Brand is having a moment in higher ed; at least in what people say they believe. Eighty-three percent of CMOs and senior leaders place brand strategy in their top three marketing priorities, and 47% rank it first overall, ahead of the website, ahead of digital experience, ahead of nearly everything else on the list. A separate survey of higher ed marketing leaders found the same enthusiasm: 44% call brand amplification a top priority this year, second only to enrollment growth. But that same survey found those institutions allocate just 23% of the budget to brand.
It’s the same pattern ad strategist and author Michael Farmer found tracking 60 major U.S. advertisers — P&G, Unilever, McDonald’s, Colgate, Nestlé, and Toyota among them — from 2009 to 2024: two-thirds saw sales growth fall well below the rate of GDP growth, driven by a slow, sustained migration away from brand-building spend even as leadership kept endorsing it.
In uncertain times, leadership looks for ways to reduce risk. Outside higher ed, that tendency shows up as cost-reduction. Within higher ed, the response often feels like a sliding scale — shifting distribution towards what feels the safest. In this case, it’s a firm push toward the traditional: list buys, retargeting, paid search aimed at students already engaged in active search. We narrow the aperture, and yet expect transformation. And while the short-term signals may masquerade as progress — re-orienting around new found results — it doesn’t necessarily mean the scales have tipped in one’s favor.
Brand amplification, brand building, brand marketing — it all requires a balance. The pattern will hold that progress plateaus because the assumptions driving what feels tried-and-true can no longer maintain as audiences constrict and platforms seek efficiency.
Three Assumptions that Shift the Scale
The traditional recruitment model — finding visible, identifiable students and reaching them directly — rests on three assumptions.
The moment of searching is targetable.
It’s built to intercept a student at the point of active search: the click, the form fill, the inquiry. But stealth shopping means most research now happens invisibly, before a student ever surfaces. And zero-click search means even the visible moment often ends without producing a lead.
It assumes there’s a purchasable list of the right people.
Direct targeting depends on identifying known, matchable prospects. Yet, even if list volume increases, match rates and trackability are still diminishing.
It assumes narrow targeting is the efficient choice.
Reaching fewer people with certainty has always seemed safer than reaching many with waste. But when every institution’s platforms chase the same shrinking pool of high-intent names, narrow targeting becomes a bidding war over an ever-smaller audience. What used to be efficient gets expensive once everyone narrows toward the same names at once.
Meanwhile, what’s often considered the ‘traditional’ recruitment approach — paid search, last-click attribution, the reliable capture of in-market demand — is being slowly dismantled by the same AI systems reshaping how students search. Seer Interactive found paid search click-through rates fall from roughly 20% to 6% on queries where an AI Overview appears education is among the categories most affected, with AI Overviews now surfacing on the large majority of education-related searches.
Securing the Shortlist
Regardless of what an LLM surfaces, what a friend recommends, or what Google returns, institutions have to secure a place in the mind of the person searching before the search happens. And while a degree is arguably a high-consideration good, our tactics treat it as a fast-moving good. Research on purchase behavior consistently finds that most decisions are shaped by a preference formed before the buyer ever enters an active search — with only a small share of any buyer cohort actively in-market at a given moment. Students searching for a college are no exception. By the time most start actively comparing schools, a shortlist has already formed. And if an institution isn’t on it, no amount of retargeting after the fact will put it there.
That’s brand.
Brand Defined
If we make the argument that higher education marketing requires balance across brand work and admissions, we must define both in relationship to each other. It isn’t really a question of brand versus admissions, or activation versus awareness. Getting to balance means defining or framing “brand” at two levels: first as marketing, and then how we activate ‘it’ through advertising.
As marketing, brand is the promise an institution makes and the identity it commits to keeping consistent across every touchpoint. It’s the answer to what this institution is and who it’s for, expressed the same way no matter where a student encounters it. When we explore this dynamic through the lens of advertising, it becomes a question of media choice and effect. What’s the expected outcome, and how does each effort move the institution closer to the sale? It’s through that view that marketing science helps to not only frame this dynamic, but also show why “brand” can create a compounding effect.
Sale and Saleability
We can draw on marketing science to draw a useful distinction by breaking the path to purchase to its simplest form: a sale is a single transaction, closed with one buyer at one moment.
Saleability is the underlying propensity to be bought at all, built over time across every future buyer, whether they’re shopping today or not. Applied to higher ed, brand builds saleability, the presence that makes an institution the one a student already leans toward. Admissions, meanwhile, focuses on those in-market — or “closes the sale.”
We see this dynamic play out in a few ways across marketing:
- Response rates to direct marketing rise considerably once brand communications are added to the mix— a well-documented pattern across IPA’s database of case studies. Strong brands make every subsequent activation dollar more effective, not just their own campaigns.
- Timescales matter, and when explored across both the long- and short-term, long-term campaigns delivered 25% lower ROI than short-term campaigns but were 75% more likely to deliver very large profit growth.
- Campaigns improving three or more brand metrics — awareness, trust, differentiation, and others — report dramatically higher rates of both reduced price sensitivity and very large profit growth than campaigns improving none.
And within our own category:
- 73% of parents felt that a college’s brand or name recognition was important. Only 3% said that it was not at all important.
- Brand/name recognition is important to students — 69% of students said that a college’s name recognition and brand are important to them.
Brand Defended
Establishing that “brand” performs is not the same as being able to defend it. To defend “brand,” in the case of higher education marketing, is to develop a shared sense of how it should perform, in relation to recruitment.
What does brand build? Saleability. The shortlist a student has already formed before the search ever starts.
How does it interact with recruitment? As a multiplier, not a substitute.
Where does the handoff occur? At the moment stealth shopping ends and active search begins.
Within this relationship we can begin to determine where the relationship takes place and how brand
| Brand | Admissions | |
| What it builds | ||
| Outcome | Saleability: measured through brand search volume, web analytics, and tracking/lift studies (awareness, consideration, perception) | The sale: measured through conversion rate, cost per application, yield |
| How it interacts | ||
| Messaging | Emotional, identity-driven: answers who the institution is and who it’s for | Rational, action-driven: answers what to do next and by when |
| Targeting | Broad: reaches the roughly 95% of future students not yet in-market. | Narrow: reaches the roughly 5% actively comparing schools right now |
| Media | High-reach, high-attention channels: CTV/OTT, OOH, sponsorship, social video | Search, retargeting, email, direct response |
| Where it hands off | ||
| Timescale | Long: effects build over 3-6+ months and compound over years | Short: effects appear within a single admissions cycle |
Return on Brand
A 2026 study from Google and Tracksuit analyzed 31 brands across 15 categories over a year, linking brand-health tracking data to Google’s own share-of-search figures. For brands earlier in their awareness curve, every five-point gain in brand awareness produced a matching five-point gain in share of search. Share-of-search movement also preceded market-share movement by six to 12 months, consistent with the lead time cited above.
Share of search is the earliest signal admissions will get. A shortlist forms before an application does, and that shortlist shows up in Google before it shows up in a CRM. Because the reality is that we rarely make decisions based on a blank slate.
Students arrive at search with a shortlist already in mind, shaped by everything they’ve seen and heard long before they typed a query. Simply narrowing our focus to that final moment won’t get us on the list, but building the brand long before it will.
