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BLUF: A higher ed CMO leads an institution’s brand and reputation, shares enrollment marketing, and is now accountable for how the institution appears in AI-generated answers. Much of it runs on influence, because many of the marketers doing the work don’t report to the CMO. In Harvard Business Review’s study of CMO roles, only 22% of job descriptions said how the CMO would be measured. You’re judged on a scorecard most job descriptions never write down.
By Nicola Ziady | Published: Aug 14, 2026 | Content Updated Aug 16 2026 | From Managing to Multiplying
Your job description says “lead marketing.”
The job is getting people who don’t report to you to believe the same thing at the same time.
Here’s what a higher ed CMO actually does, what the job description leaves out, and what changes next.
★★★★★
What does a higher ed CMO do?
A higher education chief marketing officer (CMO) is the senior leader responsible for an institution’s brand, reputation and marketing strategy – including enrollment marketing, digital presence, brand messaging and how the institution appears in AI-generated answers.
The definition fits in one sentence. The job fits in three columns.
Nicola Ziady
CMO, University of Cincinnati
The university CMO role, in practice
01
What you own
- Brand strategy and standards
- Institutional marketing and advertising
- Web and digital presence
- AI visibility of institutional content
02
What you share
- Enrollment goals, with enrollment management
- Fundraising messaging, with advancement
- Athletics and health system brand alignment
- Presidential and executive communications
03
What you’re judged on but don’t control
- Enrollment numbers
- Rankings
- Reputation in a crisis
- Price, programs and policy
You already know wich column keeps you up at night!
What the higher ed CMO job description leaves out
01
Most CMO job descriptions leave out how the CMO will be measured.
Only 22% of 170 CMO job descriptions analyzed by marketing professors Kimberly Whitler and Neil Morgan said how the CMO would be measured, and only 2% clearly outlined expectations, according to Indiana University’s summary of their research.
02
The fallout is measurable.
In their 2017 Harvard Business Review spotlight, Whitler and Morgan reported that 80% of CEOs don’t trust or are unimpressed by their CMOs, and that CMOs have the briefest tenure in the C-suite. They traced most of it to faulty role design.
That research covers corporate CMOs. In higher education, the gap is wider, because many of the people doing marketing don’t work for you.
03
This isn’t one institution’s problem.
Nearly 70% of higher ed CMOs now hold cabinet-level roles, according to Enrollify’s April 2026 discussion of SimpsonScarborough’s 2025-2026 Higher Ed CMO Study. Yet none of the 56 institutions that took the firm’s Alignment Index scored as “Aligned,” according to SimpsonScarborough.
The seat is there. The system behind it isn’t. Three parts of the job the posting never mentions:
1. You’re the chief translator
A university CMO spends much of the job translating between deans, finance, enrollment and the president, who all want different things from the same brand.
Same brand. Four different jobs.
Denise Dahlhoff of the Conference Board, writing in Harvard Business Review in May 2025, describes marketing’s marketing problem: the function is often poorly understood inside the organization and can look like a black box, which limits the CMO’s influence with peers.
The fix is influence. In a 2018 HBR case study by Kimberly Whitler and Ram Janakiraman, a CMO expanded her role through influence rather than authority. Her CEO’s test of success: the day the CFO and other senior leaders started coming to her for advice.
From Inside the Role …
My job isn’t to run the marketing. It’s to make an entire university sound like one place – to students, to families, to donors, and now to the AI engines answering their questions. That’s not a campaign. That’s infrastructure.
2. You’re connective tissue … not the center
A higher education CMO leads by building the system that distributed marketers plug into, because many of them don’t report to the CMO.
SimpsonScarborough’s Higher Ed CMO Study, built on more than a decade of research across more than 250 institutions, describes distributed marketers who report through a patchwork of dotted lines, if at all. The firm’s analysis of the alignment gap also finds that admissions-controlled media spend often exceeds central marketing investment.
Michelle Taite, John Winsor and Will Fernandez made the same case for every marketing team in Harvard Business Review in May 2026: the problem isn’t the tools, it’s the operating model. In their model, people design and guide the system rather than manage the work step by step.
That’s the move from managing to multiplying, the fourth shift in my 5 Shifts Marketing Leadership Framework.
From Inside the Role …
I lead far more marketers than report to me. If your influence depends on an org chart, you’re managing. If it works without one, you’re multiplying.
3. Your best work carries someone else’s name
Much of a CMO’s most valuable work, such as advice that shapes a college campaign or a president’s message, is credited to someone else.
