Responsible for the Sale, Not the Product

My partner, a therapist, mentioned the other day that a client, a mid-level marketer, described their situation as “lots of responsibility with little authority.” Marketers across every industry are held accountable for outcomes they don't directly control. That's a structural problem. It's worse in higher education. And in some states, it's at a breaking point.

There is a structural tension at the heart of higher education marketing that rarely gets named directly. Brand marketing supports the work of admissions and admissions marketing. It supports enrollment, including yield, and it owns brand awareness, reputation, and demand. What it rarely owns is the product. Program decisions, naming conventions, curricular design, pricing, positioning: these belong to academic governance, to deans, to provosts, to faculty senates. Marketing gets handed the output and asked to find the audience.

Faculty should shape curriculum. Deans should steward their schools. The problem is that the chain from “what should we offer” to “who wants it and why” almost never runs in both directions. Marketing gets called in after the decision. The program has been named, designed, approved through shared governance, and slotted into the catalog. Now fill it.

The consequences are predictable. Programs named with disciplinary precision that no prospective student would ever search for. Degrees built to satisfy internal stakeholders rather than employer or student demand. Institutional positioning that reflects self-perception rather than competitive differentiation. The problem, in every case, is sequencing. The market question was asked too late, if it was asked at all.

There is a related failure hiding inside the same structural problem. Higher education institutions spent decades not needing to invest in brand marketing. Reputation traveled by word of mouth, through rankings, through proximity, through the sheer stability of demand. That world is gone. The demographic cliff is real, public trust in higher education has eroded, and prospective students have more options than any prior generation. Institutions now want the results of sustained brand investment without having made that investment. They want awareness, preference, and differentiation delivered on what is functionally an enrollment marketing budget.

Enrollment marketing is direct response: funnel-driven, audience-targeted, and optimized for conversion. Brand marketing builds the conditions under which enrollment marketing works. It shapes how an institution is perceived before a student ever enters the funnel, before a family schedules a campus visit, before a counselor makes a recommendation. The brand is the foundation. Enrollment runs on top of it. What I do is brand marketing. I build that foundation. When institutions conflate the two, or treat brand as something that gets funded after enrollment targets are met, they are spending against a floor that does not exist yet.

And then there's Florida. And Texas. Whatever structural friction higher education marketers face when their own institutions treat programs as internally-governed decisions, it at least operates in a world where market signals can, in principle, change minds. What's happening in those states is categorically different. The product is being shaped by legislative mandate. What can be taught, what programs can exist, what can be said in a public university classroom: these are now political decisions. Marketers there aren't just selling a product they didn't design. They're selling a product whose parameters are set by people who have made clear they are not interested in what students need, what employers want, or what the academic mission requires. The talent exodus is real, it's accelerating, and it's not subtle. Faculty, researchers, and administrators are leaving. The product is getting worse, and the marketer is still responsible for the number.

But the larger story isn't about those outliers. It's about what's changing everywhere else. The most important shift in higher education marketing isn't a tactic or a channel. It's a repositioning of the function itself. The institutions making meaningful progress are the ones that have stopped treating marketing as an output machine and started treating it as a strategic thought partner. That means marketing has a voice before programs are designed, not just before they launch. It means brand tracking and competitive positioning inform academic planning. It means the CMO is in the room when market viability gets assessed, not when the brochure needs a headline.

My own doctoral research uncovered this. When I examined what presidents actually want from their marketing function, the answer was strategic counsel on market position. They want someone who can translate student demand, competitive landscape, and brand health into decisions about where to invest and where to pull back. They want a thought partner, not someone to make it pretty.

The institutions that close the gap between marketing responsibility and marketing authority won't do it by lobbying for a seat at the table. They'll do it by earning one: showing up with data, framing market questions in terms leadership cares about, and building the kind of trust that gets marketing included in decisions before they're made. That's the job now. Not the campaign. The conversation before the campaign becomes necessary.

Matthew Gann, Ph.D.