Building university reputation, the way academics have always built their own

This blog was kindly authored by Zeenat Fayaz, Director of Brand Strategy at The Brand Education.

Ask any Vice-Chancellor how they built their own reputation and the answer will never be a marketing campaign.

Instead they will say that reputation was built through research that peers trusted enough to cite; through ideas rigorous enough to withstand scrutiny; and through the kind of slow, unglamorous scholarly accumulation that no communications team can manufacture. Every senior leader in higher education knows this because most of them have lived it.

What makes the current model so striking is that when those same scholars step into leadership positions, the apparatus handed to them for building and protecting their university’s reputation looks almost nothing like the process that built their own.

The transition into institutional leadership does not come with a manual. What it does come with is an inherited infrastructure, one built incrementally over decades of marketisation, rankings pressure and competing institutional demands, that were never designed around how academic reputation actually works. The current structure is designed around visibility, around recruitment, around differentiation in an increasingly crowded market. All legitimate concerns, but not the same thing as reputation.

This is the gap that new research from The Brand Education sets out to examine and to close. Drawing on surveys and interviews with over 130 higher education professionals across five continents, the research surfaces a structural divide at the heart of why reputation efforts in universities so consistently fall short. It is not a divide of intent. It is a divide of design.

Rod McNaughton, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Academic Director of the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Auckland, names it precisely:

Reputation work falters not because academics are resistant, but because universities seldom build mechanisms that genuinely harness academic reputation, respecting its autonomy while aligning it with institutional purpose. The central task is not simply appointing the right individual, but navigating the contested space between recognising a legitimacy challenge and responding without defaulting to corporate templates that sit uneasily with the sector’s distinctive needs.

The research makes equally clear that the professionals tasked with enhancing reputation occupy ambiguous positions in university hierarchies. Marketing and communications leaders are often highly capable and ambitious, yet they remain structurally prevented from contributing at the level the moment demands. Three quarters of them spend less than a third of their time on strategic work. Most do not sit on executive teams. Many learn about significant institutional decisions only after they have been made, and are left to communicate choices they had no hand in shaping. As Heather McBain of the University of Edinburgh observes, “the most effective strategy lies in marrying marketing expertise with academic experience”. The will is there. The structures that would make it possible rarely are.

The academics whose work actually builds institutional reputation rarely feel part of how that reputation is shaped. Only 18 per cent say their institution’s external messaging reflects their reality, not because it’s dishonest, but because it was never built with them.

This is the divide that the research surfaces and takes seriously. It’s not a communications problem, it’s a structural one, with real consequences. It shows up in the authenticity of research partnerships, the credibility of policy conversations, the confidence of prospective students, and whether an institution’s own people will champion the place where they work.

Professor Michael Beverland of the University of Sussex Business School puts it plainly. “Authentic reputation always begins from within. It is built from the inside out”

For leaders who built their own reputations through scholarship, through peer trust and through ideas that stood the test of rigorous scrutiny, this will resonate. The question the research asks is what it would actually take to build an institution’s reputation the same way. The report offers a clear and practical answer.