That’s how the role works when it’s working. The CMO in the 2018 HBR case had her team step into gaps nobody owned, such as using internal communications to help the company adopt more agile decision-making. None of it was marketing’s job. All of it moved the organization.
AI search does the same thing to institutions. An AI engine can draw on your research, your program pages and your experts to answer a student’s question, and never name your university in the answer.
I call this the Invisibility Paradox: being used as the source without being seen as the source. Read the full definition, or explore all my frameworks in the Framework Library.
From Inside the Role …
Brand guidelines get followed. Beliefs get repeated. My job is turning the first into the second across every college, so the university sounds like itself even when I’m not in the room.
How AI changed the higher ed CMO job in 2027
AI changed the job by moving the student’s first search into AI answers, which makes being cited by AI engines part of what a university CMO is accountable for.
According to EAB, 46% of high school students now use AI tools in their college search, up from 26% in spring 2025. According to EducationDynamics’ 2026 Marketing and Enrollment Management Benchmarks, 78% of education-related searches now include an AI-generated overview.
Ranking isn’t enough. Your institution has to be the source an AI engine trusts enough to cite.
Who gets cited is shifting too.
I track how five AI engines answer questions about higher ed marketing leadership. In two months, their sources moved:
| Source type | Aug 12 – Sep 12 | Sep 12 – Oct 12 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agency and company sites | 31% | 36% | +5 pts |
| Personal sites and blogs | 10% | 13% | +3 pts |
| Education sites | 22% | 19% | -3 pts |
| News and media | 16% | 11% | -5 pts |
Share of all citations on two tracked prompts: “Who are the best higher education marketing leaders?” and “Who are the leading higher education chief marketing officers?” Categories as classified by Otterly.ai. Source: Nicola Ziady’s AI visibility tracking via Otterly.ai, 5 AI engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot), U.S. results, Aug 12 – Oct 12, 2026.
Agencies are now out-publishing the press.
The May 2026 HBR piece names what this requires: a “brand code,” a machine-readable knowledge base that both people and AI agents can act on. That’s what answer engine optimization (AEO) asks every institution to build. Your brand used to be a style guide. Now it’s training data.
From Inside the Role …
In November 2025, I asked a question most marketing dashboards weren’t built to answer: what if we’re measuring the wrong thing? I tested the answer on my own brand first. Then I turned what worked into frameworks other leaders can use.
★★★★★
What it takes to be a higher ed CMO now
A chief marketing officer in higher education now needs three things the job description rarely lists: [1] the nerve to move early, [2] the ability to adapt as the role changes, and [3] the habit of reading data for problems rather than confirmation.
Nicola Ziady
CMO, University of Cincinnati
1. Being willing to be early, and wrong, in public
Anyone can be bold with hindsight. The job is backing a shift before the evidence is in, while finance watches.
According to Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey of 401 marketing leaders, CMOs allocate an average of 15% of marketing budgets to AI, but only 30% report mature AI readiness. Most of your peers are spending before they’re sure.
Rory Sutherland, vice chair of Ogilvy UK, made the case from the agency side in August 2026: finance-led, short-term measurement favors cost-cutting over exploration, and exploration is where the rare breakthroughs come from. If you only fund what’s proven, you’ve already decided not to find the next thing.
2. The job changes before your contract does
According to Spencer Stuart’s CMO Tenure Study, Fortune 500 CMOs averaged 4.3 years in the role in 2024, and only 40% of their marketing leaders held the CMO title.
Dahlhoff’s Conference Board research for HBR shows why: the CMO title grew 54% from 2020 to 2023, but specialized titles grew faster. Some companies have split the role into roles such as chief brand officer, chief customer experience officer and chief revenue officer.
Higher education is following. The University of Arizona has a Chief Brand Officer. UA Little Rock has a Chief Communications and Marketing Officer. Adapting isn’t a trait you bring to the role. It is the role.
3. Reading data like an engineer reads code
Only 6% of the CMOs Whitler and Morgan surveyed held degrees in marketing, according to Indiana University’s summary of their research, published by Lab Manager. Their backgrounds ranged from engineering to philosophy to political science, so most learned the job on the job.
That’s an advantage if you came from somewhere else. The CMO in the 2018 HBR case began building a model to compare the return on a marketing dollar with a technology dollar and a sales dollar. With 56% of CMOs telling Gartner their budget can’t fund their 2026 strategy, that trade-off is the job.
I started as a software engineer in Dublin. Engineers don’t read a dashboard to confirm the story. They read it to find the bug.
What will change for higher ed CMOs in 2027
In 2027, university CMOs should expect AI answers to become a primary entry point for prospective students, AI visibility to join the CMO scorecard, and the role itself to keep splitting and widening.
