Universities are moving in the same direction, using AI for imagery, video, translation and personalised content. Some of it is excellent. Some of it worries me, because the audience universities most want to reach is the most sceptical of all.

In January, the IAB and Sonata Insights published research on attitudes to AI-generated advertising among Gen Z and millennial consumers in the US. 82% of advertising executives believed young consumers felt positive about AI-made ads. Only 45% of consumers actually did. Gen Z were almost twice as likely as millennials to feel negative (39% against 20%). Yet 73% said knowing an ad was made with AI would either make them more likely to buy or make no difference.

Why AI content has become a reputation issue

Read together, those findings point one way. Young people are comfortable with AI. What they object to is being misled by it. Clear disclosure costs very little, and being caught out costs a great deal.

For a university the risk is sharper than for most brands, because so much of what we sell is evidence: real students, real campuses and real outcomes. An AI-generated image of a seminar that never happened, or a synthetic student in a recruitment video, makes a claim about the student experience that isn’t true.

AI can carry your message. It must never invent your evidence.

What I’d ask every university marketing team to do

Never use AI to depict what doesn’t exist. No synthetic students, campus scenes, events or outcomes presented as real. If an image is illustrative, make that obvious.

Disclose clearly and early. Label AI-generated video, voices and imagery. The research suggests it rarely costs you trust, and it protects you when someone asks.

Use AI where it adds value. Translation, accessibility, captioning, versioning content for different audiences and helping small teams produce more of what’s genuinely theirs. That’s where the gains are, and none of it requires pretending.

Get consent for every likeness. Anyone whose face or voice is cloned, staff or students, should give explicit, informed consent that they can withdraw, with clear limits on how it’s used.

Agree the rules before the tools. Write a short, public AI content policy now, before the first problem forces one on you. It’s far easier to defend a principle you set in advance.

The opportunity

AI will be part of every university’s marketing within a few years. The institutions that set honest rules early will be trusted when others are caught out, and they’ll be free to use the technology confidently rather than nervously.

I’m learning a lot by doing this myself, and I’ll share more on Season 2 of the podcast, including the things I’d never let a digital twin do.

Edelman and LinkedIn have tracked how these professional audiences form judgements for several years. In their 2024 research, 73% of decision-makers said an organisation’s thought leadership was a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities than its marketing materials.

Universities aren’t B2B companies, but the parallel is close. The audiences that matter most for reputation are professional, sceptical and short of time, and they trust people far more than institutions.

Why your people have become your reputation channel

Global rankings ask thousands of academics and employers which universities they rate. Those judgements aren’t formed by advertising. They come from research people have read, talks they’ve heard, collaborators they’ve worked with and, increasingly, what they see from a university’s people online.

In the channel workshops I run with universities, LinkedIn comes up every time, and the strongest voices are rarely the official ones. Institutional pages post regularly to a modest audience, while a handful of academics and leaders, often with no support at all, reach far more of the people who matter. Very few universities have mapped who those people are.

A university’s reputation is built by its people, one conversation at a time.

What I’d ask every vice-chancellor and director of communications to do

Help leaders show up authentically. Give senior leaders a light-touch plan: a few themes, a realistic rhythm and help with the mechanics, in their own voice. Ghost-written posts are easy to spot and quickly undermine trust.

Back 20 to 30 academic voices. Identify academics in your priority subjects who are willing to share their work and views, then give them training, time and visibility. They’ll reach peers and employers your corporate channels never will.

Make your priorities easy to talk about. You can’t script academics, and you shouldn’t try. But you can make sure the university’s research, partnerships and ambitions are easy for them to share.

Measure the right audience. Likes are a poor proxy. Track who’s engaging: academics at peer institutions, employers in priority sectors and policymakers. That’s the audience that shapes reputation.

Protect people who speak up. Visibility brings criticism. Give staff clear guidance, a named contact and support if a post attracts attention they didn’t expect.

The opportunity

This is the cheapest reputation channel a university has, and one of the most underused. It needs time, trust and a little coordination rather than a large budget.

I’ll be talking to vice-chancellors and academics who do this well on Season 2 of the podcast, because the universities that support their people to be visible will find their reputation travels much further than their own channels could take it.

Those schemes exist for a good reason. Applicants have always trusted other students more than they trust us. When researchers asked 1,475 UK applicants about their sources of information, only 26% rated university advertising as highly trustworthy, while campus visits and the UCAS website were each trusted by more than half. That study is a decade old, and everything about how young people search since then, from TikTok to Reddit threads, has pushed further in the same direction.

Why student voice has become a reputation issue

The most persuasive marketing a university has is a current student talking honestly about their experience. The difficulty is that it only works if it’s genuinely honest, and most institutions find that uncomfortable.

So creator programmes tend to go one of two ways. Some are so tightly scripted and approved that the content reads like an advert, and audiences discount it instantly. Others have little structure at all, which leaves students unpaid, untrained and unsure of the rules, and leaves the university exposed when a post misleads or a disclosure is missing.

The more you script a student, the less anyone believes them.

What I’d ask every head of marketing and recruitment to do

Pay student creators properly, and label it. If a student is creating content for you, it’s work. Pay them fairly and make sure paid content is clearly marked, in line with the ASA and CMA guidance. Transparency doesn’t weaken the content, but getting caught without it will.

Recruit for range, not polish. Choose students across subjects, backgrounds, routes in and year groups, including commuters, mature students and those who found the first term hard. The applicants watching want to see someone like them.

Brief on facts, then let go. Give creators accurate information on fees, support and entry requirements and a clear sense of what’s off-limits, then let them speak in their own voice. Review for accuracy, not for tone.

Listen where students talk. Monitor what’s said about you on Reddit, in reviews and in comment threads, and respond like a person rather than a press office. A helpful reply from a real member of staff often does more than a campaign.

Look after them. Creators can attract criticism and the occasional pile-on. Give them training, support and a named contact, and make it easy for them to step back.

The opportunity

Honest peer voices are the scarcest and most trusted asset in student recruitment, and they cost far less than paid media. The universities that build fair, professional and transparent creator programmes will earn trust that advertising alone can’t buy.

I’d love to hear from student creators themselves on Season 2 of the podcast, alongside the marketers who work with them, because the best programmes are being designed with students rather than for them.

Times Higher Education’s redundancy survey this spring gave a sense of what it feels like on the inside. Of 1,095 staff who responded, 198 had been made redundant in the past two years. Among those who hadn’t, 68% had seen redundancies in their own department. 93% said morale had been damaged, and 59% feared losing their job within the next year. It’s a self-selecting sample, but the direction is unmistakable.

Why restructuring has become a reputation issue

I’ve written before about reputation belonging to everyone in a university. A restructure tests that idea harder than anything else, because the people who carry the institution’s story are the people being affected.

They’re also your most widely read channel. Departing colleagues post on LinkedIn, write candid reviews and talk at conferences. Remaining staff tell friends, students and prospective colleagues what it feels like to work there. And academic reputation is shaped by peers at other institutions (the same people asked to rate universities in global reputation surveys), who hear all of it.

None of this means universities shouldn’t make difficult decisions. Many have no choice. But the way a decision is communicated and carried out will be remembered long after the savings are banked.

In a restructure, your staff become your most widely read channel. What they say on the way out will outlive the savings.

