interpretation of voice, the institution does not become more audience-centered. It becomes harder to recognize.

• If presidential communications is completely separate from brand and communications strategy, the president can start to sound like the leader of a different institution.

  
  

• If crisis communications is disconnected from institutional voice, the institution may discover under pressure that it does not actually know how it sounds when trust is on the line.

  
  

• If PR operates apart from brand strategy, media response can become reactive issue management instead of a disciplined expression of institutional reputation.

  
  

• And if marketing is left downstream to “make it look good,” the institution has confused production with strategy.

This means one function needs clear responsibility for defining the institution’s voice system, reputation strategy, brand standards and public expression.

Because when everyone owns the voice, no one owns the voice. And when no one owns the voice, the institution’s identity gets negotiated message by message, campaign by campaign, crisis by crisis.

That is exhausting. It is also risky.

The better model is simple: distributed contributors, shared standards, clear governance.

Different teams can speak to different audiences. But they should be working from the same institutional identity.

That is why institutional voice belongs with brand management and communications strategy. Not because brand should write every sentence that leaves campus, but because someone has to make sure all those sentences still sound like they come from the same institution.

5. Enrollment marketing sits in the messy middle

Enrollment marketing deserves its own attention because it sits right in the messy middle of this whole conversation.

And yes, I spent a majority of my career as an enrollment marketer. So, no, I am not just saying this to toot the horn of my colleagues. (Though, shoutout to you EMers. May your FAFSA delays be minimal and your yield open rates be plentiful!)

Enrollment marketing is one of the places where brand, marketing and communications overlap most often. It is also one of the places where the stakes are highest.

Enrollment marketing is not simply “making recruitment materials.” It is a specialized, data-informed discipline that requires real expertise in student decision-making, funnel behavior, communication sequencing, CRM architecture, audience segmentation, event strategy, conversion and timing.

A strong enrollment marketer understands how an inquiry behaves differently from an applicant, how an admitted student needs to be nurtured, how parent communications influence decisions, how financial aid timing affects yield and how Slate, or another CRM, can either support or sabotage a communication strategy.

That work belongs close to enrollment strategy. Enrollment teams should have clear authority over:

✔️ Recruitment priorities

✔️ Funnel communications

✔️ Audience segmentation

✔️ Message timing

✔️ Event communications

✔️ Strategic use of CRM tools

They know the cycle. They know the pressure points. They know where students are stalling, where melt is happening and where communication can make a difference.

But the creative expression of that strategy still needs to align with the institution’s brand.

Enrollment urgency does not erase brand responsibility.

That is where the partnership matters.

Enrollment brings	Brand, marketing, and communications bring
Funnel strategy	Institutional positioning
Audience segmentation	Voice and message discipline
CRM logic	Creative and brand standards
Timing and cadence	Reputation context
Conversion priorities	Consistency across audiences
Cycle-specific urgency	Long-term institutional coherence

Enrollment should determine what needs to be said, to whom, when and why. Brand and marketing should help determine how that message is expressed so it is compelling, consistent, and connected to the institution’s larger identity.

When that relationship works, enrollment campaigns become more powerful because they are not starting from scratch every cycle. They are activating a brand that already has meaning in the market.

When it does not work, recruitment communications can become disconnected from the larger institution. They may still generate clicks. They may still drive applications. But over time, they can train prospective students to understand the institution in a way that is too narrow, too generic, or not fully true.

That is the short-term trap.

And higher ed knows that trap well.

The real issue is usually governance

Brand, marketing and communications will always overlap. That is not the problem.

The problem is pretending the overlap does not need structure.

In higher education, the work will always live in the messy middle. Institutions are too complex, too decentralized and too audience-rich for perfectly clean lines. But that is not a reason to avoid clarity. It is the reason clarity matters.

Brand is strategy. Marketing is motion. Communication builds trust.

The institutions that understand the difference are better positioned to build campaigns, messages, stories and responses that do more than generate short-term activity. They build recognition, trust, preference and momentum over time.

But knowing the difference is only step one.

The harder question is what happens when the org chart does not support the distinction.

Because if everyone has a stake, but no one has clear authority, the brand does not become more collaborative. It becomes more vulnerable.

That is where Part 2 picks up: Goodwill Is Not a Governance Model. 

We’ll get into centralization, decentralization, hybrid structures and why unclear authority is one of the fastest ways to weaken an otherwise strong brand.

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A note on sources: This post draws on established brand strategy thinking, higher education marketing practice, and sector frameworks that distinguish long-term brand building from short-term marketing activation.