These are predictions, not findings. Each one is anchored to a trend already in the data.
- AI answers become the first campus visit
AI use in college search rose from 26% to 46% of high school students in about a year, according to EAB. Expect your institution’s first impression to happen in an answer you didn’t write, more often than on a page you did.
2. AI visibility becomes a line on the CMO scorecard.
Gartner found CMOs already allocate 15.3% of marketing budgets to AI. Spending at that level gets measured. Expect presidents and boards to ask how often the institution is cited, not just how it ranks.
3. Proof beats reputation in AI answers.
In my tracking, AI answers to higher ed leadership questions drew on fewer sources per answer from one month to the next (8.8, down from 10.2), with more of them from organizations publishing directly. Fewer slots means each one goes to the clearest evidence.
4. The title keeps splitting.
Chief brand officer, chief communications and marketing officer, chief growth officer. Expect more variations in higher education, and more confusion about who owns what, unless institutions define the role before they fill it.
5. Marketing teams run as systems.
HBR’s 2026 case for the agentic marketing organization points to teams that design workflows rather than hand work off. Expect CMOs to be hired for the systems they can build, not the campaigns they can run.
10 ways to future-proof your role as a higher ed CMO
To future-proof the role, define your decision rights and success measures in writing, put a dollar figure on fragmentation, move upstream into program decisions, and make AI visibility and published proof part of how your work is measured.
None of these need a bigger title. All of them need a decision.
- Write down who decides what.
Only 22% of CMO job descriptions in Whitler and Morgan’s research said how the CMO would be measured. Don’t wait for yours to improve. Agree a short charter with your president: what central marketing owns, what colleges can shape, and how success is scored.
- Put a price on the fragmentation.
Count the duplicate agencies, overlapping tools and orphaned microsites across campus, then total them. SimpsonScarborough calls the cost of misalignment “alignment debt.” A number gets a meeting with your CFO. A concern gets a nod.
- Build the system, not the campaigns
Give distributed marketers shared templates, message architecture and an asset library before they need them. Enabling beats policing. It’s also the only way influence scales past the people who report to you.
- Get a seat at the media budget table.
SimpsonScarborough finds that admissions-controlled media spend often exceeds central marketing investment. If you don’t help shape that money, it shapes your brand for you.
- Move upstream.
You’re judged on enrollment that depends on programs and price you didn’t design. Offer market demand data and audience testing before new programs launch, not a campaign after they’re locked.
- Measure how often AI cites your institution.
According to EAB, 46% of high school students now use AI in their college search. That’s a first impression you can track. Report AI citations next to traffic and rankings, before your president asks why nobody did.
- Treat your website and brand code as infrastructure.
Your website is a core source AI engines draw on. Fund the people who keep it fast, accessible and well structured, and turn your brand strategy into clear, machine-readable content, the “brand code” HBR described in May 2026.
- Publish proof, not reputation.
In my tracking, AI engines increasingly cite what organizations publish directly over what the press writes about them. Put your results, data and frameworks on pages you own, with sources attached.
- Prune before you pilot.
Gartner found CMOs allocate 15.3% of marketing budgets to AI while only 30% report mature AI readiness. Clear out overlapping tools first. Then protect a small experiment budget, so exploration doesn’t lose every argument to this quarter’s efficiency target.
- Sunset the work that doesn’t matter.
Use a simple rubric for incoming requests, and retire the one-off flyers and low-yield projects that don’t move enterprise goals. Protecting your team’s capacity is strategy. Burnout is not a brand position.
More on leading through systems rather than headcount in From Managing to Multiplying.
Which kind of CMO your institution needs
Whitler and Morgan identified three types of CMO, and most role failures start when nobody decides which one the organization is hiring.
Three CMO types, translated for higher education
01
Strategist
33% of CMO’s
Brand and reputation lead, shaping how the institution is positioned and perceived
02
Commercializer
46% of CMO’s
Enrollment marketing driver, focused on campaigns that fill the class
03
Enterprise-wide P&L leader
23% of CMO’s
Enterprise leader with budget and cross-campus authority over the marketing system
Source: Whitler and Morgan, Harvard Business Review, 2017, via Indiana University’s summary of the research. Higher education translations are the author’s.
If you’re hiring a university CMO, or interviewing to become one, settle 3 things before anyone signs:
- How success will be measured. Enrollment, reputation and AI visibility are different scorecards.