What I’d ask every vice-chancellor and director of communications to do

Tell staff first, every time. Nobody should learn about their own department’s future from a news site or a union email. If the press will hear on Tuesday, staff hear on Monday.

Give managers a narrative, not a script. Heads of department carry most of these conversations. Equip them with the honest reasons, the timeline and the support available, and trust them to talk like human beings.

Treat leavers with dignity. Good references, outplacement support, a proper goodbye and a way to stay connected cost very little. People remember how they were treated at the end, and so does everyone watching.

Explain what you’re protecting. Staff and students need to hear the strategy, not just the cuts. What will the university be better at after this? If leaders can’t say, others will fill the silence for them.

Measure sentiment as closely as coverage. Track staff surveys, review sites and professional networks with the same discipline you apply to the media. They’re often the earliest warning of a reputation problem.

The opportunity

This cycle will turn. When it does, the universities that restructured with honesty and care will find it far easier to recruit good people back, and their standing with academic peers will have held.

I’ll be talking to leaders who’ve been through restructures on Season 2 of the podcast about what they’d do differently, because how a university behaves in its hardest year says more about its brand than any campaign.

The United States is already there. WICHE’s projections show American high-school graduates peaked last year at around 3.9 million, the highest number on record, and will fall by about 13% to roughly 3.4 million by 2041.

The HEPI report also highlights a second pressure. As the pool shrinks, higher-tariff universities are likely to recruit more deeply, taking students who would previously have gone elsewhere.

Why demographics have become a brand issue

When demand is high, almost every university can fill its places, and a lot of marketing is effectively about volume: reach, conversion and clearing. That model stops working when there are fewer applicants to go round. In a shrinking market, students choose between institutions they’ve already heard of and already rate, and recruitment becomes a contest of reputation.

The problem is timing. Brand building pays back over years, not recruitment cycles. A university that waits until applications fall to decide what it wants to be known for will be starting the work just as it needs the results.

Brand works on a five-year lag. If you start building it when the decline arrives, you’ve already lost the decline.

What I’d ask every university executive team to do

Model demand to 2040, not to next cycle. Look at your recruitment by region, subject and tariff against the population projections. Some markets will hold up far better than others, and the board should see that picture now.

Decide what you’ll be known for. Choose the handful of subjects, strengths and promises that will define the university in 2035, and start investing in them consistently. Distinctiveness takes years to register with families and teachers.

Learn from the United States. American institutions are living through their decline now. Some are merging, some are specialising and some are recruiting adult and international students in new ways. Their successes and failures are a free preview.

Shift budget from volume to reputation, gradually. Keep recruitment marketing working, but move a growing share into the things that build long-term preference: relationships with teachers and advisers, visible academic expertise, outcomes evidence and distinctive content.

Invest in schools and colleges now. When numbers fall, the advisers and teachers who guide students become even more influential. The universities they trust will be the ones that invested in those relationships when it wasn’t urgent.

The opportunity

The next few years of rising demand are the cheapest time the sector will ever have to build its brands. The universities that use them well will enter the 2030s with a reputation that recruits for them. The rest will be competing on price and clearing.

I’ll be exploring this with leaders in the UK and the US on Season 2 of the podcast, because the American experience over the next few years is the best warning, and the best guide, that British universities are going to get.

The financial backdrop explains why. The Office for Students reports that 35.8% of English providers ran a deficit in 2024-25, and 119 (42.7%) forecast one for 2025-26. In its most severe scenario, up to 196 providers, 70% of the sector, would be in deficit by 2028-29. The regulator itself now says some institutions may need new business models, “including mergers and other forms of consolidation”. When that reaches a governing body, the conversation stops being hypothetical.

The brand questions nobody plans for

Most consolidation is designed by finance and legal teams, for good reasons. But every structural option carries a reputational consequence, and those are usually discovered late.

Do both names survive, or does one absorb the other? What does a graduate’s certificate say? How do research partners, international agents and alumni react when the institution they know is now part of something else? What happens to each university’s position in league tables, which depend on data that may be combined or reported differently? And how does a member of staff explain the change to a worried student at a careers fair?

Greenwich and Kent chose to keep both brands within a group. That’s a sensible answer for them, but it isn’t automatically right for everyone, and the choice deserves the same rigour as the financial model.

Every structural option in a merger carries a reputational consequence, and most are discovered far too late.

What I’d ask every marketing director to do

Know your brand equity before anyone asks. Measure how each audience in each priority market sees you today. If a merger or partnership is proposed, you’ll need evidence of what’s at stake, not instinct.

Get into the room early. Brand architecture options (one name, endorsed brands or a family of separate names) should be modelled alongside the financial options, not after the decision has been made.

Bring realism to the recruitment forecast. The OfS found that international entrants fell 7.7% in 2024-25, 9% below what providers had forecast, yet the sector still projects 22.5% growth by 2028-29. Marketing knows the markets better than anyone, and a merger case built on optimistic numbers is a reputational risk in its own right.

Protect the student promise. Applicants and current students need to know, quickly and plainly, what changes and what doesn’t. Uncertainty spreads faster than any announcement.

Tell staff first. Colleagues are your most trusted messengers, and they’ll hear rumours long before the press release. Give them the facts and the words to explain them.

A moment to simplify

Handled badly, consolidation confuses everyone who matters to a university. Handled well, it’s a rare chance to clarify what each institution stands for, cut duplication and tell a stronger, simpler story about why the combination makes sense.

It’s one of the leadership questions I most want to explore with guests on Season 2 of the podcast, because the next wave of decisions is coming quickly, and the institutions that prepare their brand thinking now will make far better ones.

Adverts aren’t the whole market, and the Institute of Student Employers is right to say so. Its 2026 survey found that the large employers it represents actually hired 4% more graduates this year, although most of that growth came from a handful of firms restarting their schemes. But look at what sits alongside it. Those employers received 141 applications for every graduate vacancy, and 172 in London. HESA’s latest Graduate Outcomes data shows graduate unemployment at 7%, up from 5% in 2017/18. Fewer doors are visible, and far more people are knocking on each one.

Why careers data has become a reputation issue

For two decades, a lot of university marketing has sold the degree as a ticket, with graduates in gowns against a city skyline, headline employability percentages and the quiet promise that the investment pays off. That promise was always more complicated than the brochure suggested. In a market like this, it becomes a liability.

The public mood had already shifted. In Public First polling this spring, 65% of people described the total debt students take on as unfair. In the US, 51% of Gen Z graduates told Indeed and Harris Poll that their degree was a waste of money. When the job search gets harder, every gap between what was promised and what happened becomes a story, told by graduates themselves on the channels prospective students trust most.

When the job market tightens, every gap between what we promised and what happened becomes a story, told by our own graduates.

What I’d ask every marketing director to do

Audit every employability claim. Go through the website, prospectus and campaign copy and check each one against current data, course by course. A claim that was defensible in 2022 may not be now.

Show capability, not destination. Families want evidence that a course builds skills employers will pay for. Placements, live briefs, portfolios and named employer partners are far more convincing than one institution-wide percentage.

Be honest about the market. Students and parents read the news. Universities that acknowledge the tougher graduate market, and explain clearly what they’re doing about it, will earn far more trust than those still running last decade’s message.

