Marketing Maturity in Higher Education

Most universities are still treating marketing as a production function. The ones getting ahead are building it as a core business capability.

This isn't a new observation, but it's one that keeps proving true. Walk into the marketing department at most colleges and universities and you'll find a team organized around deliverables: brochures, social posts, website updates, event support. The work gets done. The requests get fulfilled. But the strategic questions rarely have clear owners: Who are we trying to reach? What do we want them to believe? How do we know if it's working?

Marketing maturity is about closing that gap. It's the degree to which an institution has built marketing as a function that can do more than execute. It informs strategy, allocates resources intelligently, measures outcomes that matter, and earns a seat at the table where decisions about enrollment, reputation, and competitive positioning actually get made.

One of the first things I did at the University of Denver was build a five-year marketing maturity model. Not because we needed another planning document, but because we needed a shared language. A way for the marketing team, senior leadership, and academic partners to talk about where we are, where we're going, and what it will take to get there. Maturity models make the gap visible. And visible gaps are the ones that get closed.

The institutions that have made this shift share a few traits. Marketing has consistent access to institutional data. There are defined processes for how marketing work gets prioritized. The team has clear accountability for outcomes, not just outputs. And leadership, at every level above the CMO, understands what good marketing actually requires.

That last point is often the hardest. Marketing maturity is primarily an organizational problem. You can build the best team in higher education, but if the institution doesn't understand the function, doesn't give it access to the right information, and doesn't hold it accountable to real outcomes, the ceiling is low. This is why organizational intelligence matters. Sustainable marketing capability is an organizational design problem as much as it is a talent or technology problem.

Matthew Gann, Ph.D.