Strategy precedes crisis. Most institutions think about communication strategy after something breaks – when they’re in damage control. Teresa’s insight is that if you define your communication strategy before the crisis arrives, you don’t react to crises. You navigate them. You’ve already decided who you serve, what problem you solve, and what makes you different. When a crisis tests those commitments, you don’t scramble. You’re already aligned.

The takeaway: Your communication strategy should be your foundation, not your emergency response.

Social listening doesn’t have to be backward-looking. Most institutions use social media monitoring to track what happened – measure sentiment after the fact, score the conversation after it’s done. Liz flipped that. What if you used social listening as a leading indicator instead? What if you paid attention to emerging conversations before they become trends? What if you spotted market moves before your competitors do?

The takeaway: Your monitoring systems should show you where the market is moving, not where it’s already been.

Systems scale. Campaigns don’t. Most agencies (and most institutions) build custom campaigns for custom clients – each one is a unique hero effort. Seth’s insight is that if you understand the first principles of how enrollment actually works – how students actually decide, what information actually moves them – you can build a system that works reliably across institutions because it’s built on truth, not on heroic creativity.

The takeaway: Stop thinking about campaigns. Start thinking about repeatable systems.

Your job isn’t to make better decisions. Your job is to make more people capable of making good decisions. Most CMOs try to centralize marketing – pull decisions up to the marketing team so they’re better, more consistent, more strategic. Jaime’s insight is the opposite: your multiplication happens when you decentralize leadership capacity. When college-level marketers think strategically. When more people can make good calls.

The takeaway: You don’t scale yourself. You scale other leaders.

Data becomes useful when it becomes insight. Most institutions drown in data – dashboards, analytics, reports – and starve for understanding. Josie’s insight is that the final step matters most: turning data into patterns, patterns into frameworks, frameworks into something you can actually teach someone else. That’s when data becomes transformative.

The takeaway: Your data isn’t useful until you can teach it.

These leaders weren’t picked randomly. They were selected because each one has made a deliberate, observable shift in how they think about their work – and they’ve documented that shift publicly through their writing, speaking, consulting work, or research.

Teresa’s published work on institutional communication strategy. Liz’s built an entire platform around social listening. Seth’s scaled enrollment systems across multiple institutions. Jaime’s publicly taught teams how to break down silos. Josie’s written the research that underpins digital leadership strategy.

The five aren’t the most “famous” or “best” CMOs in higher ed – they’re the ones who’ve been most transparent about how they think differently. That transparency is what makes them examples worth studying.

The 5 Shifts framework itself isn’t specific to higher ed – it applies to any marketing leader managing complex organizations. But these five leaders exemplify each shift within a higher education context, which means you can see how the shifts work when you’re managing enrollment, institutional reputation, distributed teams across colleges, and competing priorities across multiple stakeholders.

If you work in higher ed, as I do, you can see your own constraints and opportunities reflected in their work. That specificity makes it useful.

No. Don’t try.

Pick one. Master it. Then move to the next. If you try to shift on all five fronts simultaneously, you’ll dilute your effort on all of them. Start where your institution is most broken. Is communication strategy reactive instead of proactive (Shift 1)? Are your market insights always three months old (Shift 2)? Are your campaigns dependent on heroic effort instead of systems (Shift 3)? Pick that one first.

Mastering one shift well takes three to six months, depending on your starting point and organizational appetite. Once that shift is embedded in how your team thinks, move to the next.

You’ll see mindset shifts in weeks. A leader who starts thinking strategically about communication before crises arrive thinks differently in her next meeting – that’s immediate.

But institutional results – enrollment moving, reputation shifting, teams multiplying their leadership capacity – that’s 12 to 24 months. Marketing doesn’t move institutions overnight. Systems do, but they need time to compound.

Yes, you can use it. The framework exists to be useful. If it helps you think differently about your leadership, use it. Share it with your team. Cite it if you’re publishing or teaching on it – that’s how the ideas get stronger and more refined. The only thing I ask: don’t claim you invented it.

The framework is part of a larger conversation about how marketing leadership needs to evolve. That conversation is bigger than any one person.

Good. You’re ahead on those. The question then isn’t “do we need to do this?” It’s “are we doing it consciously, or by accident?”
Most institutions have pockets of Shift 4 thinking (some leader somewhere is multiplying capacity) or Shift 2 thinking (someone’s paying attention to market signals) without having named it or systematized it. Once you see it, you can accelerate it. Once it’s named, you can teach it.

Most leadership frameworks describe what leaders should do differently – make data-driven decisions, empower your team, think strategically. This one describes how leaders actually need to think differently to survive the next five years of marketing change. It’s built on observation of leaders who are already doing this work in real time. Not theory. Not consulting best practices. Not what should work. What actually is working in the highest-performing institutions right now.

You can start alone. Pick one shift. Study how these leaders think about it. Talk to your team about what it would look like if you made that shift. Try it.

You’ll hit walls. That’s normal. Some of those walls require expertise – a strategist to help you build your communication foundation (Shift 1), a researcher to help you interpret market data (Shift 5), a systems architect to help you move from campaigns to systems (Shift 3).

Start internal. Bring in help when you know what you need.

You can steal the thinking. You can’t steal the playbook.

Teresa’s approach to building institutional communication strategy works at institutions of her scale with her stakeholders and her history. If you try to implement her exact playbook at your institution, it will fail because your constraints are different. But her thinking – that strategy precedes crisis – that transfers. That’s what you steal.

Same with all five. Study how they think. Adapt it to your context. That’s how frameworks compound.

The Invisibility Paradox describes the gap between ranking in search results and being cited in AI systems. You ranked. You just didn’t get visited or remembered.

These five leaders aren’t invisible. They’re visible in their sectors because they’ve made shifts in how they think and in how they communicate their thinking. They publish. They teach. They’re present in the conversation.

If you master these five shifts as an integrated system, you become harder to ignore. Not because you’re louder – because you’re thinking at a level others aren’t yet.

– Teresa Valerio Parrot: TVP Communications, Trusted Voices podcast, Call to Action blog at Inside Higher Ed
– Jaime Hunt: Solve Higher Ed Marketing, “Confessions of a Higher Ed CMO” podcast on Enrollify, Forbes and Inside Higher Ed columns
– Josie Ahlquist: “Digital Leadership in Higher Education” (2020), 3x LinkedIn Top Voice in Education, digital leadership coaching
– Liz Gross: Campus Sonar, “The Higher Ed Social Listening Handbook,” social listening and market research
– Seth Odell: Kanahoma, fast-growth digital marketing agency specializing in higher ed enrollment systems

Nicola Ziady is a software engineer turned CMO who’s spent two decades building marketing strategy across healthcare (Cleveland Clinic, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital) and higher education (Case Western Reserve University, University of Cincinnati). She leads enterprise marketing strategy for a major research institution, managing strategy across 15 colleges and 160 distributed marketing professionals.

She built the 5 Shifts framework by observing what separates marketing leaders who move their institutions forward from those who execute well but stay invisible. She tests frameworks on herself and her teams before teaching them.

Her work focuses on three things: how marketing leaders actually need to think differently to survive the next five years, why most marketing leaders are invisible in AI search (the Invisibility Paradox), and how to build strategic systems that multiply leadership capacity instead of just executing campaigns.

Learn more: LinkedIn | nicolaziady.com

Connect: Nicola’s on LinkedIn talking about how marketing leaders get visible (and stay visible) in an AI-driven world. If you’re wrestling with any of these five shifts, reach out.