Put careers and marketing in the same room. The careers service usually knows what’s really happening to graduates months before marketing does. Their insight should shape the story, and their work deserves to be part of it.

Look after recent graduates. They’re your most credible voices. Support them, listen to them and give them a reason to speak well of you, especially those who found the first year hard.

The opportunity

None of this means the degree has lost its value. HESA still finds three in four UK graduates in high-skilled work fifteen months on, and over a career the evidence favours graduates strongly. But the institutions that come through this period with their reputations intact will be the ones that stopped selling a ticket and started proving a capability.

It’s a conversation I’ll be having with careers and marketing leaders on Season 2 of the podcast, because the universities that get this right in the next two years will set the standard for everyone else.

That last figure is the one I keep coming back to. It describes a rejection no university saw happen. There was no enquiry, no open day booking and no website visit to show up in the analytics. The student simply never arrived.

Search itself is moving the same way. Pew Research Center tracked almost 69,000 real Google searches last year and found people clicked a result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, against 15% when it didn’t. The answer is increasingly read on the results page, not on your website.

Why the shortlist has become a reputation issue

When I wrote about AI search earlier this month, the question was what these tools say about your university. The harder question is what happens next. A family asks for the best universities for nursing in the north of England, reads a confident paragraph and builds a shortlist from it. If you’re missing from that paragraph, or you appear with an out-of-date fee or a stale statistic, you lose them before your marketing has had a chance to work.

Most of our measurement can’t see this. Website sessions, enquiry volumes and conversion rates all start after the moment that now matters most. A university can report healthy engagement while quietly disappearing from the lists families actually use.

The most important shortlist in recruitment is now written by a machine, and most universities have no idea whether they’re on it.

What I’d ask every director of marketing and recruitment to do

Ask applicants how they built their shortlist. Add a simple question to applicant and enrolment surveys: did you use an AI tool, and what did it tell you? Ask the people who declined your offer as well. It’s the cheapest insight available, and very few universities are collecting it.

Test the questions families really ask. Each term, run the prompts a parent or sixth former would use, by subject, region and price point, across the main assistants. Record whether you appear, how you’re described and which sources are cited.

Retire website sessions as a headline measure. Falling traffic may simply mean the answer was read elsewhere. Report presence and accuracy in AI answers alongside enquiries, applications and conversion, so the board sees the whole funnel.

Publish one clear source of facts. Fees, entry requirements, outcomes, accreditation and campus details, kept current on a single, well-structured page for each course. AI tools reward clarity and consistency, and they punish contradictions between your prospectus, your website and third-party listings.

Earn the citations. Assistants lean heavily on independent sources. Accurate entries in guides, credible coverage and well-maintained listings now shape the shortlist as much as your own pages do.

The opportunity

Few universities are measuring this yet, so the ones that start now will see the invisible shortlist before their competitors do, and recruit from it while others wonder where demand went.

I’ll be asking recruitment leaders on Season 2 of the podcast how they’re tracking it, because the institutions that solve this measurement problem first will set the standard for the rest of the sector.

Asked separately, 77% said a degree isn’t good value for money at current prices, up from 51% when the question was last asked in 2014.

Yet the same research points to something more hopeful. As Wonkhe put it, the public seems to like its universities but not its degrees. Goodwill towards universities as institutions has held up far better than confidence in the degree as a personal investment.

Why this has become a reputation issue for the whole sector

For a decade, most of our public argument has rested on graduate earnings: go to university and you’ll be better off. That case was always narrower than what universities actually do, and it’s now the part of the story the public believes least, at the very moment the graduate jobs market is tightening.

Meanwhile, the case people do accept is barely made. Universities train the nurses, teachers and engineers a region depends on. They run research that changes treatment in local hospitals. They anchor city economies and regenerate whole neighbourhoods. When universities talk to the public, they mostly talk about the product, while the public seems to value the institution.

We keep defending the price of the product. The public is telling us it values the institution.

What I’d ask every university leader to do

Lead with public value. In national and regional messaging, start with what universities do for everyone, not only what a degree does for the individual. It’s the argument people are ready to hear.

Make research personal and local. A named treatment in a local hospital, a business saved by a partnership, a school transformed by better-trained teachers. Impact case studies written for funders rarely land with the public, but specific stories do.

Work with your competitors. No single university can shift national opinion. Mission groups, regional consortia and sector bodies need a shared, sustained story, told consistently by institutions that usually compete for the same students. (I chaired the Russell Group’s marketing forum long enough to know how hard this is, and how much it’s worth when it works.)

Answer the value question honestly. Where a course genuinely leads to strong outcomes, show the evidence. Where the picture is mixed, say what you’re doing about it. Defensiveness only deepens the doubt.

Measure public trust, not just applicant demand. Recruitment can stay healthy while public confidence erodes. Track what local and national audiences think of you, because politicians and funders certainly do.

The opportunity

Public goodwill towards universities is still there, but it won’t last indefinitely without a better argument. The institutions, and the sector, that start making the case for public value now will be in a far stronger position when the next funding settlement or policy fight arrives.

It’s a debate I want to have with university leaders on Season 2 of the podcast, because the sector’s next story should start with what universities give back.

The sector is responding. Nearly two-thirds of students (65%) say assessment has changed significantly because of AI, and 38% now have AI tools provided by their university, up from 9% two years ago. Enforcement is hardening too. A Guardian investigation last year found almost 7,000 proven cases of AI cheating at UK universities in 2023-24, 5.1 for every 1,000 students and more than three times the rate of the year before.

Why assessment has become a reputation issue

A degree is a promise. To an employer, the classification on a certificate says that someone was tested and met a standard. If employers start to doubt whether the graduate in front of them wrote their own dissertation, that doubt doesn’t stay with the student. It attaches to the name of the university.

Most of the conversation so far has happened inside academic quality committees, which is right, but it has left out the people responsible for what the institution promises publicly. Marketing teams are still writing employability claims and graduate profiles without knowing how assessment has changed underneath them, and employers are rarely told at all.

If employers stop trusting the grade, they’ll stop trusting the name on the certificate.

What I’d ask every university leadership team to do

Explain how your assessment holds up. Employers, parents and applicants deserve a plain account of how your degrees test genuine ability now, whether that’s oral assessment, supervised work or process portfolios. Put it where they’ll find it, not in a quality handbook.

Bring marketing and employer relations into the room. The group redesigning assessment should include the people who talk to employers and write the institution’s public promises. They’ll spot the reputational risks early, and they can turn the changes into a story worth telling.

Give students clarity, not suspicion. The HEPI survey shows students remain unsure what’s acceptable. A short, honest guide to acceptable use, consistent across departments, protects them and the university. (Half of students now think their institution should provide AI tools, which seems a reasonable expectation.)

Present AI fluency as a graduate strength. Employers want graduates who can use these tools well and judge their output critically. Show how your courses build that, and AI becomes evidence of capability rather than a risk you’re managing quietly.

Talk to employers directly. Ask your main graduate recruiters what worries them about AI and graduate quality, and tell them what you’ve changed. It’s the kind of conversation that builds trust long before a problem becomes a headline.

The opportunity

Every university is changing its assessment. Very few are talking about it. The first institutions to make the integrity of their degrees visible will own a simple and powerful position with employers: you can trust our graduates.

