Brand, Marketing, & the Messy Middle - Part 2: Goodwill Is Not a Governance Model

The org chart is never just the org chart,

In higher ed, structure is where good ideas either become real or go to die quietly in a closed-door committee meeting. An institution can say brand is strategic. It can say marketing is essential to enrollment growth. It can say communications should be more proactive, integrated, audience-centered and data-informed.

But if the people responsible for that work do not have authority, access, budget, or clear decision rights, the strategy is mostly decorative.

That is why the governance question matters so much.

In Part 1, we looked at the difference between brand, marketing and communications. But once that distinction is clear, the next question gets harder: Where should this work actually live?

Should brand, marketing, and communications be centralized?

Should some functions live in enrollment, advancement, athletics, academic units, or the president’s office?

Who gets final say when priorities overlap?

How do institutions create consistency without turning the central marketing and communications office into the campus department of “No”?

This is where many colleges and universities get stuck. Not because they lack talented people. Most campuses are full of talented people doing the best they can with structures they inherited.

They get stuck because they are trying to solve a governance problem with goodwill.

Goodwill is lovely. It is not a governance model.

In this post

We’re going to look at four things:

✔️ Why the model matters less than clarity

✔️ Why distributed work still needs unified governance

✔️ Where governance breaks down in the handoffs

✔️ Why reporting lines reveal what an institution actually believes

1. The model matters. Clarity matters more.

Most institutions operate in one of three broad structures: centralized, decentralized or hybrid.

Each one can work.

Each one can also fail spectacularly.

The model itself matters less than whether the institution has been honest about what the model requires.

Model	What it does well	Where it breaks
Centralized	Brings brand, marketing, and communications together under one senior leader. Ideally, that leader reports to the president or chancellor and has a seat at the cabinet table. This model creates clearer authority: one brand platform, one voice system, one set of standards, one reputation strategy, and one senior leader accountable for consistency.	Centralization can become slow, controlling, or overextended if the team is under-resourced. Nobody needs a 14-step approval process for a department newsletter blurb.
Decentralized	Spreads marketing and communications across divisions. Enrollment has its team. Advancement has its team. Athletics has its team. Academic colleges, centers, institutes, student affairs, and regional campuses may all have their own communicators. Embedded teams are closer to their audiences and often move quickly.	Without clear governance, decentralization turns into fragmentation: different messages, different tones, different design choices, different campaign priorities, different media responses, different crisis instincts, and different interpretations of what the institution is trying to say.
Hybrid	Creates the potential for central alignment with local responsiveness. A healthy hybrid model usually has a strong central brand, marketing, and communications function that owns institutional strategy, standards, voice, major campaigns, reputation strategy, media posture, crisis protocols, and shared platforms, while some staff remain embedded in enrollment, advancement, athletics, colleges, or other units.	Hybrid only works if decision rights are clear. Without that clarity, hybrid just becomes decentralization with better intentions. And higher ed has no shortage of good intentions.

Centralization works best when the central team is strategic, service-minded, resourced and clear about what truly requires review versus what simply needs tools, templates, training and trust.

Decentralization works best when distributed teams are connected to shared strategy, not just left to interpret the brand or institutional voice on their own.

Hybrid works best when everyone knows what is local, what is institutional, and who has the authority to decide.

Or, more bluntly:

Centralized can work. Decentralized can work. Hybrid can work. Fuzzy cannot work.

The outside world does not experience your institution according to your reporting lines. They experience one institution.

If your internal structure produces five versions of that institution, that is what the market sees.

2. Distributed work still needs unified governance

This is where institutions need to be especially careful.

A hybrid or decentralized model can work when it has clear governance. But sometimes institutions split the work in ways that look reasonable on paper but create confusion in practice.

In my experience:

• Brand and communications may live in one area while marketing lives somewhere else.

• Marketing may be embedded in enrollment, advancement, or another revenue-focused unit while communications reports through a different line.

• Public relations, crisis communications, and presidential communications may be elevated separately while brand management is treated as a set of guidelines rather than an institutional strategy function.

Brand may exist visually, but not strategically. Communications may be respected, but mostly in moments of risk. Marketing may be valued, but mostly when a campaign or enrollment cycle needs immediate results.

Each of those arrangements can happen for understandable reasons. Institutions are complex. Structures evolve over time. People inherit teams, vacancies, personalities, politics, and budget realities. Not every distributed model is automatically broken.

