The Four P's Have a Blind Spot
This post is part of OnDeck & OffScript, our ongoing series that features the voices of today’s marketing, communications, and enrollment leaders across higher education. We love talking about awareness spending, budget tensions, AI in higher ed, and enrollment strategy. We're equally curious about whatever's on your mind. Got something to say? Tell us about it.
Higher ed marketing is going through a shift. For a long time, the job lived mostly in campaigns and promotion, the part of the work everyone notices first. A newer generation of marketing leaders is proving there's a wider canvas underneath that: knowing which fires need putting out today and which ones need years of steady brand health built up instead.
Dr. Carrie Phillips, Chief Communications and Marketing Officer at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is one of the strongest examples of that shift. Budgets, feeder schools, enrollment timelines, brand presence, even the campus experience itself, she treats each one with the same instinct: know when something needs an emergency fix, and know when it needs years of steady investment instead.
That instinct starts with a blind spot she names directly. "I think that marketing has to be part of more than just the promotion side," she said. "We talk about the four P's, product, price, promotion, and place. Higher ed marketing is usually heavily in the promotion space. And I think we have to be part of the product conversation as well." Promotion gets the checkup every time. Everything else, she argues, needs one too.
Defending the Budget Before the Ask
Phillips builds her case for budget years before she needs it. "You have to start defending or laying the framework for a future ask well before you get to that point," she said. "If you're at the table and you're having to defend what you're needing to spend, you're already behind."
She learned the principle from a friend who worked as an emergency manager. "My good friend always says, you can't be trading business cards in a crisis," Phillips said. "I think that's so true for us as marketers as well. We can't be waiting to introduce what we're doing and how we're doing it when we're making that next ask." The awareness work happens on a random Tuesday in March, long before anyone sits down to decide where the money goes.
That preventive habit shapes how she treats her peers too. When a small amount of budget flexibility appeared, she didn't sit on it. "We had a little bit of wiggle room in our budget this year, a very small amount," she said. "But I reached out to my friends in admissions and said, here are two ideas I'm thinking about. Would love to get your perspective." The partnership runs deeper than a courtesy call. "If you look at the institutional strategic plan around access, we have shared goals with our partners in admissions," Phillips said. "We have the exact same goal. We are both tackling it at different points of that goal, but yet we are intersected enough that we both said, we're going to both be on the hook for this." When two departments share a goal instead of a budget line, defending the spend stops being a fight and starts being a shared appointment on the calendar.
Even the way she explains reach to leadership carries the same instinct, translating the abstract into something a provost feels before the number ever needs defending. "We can either go targeted down and really make that light maroon be a dark maroon in this area, or we can broaden as we're looking at tertiary markets," she said, turning impressions and click-through rate into a map anyone in the room reads at a glance.
Reaching Students Before They're Deciding
If budgets get preventive care years ahead of the ask, students get it years ahead of the application. Phillips has watched brand recognition take root long before a teenager ever opens a recruitment email, sometimes before that student can read at all. Student athletes and campus leaders volunteer for Friday morning carpool duty at local elementary schools. "They say have a great day, you're going to do awesome today," Phillips said. Asked how early that recognition starts, she didn't hesitate: "Maybe even kindergarten, right?"
By high school, prevention turns into range. "What we know about today's student is there's a lot going on, and so we've got to find multiple avenues and multiple ways to engage with them," Phillips said. Her recruiters study the culture of each school rather than running one script everywhere, treating a feeder school the way a good dentist treats a returning patient, knowing the history before the appointment starts.
That patience compounds. 85% of UA Little Rock alumni stay in central Arkansas after graduation, powering the workforce of the community that raised them as students. The university keeps that loop closed with an annual workforce summit on campus, turning graduates into a recruiting asset a decade after their own kindergarten carpool line.
Playing the Long Game on Enrollment
Preventive care takes years to pay off, and awareness works the same way.
"If a student doesn't know anything at all about you, it's going to be really hard in one sales cycle to go from awareness all the way to enroll in that year, maybe a year and a half, two years," Phillips said. "That's a big leap."
UA Little Rock's own numbers are the payoff of that patience. The university reversed a 13-year enrollment decline and has now put together 4 consecutive years of record enrollment, a curve that took years to bend and would look like nothing on a single quarter's report. Phillips treats her research the same way, as maintenance instead of a once-every-few-years exam. "We've been able to do research in these small incremental pieces that allow us to continue to keep learning and owning," she said. "This gives us a way to continually be testing our message, testing what's resonating, and making adjustments as we go."
Building Presence That Doesn't Spike
Prevention only works if it holds up between appointments, and Phillips treats her brand presence the same way, as year-round maintenance rather than a seasonal push. Positive coverage from one local media partner has grown 180% under her leadership. Her team built that growth through the same ongoing relationship work behind everything else she does, sustained well beyond any single campaign or news cycle. "The importance of media relations is really important, that third party validator about your work," she said.
That maintenance now serves a newer purpose too. With AI search tools combing the same coverage for information, Phillips wants her brand pillars present across all of it, well beyond the stories written specifically about her office. Her team has also cut the university's own website content by 30%, clearing out years of outdated pages so the material that remains is worth an AI tool's attention, and a prospective student's.
Where Marketing's Job Begins
Prevention has a limit, though. No amount of flossing fixes a cracked tooth, and no amount of awareness work fixes a broken experience once a student shows up. Phillips learned that at a prior university, where she set out to find exactly what a student goes through between saying "I'm interested" and moving into a dorm. "I wanted to understand from the time a student said, I'm interested, to they show up on campus on move-in day, what are all the things that have to happen in between," she said. "And so I mapped every bit of that. What I found is that it required the student interacting with 17 offices across five divisions." The diagnosis landed fast. "It's like, no wonder there's an issue," she said.
She didn't wait for someone else's permission to treat it, and she didn't try to fix it all in one visit. "Every time you do something, try to change it two degrees and you can make big shifts without panicking people about change," she said. Year one wasn't a redesign. It was getting every office's communication dates onto one shared calendar, so people saw how many messages a single student received at once, sometimes 7 or 8 in a single day. The fix started as small as a shared spreadsheet and grew from there.
Asked for the bold, honest take she wishes more of higher ed would sit with, Phillips didn't hedge:
"We can't wait for other people to give us permission to solve these problems," she said. "We have to be the change agents that go after and fix these things that pop up that can really hinder the experience for our students, and help create a much better product conversation."
Promotion will always be the easiest appointment to keep. Phillips has built a career proving the rest of the checkup matters every bit as much.
Carrie Phillips is the Chief Communications and Marketing Officer at University of Arkansas at Little Rock. This conversation was part of OnDeck & OffScript, a series featuring candid conversations with leaders across higher education. Got something to share? Join the conversation.
