Why sidelining your marketing leader is an enrollment risk
Sometimes I wish I didn't notice a trend. But this one has become too clear to ignore.
A new president arrives (and with average tenures now around six years, it’s a near-constant reality on most campuses). They come with a vision of who the institution is or should be in the marketplace. That vision is often not grounded in data. The marketing leader, who sits at the cabinet table, listens carefully. They begin adjusting institutional messaging to support the president's goals. Recognizing the scope of what's ahead, they might ask for additional budget, or present a realistic timeline for narrative shift—one measured in years, not months.
Then the marketing leader exits quietly.
I eventually find out they chose to leave rather than be demoted as the president intended. There's always more behind it than can be said, but it usually comes down to the same thing: the president wanted a mouthpiece. And a Kinko’s. Not strategic brand management.
They're replaced by someone with institutional longevity—someone skilled at communicating what others want, not at shaping the story of what the university is becoming or confronting long-held assumptions with data.
This isn’t universal, but I've seen the trend enough to know it isn't an outlier.
Kinko’s thinking will cost you enrollment
The belief that marketing is a mouthpiece rather than a driver of university outcomes is rooted in what I call "Kinkos thinking"—treating marketing as order takers and conflating brand with logo, rather than the key driver that determines whether the institution ends up on a student's college list. What may look like a simple personnel decision now is actually a strategic choice that will have long-lasting implications where it hurts: enrollment.
Presidents who think this way aren’t considering how awareness and discovery have changed. The enrollment landscape has shifted in ways that make brand more consequential than ever, not less. Nearly 60% of prospective students now begin their college search by looking for a specific institution. This brand-first dynamic is nearly the reverse of patterns from a decade ago, when prospects researched programs or areas of academic interest. Teenagers must know about your institution before they even begin their search. Once they start searching, students are arriving at narrower consideration sets faster than before. If your institution isn't present, consistent, and credible in the places they search—social media and, increasingly, AI platforms—you don't get a second chance at that first impression.
And yet institutional brands in those channels are fragmented. Whether a student encounters something brand-aligned is close to a coin toss. Awareness and discoverability are often driven by external audiences—alumni, media, community members—who require significant strategic effort to understand, align, and influence. That effort has to be coordinated across channels. It requires resources, expertise, and time. It requires a marketing leader with the standing and the data to make that case at the executive level, in partnership with the enrollment leader—because brand awareness and alignment impact them.
Supporting marketing at the cabinet level
Some of the responsibility here rests with marketing leaders themselves. Too often, they haven't had the data to tell this story in terms that create urgency for a president. That's part of what we've been building at Campus Sonar: the capacity to paint a clear picture at the executive level—one that connects industry-wide patterns to institution-specific challenges, and supports leaders in creating strategies to operate effectively in the low-trust environment higher education finds itself in.
Three years ago, I stood in front of a room of college and university presidents at the Mackinac Roundtable on Talent and introduced the concept of social intelligence. Only a handful of people in the room knew what Reddit was. I shared data about how students search for colleges, how alumni represent their institutional experience, and how the channels universities control were largely absent from that narrative. One president told me the next day that I'd kept him up at night.
This year I returned to Mackinac—as part of the opening panel discussion, anchoring the conversation in public perception data gathered through social intelligence. The room was full of presidents again, and they were paying attention.
The conversation is finally happening at the right level. And now that we’ve joined College Board, more institutions can get the full picture they desperately need