It’s a theme I want to explore with academic and marketing leaders on Season 2 of the podcast, because the credibility of the degree is now as much a reputation question as a teaching one.

The reason is simple. I now spend my working week with universities in very different countries, and the same questions come up everywhere. How do we show up in AI search? What actually moves reputation? How do we build a team that can do more without burning out? The best answers I hear rarely make it onto a conference slide, so I want to give them a bigger stage.

What’s changing

Season 2 is weekly, global and focused on practice. It opens with short solo episodes from me, and guest conversations are coming. Every guest will be someone doing the work: chief marketing officers, communications directors, recruitment leads and, where I can persuade them, vice-chancellors. I’ll ask each of them what they’d do differently if they started again, which tends to be where the real insight is.

There are three threads running through the season:

1. AI in practice. The reality rather than the hype: which tools teams are using, what they’ve stopped doing, and what went wrong along the way.
2. Reputation and performance. How institutions measure perception, what rankings do and don’t tell them, and the decisions that genuinely shift the dial.
3. Leadership. Building teams, winning the argument with senior leadership, and keeping creativity alive in organisations that run on committees.

The best answers I hear rarely make it onto a conference slide. I want to give them a bigger stage.

Why it matters to me

I’ve been lucky to learn from generous people throughout my career, first in hospitality and then at Newcastle University and through the Russell Group forum I used to chair. Most of what I know about leading a marketing function came from conversations over coffee with peers who were a step ahead. The podcast is my way of opening those conversations up to anyone who wants to listen.

How to hear it first

Season 2 is live now, and every episode is here. If you’d like each new episode and my latest thought leadership in your inbox once a week, you can sign up here. And if there’s a guest you think I should be talking to, I’d genuinely love to hear from you.

That shift matters, because a policy change is no longer just an operational problem. It’s a reputation event. It changes how welcome a student feels, how safe a partner thinks an investment is and how confident a funder is in an institution’s future. The university hasn’t done anything differently, yet the way it’s perceived has moved.

Most institutions are still reacting

In my experience, the typical response follows a familiar pattern. The policy lands, the planning team models the financial impact, and communications are asked for a statement within the day. By the time the statement goes out, agents, competitors and social media have already told the story for you.

The institutions that handle these moments well treat policy as part of their reputation strategy, all year round. They do three things differently.

They watch the horizon. Someone in the institution is explicitly responsible for tracking policy in the markets that matter most, and for asking what each change will do to perception as well as to numbers. That person sits close to the marketing and communications team, rather than being separated from it by three layers of governance.

They prepare the story before they need it. If a change to post-study work rights is being consulted on, the clearest message for students in your top five markets should be drafted, tested and agreed before the decision is announced. Speed matters, and so does tone. Reassurance delivered a week late reads as an afterthought.

They speak through others. A statement from the university is useful. A short video from a current student explaining what the change actually means for them is far more credible, as is a clear briefing for agents and partner institutions who’ll be answering the questions on your behalf.

A policy change is no longer just an operational problem. It’s a reputation event.

Domestic policy counts too

It’s easy to think of this purely in international terms. Domestic decisions on tuition fees, funding for research and the financial health of the sector shape reputation just as directly. When headlines talk about universities in financial difficulty, every institution is read through that lens, whether or not it applies to them. Staying quiet in that climate is a choice, and audiences will interpret it.

I’d argue the best response is evidence, consistently presented. Show your impact on the regional economy, your graduates’ outcomes and the research partnerships that depend on you. Make it easy for local MPs, business leaders and journalists to tell a positive story about you, because they’ll be asked about the sector whether you’ve briefed them or not.

Where to start

If I were advising a leadership team this term, I’d suggest a simple exercise. List the five policy decisions most likely to affect your institution in the next eighteen months. For each one, agree who owns the response, which audiences will feel it first and what you’d want them to hear from you on day one. It takes a morning, and it’ll change how quickly and calmly you respond when the headlines arrive.

Policy will keep moving faster than university committees. The institutions that protect their reputation will be the ones that have already done the thinking.

That gap matters, because reputation sits upstream of almost everything else. It shapes who applies, who partners with you, who funds you and who wants to work for you. Treating it as a soft, unmeasurable asset leaves leadership teams making some of their biggest decisions on instinct.

What measuring it properly looks like

In my experience, the institutions that manage reputation well do three things consistently.

They define the audiences that count. Academics in your disciplines, employers in your region, prospective students in priority markets, policymakers. Each holds a different view of you, for different reasons, and a single “brand health” score hides more than it reveals.

They connect perception to performance. Rankings, survey data, media share of voice and recruitment funnels tell you far more together than apart. When we brought these views together at Newcastle University, it changed the conversations we had with academic leaders, because we could show where perception lagged reality and where it was ahead of it.

They act on the gaps. Measurement is only worth the decisions it prompts. Sometimes the right move is a campaign. More often it’s a sustained, unglamorous effort: better academic engagement, more visible research partnerships, a sharper story told consistently by everyone who represents the institution.

Measurement is only worth the decisions it prompts.

Where to start

If your institution doesn’t yet have a clear view of its reputation by audience, I’d start small. Pick two or three audiences that matter most to your strategy, agree how you’ll track them, and review the picture with senior leadership every quarter. It’s remarkable how quickly reputation stops being a matter of opinion once it’s on the same agenda as everything else.

I’m always happy to compare notes with colleagues working on this, so do get in touch if it’s on your list.

Higher education is very good at learning from itself. Conferences, benchmarking clubs and sector bodies mean ideas travel quickly between universities. The downside is that we often end up with the same ideas, executed in slightly different colours. If you want a reputation strategy that genuinely stands apart, I’d argue you need to look further.

What hospitality taught me

In hotels, reputation is measured daily. Every review on every platform is read, scored and answered, usually within hours. Guest satisfaction is tracked by property, by department and by shift, and it’s tied directly to how teams are recognised and rewarded. When we rebuilt our approach at the Cairn Group, we were managing more than 100 social channels and treating every one of them as part of the brand.

Most universities still check perception once or twice a year, through a survey or a rankings release. By the time the data arrives, the moment has passed. Borrowing the hospitality habit of continuous listening, with clear ownership for responding, would change how quickly institutions spot and fix problems.

What consumer brands do differently

The best consumer brands are disciplined about a small number of messages. They decide what they want to be known for and they repeat it, consistently, for years. Universities, understandably, want to celebrate everything: every school, every discovery, every award. The result is often a brand that says a great deal and is remembered for very little.

I’d encourage leadership teams to borrow the consumer discipline of choosing. Pick three things you want the world to associate with you, and make sure every campaign, every press release and every academic profile reinforces at least one of them.

Universities are very good at learning from each other. The downside is that we often end up with the same ideas.

What sport understands about belonging

Sport has mastered something higher education talks about constantly: a sense of belonging that lasts a lifetime. Clubs build it through rituals, storytelling, behind-the-scenes access and giving fans a role in the story. Universities have all the raw ingredients, from graduation to alumni networks, yet rarely use them with the same confidence.

And technology, quietly, everywhere

Many of the tools that would transform university reputation work already exist in other sectors. Social listening platforms, customer data platforms, review management, AI-assisted content and real-time dashboards are standard in retail and travel. Universities often buy one of them, in isolation, and wonder why little changes. The difference outside the sector is that the technology is connected to a clear process and someone accountable for acting on what it shows.

