You could call this “The Let Them Theory” for marketing, though that would suggest both novelty and a level of intentionality the field hasn’t historically required.

If you’ve been doing this work for any length of time, you’ve watched the same scene play out. Weeks spent getting the message right. Workshops, rewrites, careful word choices, the whole ritual. Eventually it lands. Everyone agrees it finally says what it’s supposed to say.

Then someone outside the room explains it in a way you’ve never heard before.

It’s not quite right. It skips things. It adds things. It ignores entire sections you fought to keep in.

And it works.

People get it immediately. They repeat it. It travels. And you’re left with the uncomfortable realization that whatever just happened is doing more for you than the thing you spent weeks perfecting.

You see it in small ways all the time. A student tour guide tells a family, “It’s actually pretty easy to get what you need here,” which is not your official positioning, not your value prop, and not language that would survive a single review meeting. The family nods, relieved, and that’s the moment they decide to apply.

Or a faculty member says, half-joking, “We’ll figure it out,” and somehow that lands as more credible than three pages of carefully constructed messaging about support, flexibility, and student success.

None of that was approved. None of it was designed.

It still works.

At some point you stop treating that as an exception. Because it isn’t.

If you want to call that brand building, it’s already happening—and it has very little to do with what we label as marketing, which means the job is less about refining the message and more about paying attention to what’s actually creating meaning.

Most of what people understand about an institution isn’t coming from the places we spend the most time refining. It comes from everything else. Conversations, experiences, offhand comments, things that were never meant to carry meaning but do anyway. By the time someone reaches the “official” version, they’ve already decided what they think, and they’re not particularly interested in updating it.

We like to think our job is to close that gap. Make things clearer. Tighter. More aligned. Get everyone using the same language so the message holds.

But the gap isn’t always a problem.

In a lot of cases, it’s doing most of the work while we’re in a conference room debating adjectives.

People are already making sense of things in ways that are fast, social, and confidently wrong in just the right proportions. That process doesn’t depend on us being perfectly understood. It barely seems to notice whether we are.

And when we step in to correct it, the result isn’t always better. It’s usually just more controlled, more consistent, and noticeably less interesting.

That’s the part we don’t say out loud, mostly because it’s inconvenient.

The instinct to clarify is baked into the field. It’s what we’re trained to do. But if you’ve been around long enough, you’ve seen what happens when everything is perfectly aligned.

It starts to sound like everything else.

At that point, clarity stops differentiating and starts blending. You get something that is technically correct, broadly approved, and almost impossible to care about.

So the question shifts.

Not whether meaning is being created, because it clearly is, but whether we’re paying attention to where it’s actually coming from. It shows up in how people talk about the place, how decisions are made, how experiences unfold, and how all of that gets interpreted and passed along, usually without waiting for us to weigh in.

That’s the layer that tends to get labeled as something else, even though it functions as marketing far more reliably than most of what we produce.

The work isn’t disappearing.

It’s just happening anyway.