Brand, Marketing, & the Messy Middle - Part 3: Finding Your Best-fit Governance Model

By this point, the argument should be clear: brand, marketing and communications do not all have to live in one giant office, but they do need unified governance.

The harder question is what that should look like at your institution. And that answer should not start with preferences, personalities or campus folklore.

It should start with evidence.

Before an institution decides where brand, marketing, and communications should live, it should understand how comparable institutions are organizing the work, where authority sits and what patterns show up among institutions that appear more coherent, more visible or more stable.

That is where benchmarking of other governance models becomes useful.

In this post

We’re going to look at five things:

✔️ What a recent organizational design assessment showed

✔️ How to benchmark structure without simply copying peers

✔️ How decision rights prevent drift

✔️ What leadership should be asking right now

1. What our benchmarking showed

In a recent Square One partner engagement with a public institution, we conducted an organizational design assessment that included a structured benchmarking analysis of an institution's 40 peer and aspirant institutions.

The assessment also included internal listening sessions and a staff survey to understand how the current structure was experienced by the people closest to the work. That internal perspective mattered because benchmarking can show what other institutions are doing, but it cannot explain how your own structure is functioning day to day. The strongest organizational design work looks at both: external patterns and internal friction.

The goal was not to find a perfect model to copy. That rarely exists in higher ed.

The goal was not just to ask, “What are peers doing?” It was also to ask, “Where is our current structure helping the work, and where is it creating drag?”

The goal was to answer a more useful question: What does the predominant marketing and communications structure look like across this institution’s competitive landscape, what patterns emerge, and how do those patterns compare to the institution’s current reality?

A few patterns stood out.

Among institutions where brand, marketing and communications were united and reported directly to the president, 91% showed stable or growing enrollment.

Among the three institutions in the dataset where marketing reported through enrollment, all three showed declining enrollment. The sample was small, and the analysis was directional rather than causal, but the consistency of the pattern was notable.

That caveat matters. This does not prove that reporting to the president automatically causes enrollment growth. If it did, every consultant in America would have a much easier slide deck.

But it does suggest something important: structure may not guarantee success, but it can either support or constrain it.

The stronger finding was this:

Not a single peer or aspirant institution distributed brand, marketing, and communications authority across multiple offices without unified governance.

Not one.

Every institution in the dataset, whether centralized, hybrid, or somewhere in between, designated a single leader accountable for the function. Some had embedded communicators. Some kept enrollment marketing closer to enrollment. Some had hybrid structures shaped by institutional size, history, staffing realities or leadership preference.

But the decision to designate one accountable leader for the institution’s brand, marketing and communications function was the pattern.

The variation was in the details. The consistency was in the accountability. That is the part institutions should pay attention to.

The lesson is not, “Copy someone else’s org chart.” The lesson is:

Study the patterns. Understand the tradeoffs. Then decide intentionally.

2. Start with patterns, not preferences

This is where the conversation often gets oversimplified.

Leadership teams ask, “Should we centralize marketing?” as if the answer is either yes or no. But that is not the best starting point. The better question is:

What decisions need to be centralized, what execution can be distributed, and what structure gives the institution the authority, alignment and accountability it needs?

That question moves the institution away from preference and toward evidence.

One of the most useful ways to begin this work is to look outside your own walls. Look at your true peers. Look at your aspirants. Look at institutions whose brands you admire. Look at institutions that are growing and those that are declining. Then map the patterns.

What to look for when benchmarking

Ask questions like:

✔️ Where do brand, marketing, and communications report?

✔️ Does the senior leader report to the president?

✔️ Is that leader on cabinet?

✔️ Who owns brand strategy?

✔️ Who owns institutional voice?

✔️ Who owns reputation strategy?

✔️ Where does enrollment marketing sit?

✔️ Where do PR, media relations, crisis communications, and presidential communications live?

✔️ How is web governed?

✔️ Are embedded communicators connected to a central strategy?

✔️ Where the institution differs from peers, does that difference appear intentional or inherited?

The answers will not tell you everything. But they will tell you more than campus folklore will.

Organizational structure should not be built around habit, volume, personalities or whoever has historically held the work. It should be built around what the institution needs next.

A good benchmarking process should help leadership identify patterns such as:

What to study	Why it matters
Reporting line	Shows whether the work is treated as strategic or service-oriented
Cabinet access	Shows whether the function has proximity to institutional decision-making
Brand ownership	Shows who is accountable for meaning, voice, identity, and consistency
Enrollment marketing structure	Shows how the institution balances recruitment urgency with long-term brand coherence
PR and crisis alignment	Shows whether reputation work is connected to institutional voice and executive strategy
Web governance	Shows whether the website is treated as infrastructure, marketing, brand, communications, or all of the above
Embedded communicators	Shows whether distributed execution is connected to shared strategy
Decision rights	Shows how conflict gets resolved when priorities collide

That last one matters more than people think.

Because structure does not just determine who does the work. It determines who gets to decide what good looks like.

3. Decision rights prevent drift

Once an institution understands the patterns, the next step is not simply redrawing boxes.

The next step is defining decision rights.

This is where a lot of structures fail. The org chart may show where people report, but it does not always show who owns the decision, who gets input, who can stop something, and who is responsible for execution.

That is why governance matters.

A hybrid model without decision rights becomes a weekly negotiation.

A decentralized model without decision rights becomes fragmentation.