How to make this practical

None of this needs a major programme. I’d start by asking each member of your marketing and communications leadership team to bring one idea from outside higher education to your next away day, along with a view on how you’d adapt it. Some won’t fit. A few will be far better than anything you’d have found at a sector conference.

I’ve found that the most valuable question in any reputation strategy session is a simple one: who outside our sector does this brilliantly, and what would they do in our position? It’s a question I’ll be putting to guests throughout Season 2 of Marketing Greats in Higher Education.

A lecturer’s keynote at an international conference. A researcher’s interview on the radio. The person who answers the phone in admissions on results day. A finance colleague negotiating with a partner overseas. A student’s post about their first week. Each of those shapes reputation more directly than most campaigns, and most of the people involved have never been told they play a part.

Why the culture matters more than the campaign

Campaigns can raise awareness, but they can’t make a university trusted. Trust is built through experience, and experience is delivered by people. If your academics don’t feel connected to the institution’s story, they’ll tell their own. If professional services colleagues feel invisible, the care they show students won’t be part of how you describe yourself. Both are missed opportunities.

The universities I’ve seen do this well have stopped treating reputation as a department and started treating it as a shared responsibility, supported by the specialists.

The moments that shape how a university is seen are happening almost everywhere except in marketing.

What building that culture looks like

Make the story easy to tell. Most colleagues are happy to champion their institution if they know what to say. Give them a short, honest narrative about what the university stands for, with examples from their own area, and update it regularly. When we created a clearer strategic narrative at Newcastle, academic colleagues told us they finally had language they were comfortable using.

Treat academics as partners. Researchers are often the most credible voices a university has. An academic engagement strategy that helps them share their work, prepares them for media and recognises their contribution to the institution’s profile pays back many times over. It needs to feel like support, not surveillance.

Bring professional services into the picture. The people running accommodation, finance, estates, IT and student services are part of the brand experience every day. Include them in how reputation is discussed, share the data with them and celebrate the moments where their work made a difference.

Measure it, and say so. If reputation matters, it should appear in team objectives and leadership conversations, not just in the marketing plan. Even a simple measure, reviewed regularly, tells colleagues that this is everyone’s business.

Recognise the people who do it well. Some of the most effective changes I’ve made as a leader were about recognition. Thank the professor who gave up an evening for a recruitment event. Share the story of the receptionist whose kindness turned into a glowing review. Culture follows what leaders notice.

The role of the marketing and communications team

None of this diminishes the specialists. If anything, it raises the bar for them. The team’s job becomes enabling the whole institution: providing the narrative, the training, the tools and the insight that help thousands of colleagues represent the university well. It’s a more strategic role, and in my experience it’s a far more rewarding one.

If I could leave one thought with university leaders, it would be this: your reputation is already being built by everyone in your institution, every day. The only choice is whether you support them to do it well.

That answer is now one of the most influential summaries of your institution that exists. It’s written by a machine, drawing on whatever it can find about you, and most universities have very little idea what it says.

Why this changes the reputation game

For twenty years, universities have optimised for search engines that returned a list of links. You could compete for the top spots, and the user still arrived on your page, where you controlled the story. AI answers work differently. They summarise, compare and recommend. They might mention you, describe you inaccurately or leave you out entirely, and the user may never see your own words.

The sources these systems rely on also look different. Clear, factual content on your own site matters, but so do rankings, news coverage, independent reviews, Wikipedia, academic profiles and what other people say about you online. In other words, AI search rewards exactly the things a strong reputation strategy should already be building.

What an AI assistant says about your university is fast becoming one of the most influential summaries of you that exists.

What I’d ask every marketing director to do

Check what’s being said. Ask the main AI assistants the questions your priority audiences are asking, in the markets that matter to you, and record the answers. Do it every month. It’s the quickest way to understand where perception and reality have drifted apart.

Fix the facts at source. Many of the errors I’ve seen come from outdated or inconsistent information: old programme pages, conflicting statistics, a profile that hasn’t been updated in years. Clean, consistent, well-structured information across your own channels is the foundation.

Earn third-party proof. AI systems lean heavily on what others say. Strong media coverage, credible partnerships, independent recognition and active academic profiles all strengthen how you’re represented. This is reputation work in its truest sense, and it can’t be faked.

Answer the real questions. Students ask about cost, safety, graduate jobs and what life is genuinely like. Content that answers those questions plainly, with evidence, is far more likely to be used in an AI answer than another page of aspirational copy.

Give it an owner. Like social media a decade ago, AI search often falls between teams. Someone needs to be responsible for monitoring it, reporting on it and coordinating the response.

The opportunity

It would be easy to see this as another threat. I see it the other way round. AI search rewards institutions that are clear about who they are, consistent in how they describe themselves and genuinely respected by others. Those are the same qualities that have always built lasting reputations. The difference is that the gap between the institutions doing this well and those that aren’t is about to become much more visible.

This is one of the topics I’m most looking forward to exploring with guests on Season 2 of the podcast, because the teams experimenting now will set the standard for everyone else.

That may sound contradictory. It isn’t. Rankings shape the choices of students, partners, funders and governments, and pretending otherwise does an institution no favours. But a ranking is a reflection of what a university has already become. It shows you where you stand. It can’t tell you who you want to be.

The problem with chasing the table

When an institution sets “rise ten places” as its strategy, a few things tend to happen. Effort concentrates on the indicators that seem easiest to move. Decisions are made to suit the methodology rather than the mission. And when the results arrive, colleagues across the university feel measured by something they don’t understand and didn’t choose.

The improvements rarely last, because they’re not built on anything the institution genuinely values.

A ranking shows you where you stand. It can’t tell you who you want to be.

Using rankings well

The universities I’ve seen improve most consistently use rankings in a different way.

As a diagnostic. The underlying data is far more useful than the headline position. It shows how you’re perceived by academics and employers in different parts of the world, how your research is cited, how international your community is. Each of those tells you something worth knowing about your institution, ranked or not.

As a mirror on reputation. For many institutions, the gap between their actual quality and how they’re perceived is the biggest opportunity they have. If your research is excellent but your academic reputation lags, that’s a story you haven’t told well enough, to the right people, in the right places.

As a conversation starter. Rankings give leadership teams a shared, external view to discuss. Used carefully, that conversation can align a university around genuine priorities, rather than dividing it over a number.

What drove our results at Newcastle

When people ask me how Newcastle reached 110th, I tell them we didn’t start with the ranking. We started with what the University was genuinely strong at, built a global brand, research and reputation strategy around those strengths, and made sure the people who shape academic and employer reputation around the world actually heard about them. The ranking followed the work.

That’s the approach I’d recommend to any institution. Decide what you want to be known for. Measure how far perception has caught up with reality. Close the gap with sustained, honest effort, and let the rankings reflect it.

Rankings will keep evolving, and they should. The universities that thrive will be the ones that treat them as a mirror worth looking into regularly, and never mistake the reflection for the plan.

The teams getting real value have done something harder. They’ve treated AI as a design question about how work flows through the team, and they’ve been deliberate about it.