But every distributed model needs to answer one question clearly:

Who owns the whole?

Because brand, marketing, communications, PR, crisis response, enrollment marketing, presidential voice, web, advancement storytelling and academic communications are all shaping the same institutional identity.

They may do different work.

They may require different expertise.

They may operate on different timelines.

But the audience does not experience them as separate functions.

The audience experiences one institution.

That is why distributed execution cannot become disconnected authority. 

If brand lives in one place, marketing in another, and communications somewhere else (not recommended, by the way), but if it did, the institution would need a very clear mechanism for alignment. Otherwise, each function will naturally optimize for its own mandate.

• Enrollment marketing will optimize for the cycle. PR will optimize for the immediate public response.

• Presidential communications will optimize for executive voice.

• Advancement communications will optimize for donor relationships.

• Athletics will optimize for energy and visibility.

• Academic units will optimize for their own programs and priorities.

• Brand management may optimize for consistency, but without authority over the places where the brand actually shows up, consistency becomes a request instead of a standard.

None of those instincts are wrong. In fact, they are often exactly what those teams are supposed to do. The problem is what happens when no one is responsible for connecting them.

A distributed model can work, but only if leadership is explicit about decision rights, final authority and shared standards. The institution has to know which decisions are local, which are institutional and who gets to resolve conflict when priorities collide.

Because if the answer is simply, “They’ll collaborate,” that is not enough.

Collaboration is a behavior. Governance is a structure.

And when the stakes are high — a soft enrollment cycle, a public issue, a presidential message, a campaign launch, a web redesign, a crisis — structure matters.

The question is not whether multiple teams can contribute to brand, marketing and communications work. Of course they can.

The question is whether the institution has built a model where those contributions add up to one coherent institutional identity.

3. Governance gets tested in the handoffs

Once you start looking at structure this way, the issue becomes less about centralization versus decentralization and more about handoffs.

Enrollment is a handoff. Web is a handoff. Advancement is a handoff. Athletics is a handoff. Academic storytelling is a handoff. Presidential communications is a handoff. Internal communications is a handoff. Media relations is a handoff. Crisis communications is definitely a handoff.

These are handoffs in the relay sense, except higher ed often forgets to decide who is carrying the baton, when it gets passed and who is responsible if it hits the floor.

It’s these handoffs are where unclear governance shows up first.

A quick scenario: the tuition reset

This can sound theoretical until a real institutional decision hits multiple audiences at once.

Imagine a university is preparing to announce a tuition reset.

That decision may start in finance, enrollment or the president’s cabinet, but the moment it moves toward public release, it becomes a brand, marketing and communications issue.

A unified brand, marketing and communications function is going to think through the full ecosystem:

✔️ What does this mean for prospective student marketing and the recruitment communication flow?

✔️ Is there paid media in market that needs to be adjusted before the announcement?

✔️ How should this be released to the press?

✔️ What videos, statements or messages need to come from the president explaining the decision, the rationale and what it means for the institution’s future?

✔️ How should current students and families hear about it before they read about it somewhere else?

✔️ How do admissions counselors, financial aid staff, tour guides, coaches and campus visit teams need to be trained to talk about it with families?

✔️ What are the potential blowbacks, misunderstandings or crisis issues that need to be anticipated?

✔️ How should this be positioned with alumni and donors?

✔️ Where does this live in the web hierarchy, and what needs to exist immediately: FAQs, cost examples, explainer videos, interactive tools, landing pages or leadership messages?

✔️ What existing web pages need to be updated so the institution is not contradicting itself?

✔️ Are there print pieces already in circulation, such as viewbooks, brochures, financial aid pieces or event materials, that need to be pulled, edited or contextualized?

That is not just a marketing checklist. It is not just a PR checklist. It is not just a brand checklist.

It is the work of making sure one institutional decision becomes one coherent institutional story.

In a disconnected structure, every office may answer its own part correctly. Enrollment may update its emails. PR may write the release. The president’s office may draft a message. Brand may review language. Web may build a page. Advancement may prepare donor talking points.

None of that is wrong.

But if no one is connecting the whole system, the institution can still end up with misaligned timing, conflicting language, outdated materials, confused staff, anxious families, and a press narrative it should have seen coming.

