Let’s be honest: if higher education were a TV show, it would be peak prestige drama.
Every semester is a season premiere.
Every campus is its own cinematic universe.
Every student, faculty member, and alumnus has protagonist potential.
Every Admitted Students Day? A trailer for next year’s cast.
The stars are already on set — teaching, learning, researching, living, changing. You can almost see the narrative arcs forming above their heads.
And yet, despite all that narrative gold, our storytelling chops keep getting called into question.
“We need to do a better job telling our story.”
You’ve heard it. You’ve bristled at it. You’ve built decks and dashboards to push back. Yet the line persists, like a cloud hovering over the work we do.
The Real Problem Isn’t a Lack of Stories
Here’s the truth: we don’t suffer from a storytelling problem. We suffer from a personality problem. Not a lack of it. An inconsistency expressing it.
We’re not short on stories. What we’re short on is storytelling that sounds like it comes from the same person: A single, authentic institutional brand voice.
Think about how we show up across channels:
- In alumni magazines, we publish sophisticated, long-form profiles — crafted by former journalists, English majors, and freelancers, rendered in pristine AP style.
- On social, we pivot to the punchy image-and-quip, one-two combo — managed by digital natives fluent in GA4.
- In digital ads, we lean into acronyms and rankings — MBA, MPH, ROI — written to convert by performance-driven marketers who, at many institutions, are also running organic social.
- In admissions collateral, we cozy up to prospects with the warmest, most inclusive voice, inviting students to join our community — with messaging led by enrollment strategists who know yield rates by ZIP code.
- In fundraising campaign materials, we ask alumni to dream, give, and mentor — crafted by savvy Advancement teams often siloed from central marcomm.
Each approach is smart. Strategic. Even successful on its own terms. But together, they don’t sound like one institution. They sound like five different ones.
Here’s what happens when we tell each of these stories using the same institutional voice:
- Our stories build trust.
- That trust builds relationships.
- Those relationships build reputation.
- Reputation builds value, so that, over time, we can rely on personality-driven branding more and we have to rely on marketing less.
Marketing less means not having to explain things differently to different audiences, because people already know our institutions. They like us and are raising their hands to join us.
Getting there takes discipline. It requires vision, leadership, alignment, and an institution-wide commitment to showing up consistently and authentically everywhere, with one personality that rings true in all we market and communicate.
Before getting into just how to do it, though, let’s take a step back and examine where we stand as an industry in our evolution over time as marketers and communicators.
The History Behind Our Branding Evolution
American colleges have been around for centuries, yet we’ve only invested in higher education branding and marketing for a few decades. The truth is that we’re barely in our adolescence as a field, in terms of our ability to speak with one, authentic voice on behalf of our institutions. Harvard, the first institution of higher education in the US, opened in 1636. And for more than 340 years thereafter, American higher education didn’t have to market itself. At least not like other B2C or B2B sectors.
Even transformative legislation—the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and the Higher Education Act of 1965—expanded access, but didn’t change how institutions communicated. Marketing? Not part of the equation. Admissions officers were gatekeepers, not storytellers.
But outside higher ed, the world was changing fast.
The 1950s and ’60s were the Golden Age of Advertising. Brands weren’t just selling products. They were building emotional resonance through personality. They created archetypally precise personas to speak to audiences not just demographically and geographically, but psychologically. It was during this marketing boom that advertising agencies began creating more sophisticated brand expressions for products and goods to connect with consumers on an emotional level.
- Snap, Crackle, and Pop were the Entertainers.
- The Marlboro Man was the Rebel.
- Volkswagen was a mix of Rebel and Sophisticate.
Most importantly, brands started speaking to young people. They identified a new “jackpot market”: kids, teenagers, college students. And they adjusted their tone accordingly. Think: fun, irreverent, aspirational, cool.
Higher education missed this shift entirely — even though our audience was the same.
Why? Because we didn’t need to compete. Yet.
Between WWII and Vietnam, demand surged. Higher ed was still seen as Horace Mann’s Great Equalizer—the key that unlocks the American Dream. Institutions were viewed as manifestations of public good. Flawed? Yes. Exclusionary? Certainly. But necessary and trusted.