Start with the work nobody wants

The quickest wins I’ve seen come from the jobs that eat time without adding much: pulling weekly reports from five platforms, resizing assets for every channel, first drafts of routine copy, tagging and tidying CRM data. Automating that work well frees hours every week, and it builds trust in the technology because the results are easy to check.

At Newcastle we started with reporting. Bringing campaign data into one automated view meant the team stopped spending Monday mornings building spreadsheets and started spending them on what the numbers meant.

Then redesign the roles

Once the routine work is handled, the shape of the team should change. You need fewer people producing and more people deciding: strategists who can brief well, editors who can judge quality, analysts who can ask the right questions of the data. That’s a different skills profile, and it needs investment in training, not just software.

You need fewer people producing and more people deciding.

Build the infrastructure underneath

None of this works on messy data. The institutions moving fastest have invested in the unglamorous foundations: a well-governed CRM, consistent tracking, clear rules on what data AI tools can and can’t touch. It’s the least exciting part of the conversation and the one that decides whether everything else succeeds.

Keep people at the centre

Higher education is a human decision, often the biggest a young person makes. AI should give your team more time for the conversations, stories and creative ideas that persuade people, not replace them. The best AI-enabled teams I know are more human in how they show up, not less.

I’ll be exploring this in depth on Season 2 of Marketing Greats in Higher Education, with leaders who’ve done it well and some who’d do it differently next time.

In universities, reputation is one of those things, yet it rarely appears on a governing body’s agenda in any structured way. It comes up when something goes wrong, or when a rankings result arrives. That leaves boards reacting to reputation rather than overseeing it.

I’d like to see that change. Here are the five numbers I’d put in front of every university board, every quarter.

1. Reputation by priority audience

A single brand score hides more than it reveals. Boards should see how the institution is perceived by the three or four audiences that matter most to its strategy: prospective students in key markets, academics in priority disciplines, employers, and policymakers or funders. The trend over time matters more than any single reading.

2. The perception gap

This is the difference between how good an institution actually is, on measures like research quality or graduate outcomes, and how good it’s perceived to be. A large gap is an opportunity. It tells the board that the story hasn’t reached the people who need to hear it, and it gives the marketing and communications team a clear brief.

3. Share of voice in the conversations that count

How often is the university mentioned, and in what light, in the media, social channels and AI search results that its audiences actually use, compared with its real competitors? Boards don’t need every mention. They need to know whether the institution is gaining or losing ground.

Boards should be overseeing reputation, not just reacting to it.

4. Conversion from interest to commitment

Reputation shows up in behaviour. Enquiry to application, application to enrolment, first contact to research partnership: these conversion rates tell the board whether a strong reputation is turning into outcomes. A falling rate is often an early warning of a reputation issue before it appears anywhere else.

5. Reputational risk, assessed honestly

Every institution carries risks that could damage how it’s seen, from financial headlines to campus incidents to policy changes in key markets. Boards should see a short, honest assessment of the top risks, their likelihood, and how prepared the institution is to respond. It belongs alongside the financial risk register, because the two are closely linked.

Making it work

None of this needs a heavy reporting burden. A single page, updated quarterly, with clear trends and a short commentary from the director responsible, is enough to change the quality of the conversation. In my experience, what boards ask about is what institutions prioritise. Put reputation on the agenda with real numbers, and the rest of the organisation will start to manage it with the same seriousness.

If you’re a governor or a vice-chancellor and you’d like to compare notes on what this could look like for your institution, I’m always happy to talk.

I understand the logic. I’d still argue it’s usually the wrong call, and I’ve seen the consequences from both sides.

What hospitality taught me about downturns

At the Cairn Hotel Group, we operated in a sector where demand can fall off a cliff with very little warning. The brands that came through difficult periods strongest were rarely the ones that went quiet. They were the ones that kept investing in visibility, focused their spend ruthlessly on what worked and used the silence of competitors to take share. We grew revenue from £60M to £110M, and much of that growth came from staying visible when others weren’t.

The wider evidence points the same way. Research from the IPA and others has shown for years that brands which maintain their share of voice through a downturn tend to recover faster and grow more strongly afterwards. Reputation, once lost, is slow and expensive to rebuild.

Reputation, once lost, is slow and expensive to rebuild.

Why universities are especially exposed

Higher education has a long purchase cycle. A prospective international student may start researching two years before they enrol. A research partner may take longer still. Cut visibility this year, and the impact lands in recruitment and partnership pipelines in two or three years’ time, often after the people who made the decision have moved on.

There’s a second risk. When an institution is restructuring, the story is already being told: by staff, by unions, by local media and by students. Pulling back on communications at that moment doesn’t make the story go away. It simply means someone else tells it.

Cut smarter, not deeper

None of this means marketing budgets should be protected without question. Difficult years are a good moment to be rigorous. In my experience, the best approach looks like this.

Stop what doesn’t work. Every marketing function has activity that continues out of habit. Look hard at cost per enquiry, cost per application and cost per enrolment by channel, and be prepared to switch off the bottom quarter.

Protect the long-term brand work. The temptation is to keep the short-term recruitment campaigns and cut everything else. Keep a core of reputation activity running, especially in priority markets and with academic audiences, because that’s what feeds future demand.

Use AI and automation to protect capacity. If headcount is reducing, redesign how work flows rather than asking fewer people to do the same work. Automated reporting and AI-assisted content production can protect output while the team adjusts.

Communicate internally, early and honestly. Your own staff are your most credible ambassadors and, during a restructure, your biggest reputational risk. Clear, respectful internal communication is never wasted.

A word for vice-chancellors and finance directors

The most useful conversation I ever had with a finance director was about treating marketing as investment rather than overhead. Once we agreed how we’d measure return, from enquiry to enrolment and from campaign to income, the discussion changed. We weren’t defending a budget any more. We were deciding together where the next pound would work hardest.

If your institution is facing difficult choices this year, that’s the conversation I’d encourage you to have before the cuts are made, not after.

They also carry a reputational truth that’s easy to overlook. In many countries, your partner is your university. A student in Kuala Lumpur, Dubai or Hanoi may never visit your home campus. Their experience of your partner’s teaching, facilities and service is their experience of you, and they’ll describe it to family, employers and social media in your name.

What I learned from a multi-campus university

At Newcastle University, we worked across campuses in the UK, Malaysia and Singapore. It gave me a clear view of how reputation travels. A strong experience overseas strengthened the brand at home and in neighbouring markets. A poor one, even if it involved a small number of students, could be amplified far beyond its scale.

The lesson I took from that is simple: international partnerships should be governed as reputation assets, not just as academic or commercial agreements.

In many countries, your partner is your university.

Where institutions get it wrong

Most partnership due diligence focuses on academic quality and financial viability. Both matter, but they’re not the whole picture. I’ve seen partnerships approved without anyone asking how the partner markets itself, how it treats students when things go wrong, or how it’s perceived locally. Those are the questions that decide whether a partnership strengthens or weakens your name.

Brand use is another common gap. Partners understandably want to make the most of an international university’s name. Without clear guidelines and regular checks, logos appear on materials you’ve never seen, claims are made you can’t support, and the brand is stretched in ways that are hard to pull back.

A better approach

Include reputation in due diligence. Before signing, look at the partner’s local perception, media profile, student reviews and marketing practices. Ask the marketing and communications team for a view, not just the international office.