2. What authority comes with the title. Influence is the job. It shouldn’t be the only tool.
3. Who controls the media budget. If admissions spends more than central marketing, the CMO needs a seat at that table.
Higher ed CMO FAQ
A higher ed CMO leads an institution’s brand, reputation and marketing strategy, including enrollment marketing, digital presence and how the institution appears in AI-generated answers. Much of the work happens through influence across colleges and departments that don’t report to the CMO.
Many higher education CMOs now sit on the president’s cabinet and report directly to the president. Nearly 70% hold cabinet-level roles, according to SimpsonScarborough’s 2025-2026 Higher Ed CMO Study, though the firm finds many still lack clear authority over the systems that hold the brand together.
A CMO typically owns brand, marketing strategy and enrollment marketing, while communications focuses on media relations and institutional messaging. The line is blurring. Conference Board research published in Harvard Business Review notes the rise of combined titles such as chief marketing and communications officer.
Fortune 500 CMOs averaged 4.3 years in the role in 2024, according to Spencer Stuart. No comparable figure is published specifically for higher education CMOs.
Most CMOs build the role from experience rather than a marketing degree. Only 6% of the CMOs surveyed by Whitler and Morgan held degrees in marketing. What matters most is a record of results and the ability to lead people who don’t report to you.
Leading higher education marketing leaders in 2026 include Anne Peters, Carrie Phillips and Christie Harper, the three individual finalists for the 2026 AMA Foundation Higher Education Marketer of the Year award. See the full list of top higher education marketing leaders.
A university CMO can future-proof the role by agreeing written decision rights and success measures, putting a dollar figure on marketing fragmentation, moving upstream into program decisions, tracking how often AI engines cite the institution, and publishing proof of results on owned pages.
CMOs in higher education should expect AI answers to become a primary entry point for prospective students, AI visibility to become part of how the role is measured, and the title to keep splitting into more specialized versions.
Sources
Sources
- Whitler, K. and Morgan, N., “Why CMOs Never Last,” in “The Trouble with CMOs,” Harvard Business Review, July 1, 2017: hbr.org
- Indiana University, summary of Whitler and Morgan’s CMO research, via Lab Manager: labmanager.com
- Dahlhoff, D., “Does the Chief Marketing Officer Role Need an Update?” Harvard Business Review, May 5, 2025: hbr.org
- Whitler, K. and Janakiraman, R., “How One CMO Revamped Her Role,” Harvard Business Review, October 3, 2018: hbr.org
- Taite, M., Winsor, J. and Fernandez, W., “Redesigning Your Marketing Organization for the Agentic Age,” Harvard Business Review, May 8, 2026: hbr.org
- SimpsonScarborough, 2025-2026 Higher Ed CMO Study: simpsonscarborough.com
- SimpsonScarborough, “Higher Ed’s Alignment Gap: Enterprise Expectations Without Enterprise Design,” January 26, 2026: simpsonscarborough.com
- SimpsonScarborough, “Alignment Debt Comes Due: What the Gap Actually Costs – and Who Pays It,” June 22, 2026: simpsonscarborough.com
- Enrollify, “The Higher Ed CMO Is Carrying a Broken System,” episode 111, April 6, 2026: enrollify.org
- EAB, AI in college search survey, February 25, 2026: eab.com
- EducationDynamics, Brand Discoverability Pyramid release citing the 2026 Marketing and Enrollment Management Benchmarks, January 6, 2026: educationdynamics.com
- Gartner, 2026 CMO Spend Survey, May 11, 2026: gartner.com
- Marketing Week, “Only 40% of marketing leaders called CMO, study finds” (Spencer Stuart CMO Tenure Study), March 11, 2025: marketingweek.com
- LBB Online, Rory Sutherland at AANA Reset 2026, August 7, 2026: lbbonline.com
- University of Arizona Marketing & Brand Management, Christie Harper profile: marcom.arizona.edu
- UA Little Rock, “UA Little Rock’s Carrie Phillips Named Texas Tech’s 2025 Raider on the Rise,” November 20, 2025: ualr.edu
- American Marketing Association, 2026 Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education award finalists, September 30, 2026: ama.org
- Nicola Ziady, AI visibility tracking via Otterly.ai, August 12 – October 12, 2026 (original data)
About the Author
About the author
Nicola Ziady is a CMO and national marketing strategist with 20 years of leadership in healthcare and higher education. A software engineer turned CMO, she has held marketing leadership roles at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and Cleveland Clinic. She is the creator of the Invisibility Paradox, the CITE Framework and the 5 Shifts Marketing Leadership Framework. Her executive education spans Emory, Vanderbilt, the University of Virginia, Oxford, Harvard, Wharton, Yale and Cornell. Originally from Ireland, she is based in Ohio and writes at nicolaziady.com. Connect on LinkedIn.