A unified function does not eliminate complexity. It simply gives the institution a better chance of seeing the whole board before pieces start moving.

Because a tuition reset is not just a pricing announcement. It is a trust moment. And trust moments are where structure shows.

4. Reporting lines reveal what an institution believes

This is the part that tends to make people uncomfortable.

Where brand, marketing and communications report says a lot about what an institution believes those functions are for.

If marketing reports only through enrollment, the work will naturally be shaped by enrollment’s priorities. That may make sense in some institutions, especially much smaller ones where recruitment is the overwhelming strategic need. But it also creates risk. The brand can become overly tied to a single recruitment cycle, and long-term reputation work can lose major ground to short-term conversion pressure.

If communications reports through the president, advancement, donor or alumni priorities may receive the most strategic attention. Again, that may make sense in some contexts. But the institution’s brand has to serve more than presidential friends, donors and alumni.

If web lives primarily in IT, the website may be treated as infrastructure rather than as one of the institution’s most important brand voice. (Yes, brand!)

If presidential communications lives independently in the president’s office, executive voice may become disconnected from the institution’s broader communications strategy.

If crisis communications sits apart from brand, PR, and executive strategy, the institution may be fast in a crisis but inconsistent, cautious in all the wrong ways, or unclear about what kind of trust it is trying to preserve.

If athletics, enrollment, advancement, and academic units all operate with separate creative authority and no shared governance, the institution may have energy, but not coherence.

None of this means there is only one correct reporting structure. There is not.

A small private college, a regional public university, a large research institution, and a multi-campus system may all need different models.

But if brand and marketing are expected to shape enrollment, reputation, advancement, student experience, public trust, and institutional visibility, the senior leader responsible for that work needs access to institutional strategy.

I may not share my view straightforward very often, but I have one that I have no hesitation of sharing:

The senior leader responsible for brand, marketing and communications should report to the president.

Not because titles are fun. And not because marketing and communications need to feel important. This is not about ego. It is about scope.

Brand, marketing and communications touch enrollment, advancement, academics, athletics, student affairs, public relations, crisis response, internal communications, community trust, web strategy, presidential voice, institutional reputation and public visibility.

If the work crosses the whole institution, the leader responsible for it needs access to whole-institution strategy. That means reporting to the president and a cabinet seat.

Because a leader cannot be accountable for institutional consistency while being structurally positioned as a service provider to everyone else’s priorities.

That is how marketing becomes the place where strategy requests go to be formatted. It is how communications becomes the office asked to “send the message” after all the meaningful decisions have already been made. It is how PR becomes cleanup instead of reputation strategy. It is how crisis response becomes a scramble instead of a prepared institutional discipline.

And once that happens, the institution has already made a choice. It has decided that brand, marketing and communications are production functions, not strategic ones.

The sector appears to be moving away from that model.

Leadership teams should pay attention.

The bottom line

There is no universal "right" org chart for higher ed marketing.

Some institutions need centralized structures. Some need hybrid models. Some can make distributed teams work beautifully when governance is clear and leadership is aligned.

But vague authority is not a model.

Brand, marketing and communications work cannot live in a fog.

If brand is expected to create consistency across the institution, it needs authority. If marketing is expected to drive enrollment, reputation, advancement, and engagement, it needs strategic access. If communications is expected to build trust with multiple audiences, it needs to be involved before decisions are already baked.

That does not mean every communicator, marketer, writer, designer, PR professional, or enrollment marketer has to report to one office. That is not always realistic, and it is not always necessary.

But it does mean the institution needs clear ownership of institutional voice, brand strategy, reputation, and public expression.

Goodwill matters.

Relationships matter.

Collaboration matters.

But they cannot carry the weight of unclear authority forever.

At some point, institutions have to stop asking people to “partner better” inside structures that were never designed to support partnership.

Brand, marketing, and communications can have distributed execution. They cannot have disconnected authority.

That is where Part 3 picks up: how to move the conversation from preference to evidence, benchmark the right institutions, and define decision rights before the org chart becomes another campus argument with a calendar invite.

Which, to be fair, is very higher ed.

But it is not strategy.

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Sources and frameworks referenced: CASE Brand and Reputation Metrics Framework, SimpsonScarborough Higher Ed CMO Study, Binet & Field’s research on long-term brand building and short-term activation, and Square One Consulting organizational design benchmarking methodology.