Agree the brand rules upfront. Set out how your name and logo can be used, what claims can be made and who approves materials. Make it part of the contract, not an afterthought.

Measure the experience, not just the numbers. Track student satisfaction, graduate outcomes and complaints across partnerships with the same seriousness you apply at home, and share the results with your partners.

Tell the joint story well. The best partnerships are genuine collaborations, and they deserve to be celebrated as such. Joint research, shared graduates’ success and local impact make powerful stories in both markets.

Plan for the difficult conversation. Partnerships end, regulations change and incidents happen. Agree in advance how you’ll communicate together if something goes wrong.

The opportunity

Transnational education will be one of the defining strategies of the next decade. Done well, it gives universities a lasting, trusted presence in the markets that matter most. Done carelessly, it quietly erodes the reputation that made the partnership possible in the first place.

The institutions that get this right will be the ones that bring their reputation and marketing expertise to the table from the very first conversation.

Outside the institution, though, I found that very few people knew those stories. Local residents saw the campus, the students and occasionally the headlines. Few connected the university to the treatment they received in hospital, the company their son worked for or the regeneration of their high street.

Why it matters more now

Public confidence in universities has become more fragile. Debates about value for money, international students, free speech and institutional finances have made the sector a political topic in many countries. In that climate, the people who matter most to a university’s licence to operate are often local: MPs, councillors, business leaders, hospital trusts, schools and residents.

They’re also the audience most universities invest in least. Marketing budgets understandably flow towards student recruitment and international reputation. Civic communication tends to rely on an annual impact report that few people read.

The people who matter most to a university’s licence to operate are often local.

What I’ve learned from the other side of the table

My board roles have given me a different perspective. As a trustee of a community health charity and of Citizens Advice, and as a parish councillor, I’ve sat in rooms where universities were discussed by people outside the sector. The institutions that earned genuine goodwill weren’t the ones with the glossiest reports. They were the ones that turned up, listened and made it easy to work with them.

Telling the civic story well

Make it personal and local. Economic impact figures are important, but they don’t move people on their own. The nurse trained at the university, the local firm built on its research and the school whose pupils were mentored by students are far more powerful.

Brief the people who’ll be asked. Local MPs, council leaders and business groups are asked about universities regularly. Make sure they have the facts, the stories and a named contact, and that they hear from you before they hear about you.

Show up consistently. Civic reputation is built through presence: at local events, in local media, on local boards. Encourage senior leaders and academics to take those roles, and recognise them when they do.

Measure local perception. If civic reputation matters, track it. Even a simple annual survey of local residents and partners will show whether the story is landing.

Connect civic and global. The strongest universities tell one story, in which global excellence and local commitment strengthen each other. An international student choosing a university in a thriving, welcoming city is responding to both.

A question for leadership teams

Ask yourselves this: if your university faced a difficult news story tomorrow, who in your city would publicly speak up for you? If the list is short, the civic story deserves more attention than it’s getting. It may be the most important reputation investment you make this decade.

Most universities have a crisis communications plan. Far fewer have tested it under pressure, with the people who’d actually be in the room, on a Saturday evening, with incomplete information and the media already calling.

What I’ve seen work

At Newcastle University Students’ Union, I ran crisis communications training for three cohorts of sabbatical officers. These were newly elected student leaders, often in their early twenties, suddenly responsible for an organisation representing 29,500 students. The training made a visible difference. When real incidents came, they knew their roles, they knew who to call and they knew what not to say.

The same principle applies at every level of a university, from the press office to the vice-chancellor’s office. Confidence in a crisis comes from rehearsal, not from a document.

Confidence in a crisis comes from rehearsal, not from a document.

The common failure points

Speed versus certainty. Institutions often wait until they have all the facts before saying anything. By then, others have filled the silence. A short holding statement that acknowledges the issue and commits to an update is almost always better than nothing.

Too many voices, or none. Either everyone comments, or nobody is authorised to. Agree in advance who speaks for the institution in different scenarios, and make sure they’re trained.

Forgetting the internal audience. Staff and students often learn about a crisis from the media. That’s damaging in itself, and it turns your most credible ambassadors into confused or angry critics.

Tone. Legal caution is important, but statements that sound defensive or bureaucratic make things worse. People want to hear that the institution understands, cares and is acting.

How to prepare properly

Map your likely scenarios. Protests, safety incidents, cyber attacks, financial difficulties, research misconduct, a senior leader under scrutiny. Most institutions can list their top ten in an hour.

Write the first hour in advance. For each scenario, draft the holding statement, the internal message and the key questions you expect. You’ll adapt them, but you won’t start from a blank page.

Run live exercises. At least twice a year, bring the crisis team together for a realistic simulation, ideally with injects that arrive in real time. It’s the single most valuable thing you can do.

Monitor continuously. Social listening and media monitoring should be running all the time, with clear thresholds for escalation. Most crises show early warning signs online.

Review honestly afterwards. After every real incident, ask what worked, what didn’t and what you’d change. Then update the plan.

A leadership responsibility

Crisis preparedness can’t sit only with communications. It needs the vice-chancellor, the registrar, legal, security, student services and estates working together, and it needs the governing body to ask whether it’s been tested.

The question isn’t whether your university will face a crisis this year. It’s whether, when it happens, your people will already know what to do.

That’s a positive shift. It also creates a new kind of reputational risk, and I don’t think the sector has fully caught up with it.

Scepticism is rising

Prospective students, particularly younger ones, are some of the most environmentally literate audiences any organisation will face. They’re also some of the most sceptical. They notice when a university promotes its green credentials while expanding flights for international recruitment or holding investments that contradict its message. Staff notice too, and they’re often the most vocal critics when words and actions don’t match.

Regulators are paying closer attention as well. In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority’s Green Claims Code has set clear expectations for environmental claims, and new EU consumer rules restrict vague, unsubstantiated environmental language. Universities aren’t exempt from that direction of travel just because they’re charities or public bodies.

Students are some of the most environmentally literate audiences any organisation will face, and some of the most sceptical.

Where the risk sits

In my experience, the problem is rarely deliberate exaggeration. It’s usually enthusiasm outrunning evidence. A campaign describes the campus as “carbon neutral” when only part of it is. A web page claims leadership on sustainability without saying against what. A target is announced, then quietly missed, without anyone updating the public commitment.

Each of those is small. Together, they create a gap between what an institution says and what it can prove, and that gap is exactly what critics, journalists and rankings assessors look for.

A more credible approach

Evidence every claim. Before a sustainability claim appears in marketing, someone should be able to point to the data behind it. If they can’t, change the wording.

Be specific, not sweeping. “We cut emissions from our estate by a third between 2019 and 2025” is far more credible than “we’re a leader in sustainability”. Specific claims are also more memorable.

Report progress honestly. Publish what you’ve achieved and what you haven’t. Institutions that acknowledge where they’re behind earn more trust than those that only share good news.

Align communications and operations. The sustainability office, estates, finance and marketing should agree a shared position and a shared set of facts. Mixed messages are where most problems start.

Let your research speak. Many universities have world-class climate and sustainability research. That work, and the academics behind it, are often the most powerful evidence of genuine commitment.