It wasn’t until the late 1970s and early 1980s — after major federal disinvestment and the rise of tuition-dependent business models — that things started to shift. It was during this era that states began to cut funding, which, for the first time, meant that our public institutions became dependent on net tuition revenue (NTR). Suddenly, colleges and universities had to start thinking like businesses. They had to attract, not just admit. They had to position, persuade, and promote.
Branding arrived. Slowly. Unevenly.
At first, it was mostly visual—logos, color palettes, typefaces. Then came slogans. All the taglines! Then campaigns.
But for the most part, higher ed continued to treat branding as something layered on after, or on top of institutional strategy—not something baked into it.
And today, in 2026, we still do. We default to the safest, blandest kind of language to reach our audiences:
- Empower the future.
- Ignite potential.
- Pursue your passions.
- We are [insert abstract noun] makers.
- Change the world.
- Best value. Highest ROI. Nationally ranked.
And we wonder why our campaigns fade within two years. Meanwhile, we keep telling stories. Good ones. But fragmented ones.
- Our magazines profile alumni.
- Our ads promise boardroom-ready success.
- Our strategic plans forecast institutional transformation.
- Our campaign videos tug at heartstrings.
- Our recruitment emails crack jokes.
None of these messages is wrong. But very few are connected by a consistent tone, point of view, or personality.
And the explosion of digital channels has only made this worse.
In the 1960s, marketers had four big channels: TV, radio, print, and outdoor. Today? We’ve got paid search, paid social, organic, in-app, mobile, OTT, CTV, podcasts, immersive media, video pre-roll, native advertising, SMS, email, and now AI-powered everything.
The noise is real. But the answer isn’t more noise. It’s tuning in our messaging to just one frequency; to hone in on our authentic institutional personality.
Because when we look outside higher ed, we see what consistency actually looks like:
- LEGO is creativity.
- Patagonia is exploration (with values).
- Volvo is safety.
- Disney is magic.
- Liquid Death is irreverence (as hydration).
- Coca-Cola is classic happiness
These brands don’t change their personality based on channel or audience. They don’t start over every fiscal year. They understand that repetition is recall. And even more? That consistency of expression results in clarity of perception.
This is why the most successful brands promote their brand personality exponentially more than their individual products or offerings. They may evolve the language, but the feelings they convey remain the same.
They brand more—so they can market less.
Let Personality Lead Your Institution’s Storytelling
Higher education doesn’t lack feelings, that’s for sure. It’s just that our sector still doesn’t fully trust the public to embrace us. So we haven’t fully trusted the process that Capitol “B*” brands live by.
Because our institutions already have personality. Plenty of it. Traditions. Beliefs. Attitudes. Tensions. Even mediocrities. The raw material is there. It just hasn’t been consistently expressed through a clear higher ed storytelling strategy. And no, personality doesn’t have to be polished. It just has to be true.
We don’t need to invent something when it comes to how we talk about ourselves. We need to reflect what already exists—boldly, honestly, consistently. Because when we do, something shifts:
- We stop asking, “What can we say?” and start asking, “What do we actually believe?”
- We stop chasing demographics and start aligning with motivations and values.
- We stop sanding off our rough edges—and start owning them.
Because people don’t choose the brands they consume based on age, income, and geography alone. That’s like saying people choose partners based on demographics.
I don’t know about you, but demographics and my parents’ household income had about the same influence on my college decision as they did in me falling in love with my wife. People choose to spend their time, and to devote their hearts, to people, places, and things that fit—culturally, emotionally, behaviorally—in ways that have nothing to do with actions, but everything to do with motivations.
We act on motivations. Not manipulations. We identify with authenticity. We crave it. We desire belonging. And it is personality, not just personalized promotion or shallow segmentation strategies, that we understand intrinsically. A priori. Instinctually.
So no, we don’t need to do a better job telling our story.
We need to tell it with personality.
Because when higher education leads with its authentic voice, it stops sounding like everyone else and starts sounding like itself.
That’s the work we want to do with you. To help you uncover your institution’s authentic personality and express it with clarity and consistency.
This is why we have formed Executive Brand Teams. These are senior, cross-disciplinary teams that bring together expertise in research, strategy, creative, and web. We engage from the very start and stay with you throughout, accountable for both the work and the outcomes. No silos. No handoffs. One cohesive team, helping you align around a single voice and show up as one institution, everywhere it matters. If that’s the kind of partnership you’re looking for, we’d welcome the conversation.
