Heart Over Hype: Marketing That Sees Students First
Kevin Tyler reconnects with higher ed leader and consultant Jaime Hunt to talk about her new book, Heart Over Hype: Transforming Higher Ed Marketing with Empathy. But this isn’t just a book plug; it’s a call to action.
After decades in campus communications, Hunt now runs Solve Higher Ed Marketing, helping institutions refine not just what they say, but how they say it. Her message? Empathy isn’t fluff. It’s foundational. And if higher education wants to reconnect with the communities it serves, it has to start by seeing students as more than prospects.
Hunt breaks empathy into three actionable layers: cognitive (anticipating needs), emotional (connecting through feeling), and phenomenological (understanding lived experience). It’s that third one—deep empathy—that she argues higher ed marketing has been missing. “It’s not about being nice,” she says. “It’s about being human.”
With humor, heart, and a healthy dose of frustration, Hunt and Tyler unpack how too many campaigns still lead with institutional ego rather than student insight. The result? Marketing that feels cold, generic, and out of touch. Through the lens of her work at Winston-Salem State, Hunt shows how shifting to empathy-first messaging not only changed perception, but outcomes—student satisfaction, belonging, and graduation rates rose.
One of her key tools? The “empathy audit,” a reality check for materials and processes that asks: Does this make the reader feel seen? Or small?
But Hunt goes deeper, challenging leaders to build cultures where good ideas don’t get stuck in the org chart and where students of all ages—traditional, returning, or parenting—see themselves in the stories being told.
Marketing may not save higher ed alone, but Hunt makes the case that it can lead the way—if we listen more closely, lead more openly, and remember that behind every click or campus visit is a person wondering if they’ll belong.