Turning risk into reputation

Handled well, sustainability is one of the strongest reputation stories a university can tell, because it combines research, teaching, campus life and civic responsibility. The institutions that win trust will be the ones that treat it with the same rigour they’d apply to any other claim about quality.

My advice to marketing and communications leaders is simple: before your next sustainability campaign, ask the most sceptical student you know to read it. If it survives their scrutiny, it’s ready.

Student records, CRM data, web analytics, survey results, rankings data, research metrics, social listening, application funnels. Most universities have all of this. What they often lack is a way of bringing it together so that leaders can see what’s happening and act on it.

Why the gap persists

The problem is rarely the technology. It’s usually a mix of three things.

Data lives in silos. Admissions, marketing, planning, research and student services each hold part of the picture, in different systems, with different definitions. Nobody has the whole view.

Reporting replaces insight. Teams spend hours producing reports that describe what happened, and very little time explaining why or recommending what to do next.

Decisions aren’t designed around data. If the key decisions in an institution are made in committees that never see the data, or see it months late, even the best analysis changes nothing.

Reporting describes what happened. Insight tells you what to do next.

What made the difference for us

At Newcastle University, we implemented HubSpot with stronger governance and introduced Google Analytics 360, but the bigger change was cultural. We built a data-driven segmentation and content strategy and, most importantly, created processes to share insights across teams and channels rather than keeping them inside marketing. When colleagues could see how their activity connected to enquiries and applications, the quality of conversations changed.

Earlier, at the Students’ Union, personalisation based on better data increased email engagement by more than 300%. The data had always been there. We’d just never used it properly.

A practical route forward

Start with the questions, not the data. Ask senior leaders which five decisions they most need better evidence for. Build from there.

Agree common definitions. What counts as an enquiry, an applicant or a conversion should mean the same thing in every team. It’s unglamorous work and it underpins everything else.

Automate the routine reporting. Dashboards that update themselves free analysts to do what they’re actually good at: explaining, testing and recommending.

Put insight in front of decision-makers. A one-page summary at the start of an executive meeting is worth more than a hundred-page report nobody reads.

Invest in data literacy. The most sophisticated analysis is wasted if colleagues can’t interpret it. Short, practical training for managers pays back quickly.

Use AI carefully, and early. AI tools are already good at summarising data, spotting patterns and drafting commentary. Used with clear governance, they can dramatically shorten the time from data to decision.

The prize

Universities that close the gap between data and decisions will recruit more effectively, spend more wisely and understand their reputation in far greater depth. Those that don’t will keep producing reports while their competitors act.

The technology to do this is affordable and widely available. What’s needed now is the leadership to make it part of how the institution thinks.

Governments are asking the same questions, linking funding and regulation more closely to graduate outcomes. Global rankings include employer reputation and employment outcomes in their methodologies. Employers have quietly become one of the most influential audiences in higher education.

They’re also one of the least actively managed.

How universities usually approach employers

In most institutions, employer relationships sit in several places at once. The careers service works with graduate recruiters. Academics hold relationships with industry partners for research and placements. Business development teams pursue commercial contracts. Alumni relations stays in touch with graduates who now run companies. Each does valuable work, but rarely as part of a coordinated reputation strategy.

Marketing and communications, meanwhile, are mostly pointed at prospective students. Employers see the university through its graduates and its research partnerships, but seldom through a deliberate, consistent story.

Employers have quietly become one of the most influential audiences in higher education.

A view from the other side

Before higher education, I spent years on the employer side of the table. As a senior marketer in hospitality and a board executive on IHG’s commercial marketing board for EMEA, I hired graduates, worked with universities on placements and formed my own impressions of which institutions produced people who were ready to contribute. Those impressions were shaped far more by individual graduates and responsive university contacts than by anything the universities published.

That experience has stayed with me. Employer reputation is earned one graduate and one interaction at a time, and it can be managed.

What good looks like

Treat employers as a priority audience. Give them a place in the reputation strategy, with clear objectives, messages and measures, alongside students and academics.

Coordinate the relationships. A shared view of who’s talking to which employers, and about what, prevents duplication and helps every conversation build on the last.

Tell the outcomes story with evidence. Graduate success stories, employment data and examples of employer partnerships should be visible, current and easy for employers and prospective students alike to find.

Make it easy to work with you. Employers often tell me universities are hard to work out, with too many doors and no obvious one to knock on. A clear front door for employer engagement is a reputation investment in itself.

Bring employers into the university. Guest lectures, curriculum advisory boards, live projects and mentoring all strengthen relationships and give employers a stake in your graduates’ success.

Measure employer perception. Track how employers in your priority sectors and regions view your graduates and your institution, and act on what they tell you.

Why this matters now

As the debate about the value of a degree intensifies, the institutions that can show, convincingly, that employers value their graduates will have a significant advantage. That case can’t be made in a prospectus alone. It’s made through a deliberate, sustained relationship with the people who hire.

For vice-chancellors and governing bodies, I’d suggest one simple test: does your institution know what its top fifty employers think of it? If not, that’s a gap worth closing this year.

Over the following years, that changed. By the time I left, the team was regarded as a strategic partner across the institution. The difference wasn’t a restructure or a new title. It was about evidence, relationships and the right seat at the right table.

Why it matters

Almost every major decision a university makes has reputational consequences. Which markets to enter, which programmes to launch or close, how to respond to policy change, how to communicate a restructure, which partnerships to pursue. When those decisions are made without marketing and communications expertise in the room, the institution often finds out too late that a good decision has been badly received, or that a better option was missed.

In the commercial world, chief marketing officers increasingly sit on executive boards because customer insight is recognised as strategic. Higher education has been slower to follow, and I think it’s costing institutions dearly.

Almost every major decision a university makes has reputational consequences.

Earning the seat

I’d be the first to say that marketing leaders have to earn their place. From my own experience and from the many directors I worked with as Chair of the Russell Group Marketing & Student Recruitment Forum, the ones who succeed tend to share a few habits.

They speak the language of the institution. Recruitment numbers, income, research reputation and student outcomes, not impressions and click-through rates. They connect their work to the measures the executive already cares about.

They bring insight, not just output. The most valuable thing a marketing director can bring to an executive meeting is evidence about audiences: what prospective students, employers and partners think, and what’s changing.

They build relationships across the institution. Strong partnerships with deans, finance, the international office and the vice-chancellor’s office matter more than any reporting line.

They’re willing to challenge. Being in the room means being prepared to say when a decision carries reputational risk, and to propose an alternative.

What vice-chancellors can do

The responsibility doesn’t sit with marketing leaders alone. Vice-chancellors and executive teams can make a significant difference by involving marketing and communications early in strategic discussions, asking for reputational impact as a standard part of major proposals and holding the function to account for evidence, not just activity.

Some institutions do this by giving the director a place on the executive team. Others achieve it through a strong relationship with the vice-chancellor and a standing role in key committees. The structure matters less than the principle: reputation should shape strategy, not simply follow it.

The payoff

Institutions that make this shift tend to make better decisions, communicate them more effectively and respond to change more quickly. They also attract and keep better marketing talent, because ambitious leaders want to work where their expertise is valued.

My advice to marketing directors is to start building the evidence and the relationships now. My advice to vice-chancellors is simpler: if your marketing director isn’t in the room when strategy is made, ask yourself what the institution is missing.