Working in higher education marketing is an exercise in managing opinions. Universities are built to distribute authority. Shared governance exists for good reason: it stops any one person bending the institution to their own taste and protects long-term thinking from short-term fashion. But the same structure can become an anti-creativity machine. Every additional sign-off is a chance to wear down the one thing that made the work worth doing in the first place. What remains is something nobody could object to, but that nobody would remember either. Decision chains are frequently where good brand strategy and creative go to die.

We’ve been on both sides of the table: building ideas and excitement together, then watching the weeks go by as the idea is diluted by everyone who has a claim on it. The biggest challenge for creatives isn’t the creative itself, but getting it through the institution intact.

Consensus and conviction don’t mix. 

This pattern is well documented outside HE, too. In branding, “design by committee” has become shorthand for work that gets safer with every round of feedback, not better. 

Diffusion of responsibility is the mechanism. The more people who touch a decision, the less any individual feels accountable for it. The incentive shifts from “is this right?” to “can anyone object?”

Nobody loses their job over inoffensive. Plenty of people have lost the argument for brave. 

In a university, that dynamic runs through more layers than almost any other organisation. A campaign has to survive central marketing, schools, faculties, the students’ union, local council, alumni, the kitchen sink…

Each layer (except that last one) is legitimate. Each layer has genuine expertise to bring. None of them, individually, ever sets out to kill the work. But, by the time we’re back at the table for round four of feedback, it’s rarely about the work anymore. It’s not even about keeping everyone happy. It’s about keeping everyone not unhappy. 

Governance built for oversight, not judgement calls. 

Shared governance was built to slow down the decisions that genuinely need slowing down – curriculum, academic standards, resource allocation. It wasn’t built to adjudicate a headline or a colour palette, but it gets used that way anyway, because the same committees that rightly guard academic integrity are often the only forum anyone has for surfacing an opinion. Give people a stake in the institution and no formal channel for a view, and they’ll find one (usually the nearest meeting with a marketing item on the agenda). We’ve lost count of the number of times a genuinely useful piece of academic scrutiny has arrived in the same breath as someone’s personal opinion on a shade of blue, both treated with equal institutional weight because they came from the same committee. 

The result is a strange inversion. The most senior, most experienced people in the room are often the furthest removed from the audience that the work needs to influence. A prospective undergraduate doesn’t care about internal consensus. They care whether the university’s saying something true, and saying it with confidence.

It’s made worse by a simple asymmetry: nobody in that room is rewarded for approving something bold, but plenty of people are exposed if something bold goes wrong. So, the safe move, every time a decision is genuinely in the balance, is to ask for one more round of softening rather than sign off on the sharper version. Now, multiply that instinct across every layer of sign-off and see what you’re left with.

What holding the line actually looks like 

None of this means committees are the enemy, or that consultation is the problem. Good challenge makes work sharper – an outside perspective that says “this doesn’t reflect what we’re actually good at” is worth having, and we’ve had briefs improved by exactly that kind of pushback.

The failure mode isn’t scrutiny. It’s scrutiny with no distinction between something that is factually wrong, strategically wrong or simply not to someone’s taste. 

The clients who get good work through governance tend to share one habit: they separate feedback that improves the work from feedback that just registers a preference, and they do it before the meeting, not during it. That means briefing hard enough at the start that there’s a clear rationale to defend, naming a single decision-owner before the first draft goes anywhere near a wider group, and treating “I don’t like it” as data about the person, not a verdict on the work. It also means being honest with each other early: strategic distinctiveness and universal internal comfort are usually in tension, and someone senior needs to actively hold that tension rather than let each round of feedback quietly resolve it in favour of comfort. We say this to clients at the start of every project, and usually before they’ve fully believed us. 

Where a good brand partner actually earns their fee 

This is where our job stops being about the work itself. A CMO or marketing director inside a university is rarely the most senior person in the room when a decision gets made, and is almost never the person best placed to win an argument with a Chair of Council using creative language. Their fluency is in audience, tone, positioning. The people they need to persuade are fluent in risk, reputation, and resource. Those two languages don’t translate on their own, and we spend a surprising amount of our time as translators rather than designers. 

Our real job, above the brief, is closing that gap – arming the marketing lead with a case that survives contact with people who weren’t in the workshop. That means writing the rationale in the vocabulary the next room up actually uses. It means pressure-testing the work against the specific objections a Vice-Chancellor or Chair of Council is likely to raise, before they raise them. And it often means doing some of that persuading directly ourselves as a credible outside voice calling out things a member of staff can’t say about their own institution without it sounding like a complaint. 

None of this replaces the CMO’s judgement. It extends their authority past the point where their formal seniority runs out. The institutions that get distinctive work through governance aren’t the ones with the most agreeable committees. They’re the ones where the marketing lead had a partner who understood that distinctive work requires sponsorship, not simply approval.

Most institutions don’t have a creativity problem. They have an influence problem, dressed up as a consultation process – a gap between what the marketing team knows is right and what the marketing team can get agreed three floors up. Increasingly, that’s a shared job between the CMO and the partner who helped them build the case in the first place. It’s most of where we earn our value.