Even a centralized model without decision rights can become a bottleneck.

When governance conversations get fuzzy, I like the OVIS framework because it forces a clearer conversation.

For each major brand, marketing, or communications decision, identify who owns, vetoes, influences, and supports the decision.

Role	Meaning	Example
Owns	The person with final authority and accountability.	The senior marketing/communications leader owns institutional brand standards.
Vetoes	The person or role with legitimate veto power, usually for legal, compliance, budget, accessibility, or institutional risk reasons.	Legal vetoes noncompliant language. Finance vetoes a budget issue. Accessibility reviews stop a noncompliant web experience.
Influences	The people whose expertise or stakeholder perspective should shape the outcome.	Enrollment influences recruitment messaging. A dean influences college-level campaign priorities.
Supports	The people or teams responsible for execution once the decision is made.	Web, creative, CRM, content, or media teams support rollout.

OVIS separates input from authority. And higher ed desperately needs that distinction.

That matters in higher ed, where “being consulted” can quietly become “having veto power” if no one defines the difference.

And that, my friends, is how one email becomes seven meetings and a shared document titled “Final_FINAL_v6_reallyfinal.pdf”

A dean may need to influence a college campaign. Enrollment may need to influence recruitment messaging. IT may need to support the website infrastructure. Legal may need veto power on compliance language. But that does not mean every stakeholder owns the brand decision.

Naming those roles up front is not about shutting people out. It is about making collaboration honest.

4. The questions leadership should be asking

If an institution wants to get serious about brand and marketing governance, the conversation should not start with personalities or history.

I'm going to get a little honest.

Many structure conversations in higher education are far too often hijacked by the politics of comfort.

Who has been here the longest? Who is well-liked? Who built the current process? Who feels protective of their area? Who might be offended if something changes? Who is the most outspoken? Who has the ear of senior leadership? Who has simply “always” owned that work?

I get it. Higher ed is relational, and institutional history matters. Those dynamics are real. And to be clear, this is not an argument for treating people carelessly. Good people matter. Institutional knowledge matters. Relationships matter. No one should be reckless with talent, trust or morale.

But protecting people is not the same as protecting unclear structure.

When leaders avoid governance decisions because they do not want to disappoint someone, confront a power imbalance, or change a legacy arrangement, they are still making a decision. They are deciding that internal comfort matters more than institutional clarity.

That may feel kind in the moment, but it is rarely kind in the long run. Not to the institution, not to the staff trying to do the work, and not even to the people being “protected” by an arrangement that no longer serves the mission.

It's also a quick way to run off some of your best talent.

A structure should not exist because someone is attached to it. It should exist because it helps the institution do the work better.

So before changing the org chart, leadership should sit down and answer the harder questions.

The Governance Stress Test

Can your institution clearly answer:

✔️ Who has final authority over institutional positioning?

✔️ Who owns institutional voice?

✔️ Who owns the visual identity?

✔️ Who governs use of the seal?

✔️ Who owns reputation strategy?

✔️ Who governs public relations and media strategy?

✔️ Who owns crisis communications strategy?

✔️ Who owns internal communications strategy?

✔️ Who owns presidential communications strategy?

✔️ Who approves major campaigns?

✔️ Who owns the homepage?

✔️ Who controls top-level web navigation?

✔️ Who commissions and interprets brand research?

✔️ Who sets paid media strategy?

✔️ Who reviews enrollment creative?

✔️ Who resolves conflict when short-term recruitment pressure pushes against long-term brand consistency?

✔️ What decisions are local?

✔️ What decisions are institutional?

✔️ What decisions require consultation but not consensus?

✔️ If brand, marketing, communications, PR, and presidential communications report to different leaders, who has final authority when they disagree?

✔️ Who ensures brand management is more than guidelines sitting in a PDF?

✔️ Where our structure differs from peers, is that difference intentional or inherited?

And maybe the most important question:

Who has the authority to say, “No, that weakens the institution”?

Those questions may feel uncomfortable. But they are necessary.

Because if everyone thinks they own the decision, nobody really does. And if nobody owns the decision, the loudest voice, the tightest deadline, the longest-tenured person, or the most protected relationship usually wins.

That is not strategy. That is survival.

And you do not want your offices competing to survive.

The bottom line

The goal of benchmarking is not to find an org chart to copy. The goal is to force a more honest conversation about authority, alignment and accountability.

The best structure for one institution may not be the best structure for another. Context matters. Size matters. Talent matters. Institutional history matters. Enrollment pressure matters. Leadership capacity matters.

But “context matters” should not become an excuse for avoiding structure.

If brand, marketing and communications are expected to shape enrollment, reputation, advancement, public trust, presidential voice, crisis response and institutional visibility, then leadership has to define how that work is governed.

Not vaguely.

Not hopefully.

Clearly.

The institutions that do this well are not necessarily the ones with the biggest teams or flashiest campaigns. They are the ones where the structure helps people make better decisions faster, where distributed work still adds up to one coherent identity, and where authority is clear enough that collaboration can actually work.

Because at the end of the day, governance is not about control. It is about clarity.

And clarity is what gives brand, marketing, and communications the power to do what higher ed needs them to do: build trust, create momentum and help the institution become known for something that actually matters.

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Want to read the full series?

• Part 1: Brand Is Strategy. Marketing Is Motion. Comms Builds Trust.

• Part 2: Goodwill Is Not a Governance Model

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.