When a Generic Website Is Signaling a Deeper Strategy Problem

I wanted to dig into that question as I watched the Blanding site move past 650 .edus that had been submitted and audited. Everyone seemed to be curious about the same thing: are we as bland as we feel like we are? And how do we stack up against our competitors? More importantly, what deeper insights are these patterns showing us?

The obvious interpretation of generic language is usually shallow. A homepage leans on words like community, purpose, impact, leadership, and transformative. The conclusion seems easy: the copy is weak. The institution needs sharper writing, fewer clichés, stronger headlines, more specificity. But that is a surface-level fix, and it's not likely to solve the root issues.

A bland website is not always evidence of thin thinking. More often, it's evidence of unresolved strategy showing up in language. What looks vague on the page is often the visible residue of harder questions underneath: what the institution most wants to be known for, which audiences matter most in which contexts, what kind of proof actually builds belief, what belongs at the institutional level versus the program level, and how much complexity the communications system is being asked to carry without a clear hierarchy.

That's a different diagnosis than "the copy needs work." It's also much more useful.

What Blanding has been surfacing, at least as I read it, is not simply weak language. It's a set of recurring symptoms: interchangeable phrasing, low-friction aspiration, evidence without argument, and pages trying to serve too many purposes for too many audiences at once. Those things are visible on the surface, but they're rarely self-contained problems. They point inward.

A site can sound generic because it says almost nothing. It can also sound generic because it says too many true things with no clear structure. It can be overloaded with rankings, outcomes, initiatives, differentiators, and proof points, and still fail to communicate a coherent idea. In that environment, "more specificity" is not a cure. It's just a different material added to the pile.

The issue is usually architectural and points to a lack of cohesion and activation around the institutional brand strategy.

By architecture, I mean the structure of meaning across the institution's communications system. What is the core idea, if there is one? What are the supporting themes? Which claims are expressions of identity, and which are claims about value? Which audiences need which story, at which moment? Which proof points reinforce belief, and which are compensating for the absence of a clear argument? Which pages are carrying too much strategic burden because no one has resolved the message hierarchy elsewhere?

Those are not copy questions. They are strategy questions. And successfully addressing them is directly tied to enrollment, yield, and retention.

The Brand Work That Already Exists

Here is what makes this complicated. Most institutions have done some form of brand work.

If you spend any time looking at .edu websites, you will find brand guideline microsites everywhere. Logo usage rules. Color palettes. Approved typography. Photography standards. Editorial conventions. Sometimes a voice-and-tone section. Sometimes a set of messaging pillars. Occasionally something more sophisticated, with audience segmentation, positioning language, or channel-specific guidance.

But in many cases, what exists is not a true messaging system. It is a visual wrapper with a light verbal layer. Enough to create consistency in look and feel. Not enough to guide the harder decisions about what the institution is really trying to mean, to whom, and in what order of priority.

That distinction matters.

Because when institutions say they have “done the brand work,” what they often mean is that they have standards. Not strategy.

The investment was made. A firm was hired. A process happened. A site was launched. A guidelines portal exists. But somewhere between the visual system and the actual communications ecosystem, the harder strategic work either never happened, never got finished, or never got enough institutional authority to govern what came next.

So the homepage says one thing. The admissions page says another. Program pages drift toward generic category language. Departments improvise. Campaigns get built from local priorities instead of a coherent messaging architecture.

In some institutions, the problem is that a strong strategy exists but is not being activated. In others, the problem is that what was documented was never robust enough to guide the system in the first place.

I have seen both.

And in over 25 years of working inside higher ed websites, I have seen how often brand standards end up functioning more like archival documents than operating systems. Useful for maintaining surface consistency. Much less useful for governing meaning.

Why This Keeps Happening

Part of this is historical. "Brand" and "marketing" were dirty words in higher education until very recently. For a lot of the academic community, those concepts felt uncomfortably close to for-profit schools and online-degree spam. Too commercial. Too sales-driven. By resisting calling it what it was, institutions avoided doing the hard work of positioning and differentiation.

It provided moral cover for doing nothing.

That's changed, mostly. But the institutional structures haven't caught up.

The people doing communications and marketing work inside .edus are often small teams with enormous scope and limited authority. They're responsible for the website, the email campaigns, the print materials, the social presence, the event collateral, admissions content, alumni communications, advancement messaging, and crisis communications. They're executing across every channel the institution touches.

But they rarely have the authority to influence what the provost's office says about the academic experience, or how a particular college within the university describes its programs, or what the president's office wants the homepage to convey this semester. They're downstream of decisions they didn't make, trying to create coherence out of inputs that were never coordinated.

Add to it: shared governance, distributed academic units, siloed marketing budgets, presidential turnover cycles that reset strategic conversations every few years, and the genuine mission complexity of institutions that serve undergraduates, graduate students, parents, alumni, donors, faculty recruits, community members, and legislators. All at once. All with legitimate claims on the institution's attention.

The tendency is to treat all of those audiences as equally important. They cannot all own the same moment equally. Especially on the homepage, institutions need a clear audience priority. Your alumni are a known audience. They already know you. They've already been differentiated to. They'll find their section. Direct them accordingly. Parents will, of course, scour everything, but they'll appreciate content that is specifically for them.

Getting there is genuinely hard. A provost managing 40 department chairs and a capital campaign does not have the same latitude as a CMO at a consumer brand. I've sat in enough of those rooms to know that the constraints are real. I've watched committee-driven organizations default toward safety when not being led by strategically aligned directives and teams. Not because anyone decided "let's be generic." Because no one decided at all.

The result is less specificity, more diplomatic language, and weaker positioning. All those cliché-laden statements act as a safety blanket for the internal organization. But they're watering down the message to the people who matter most.

The Website as the Body's Architecture

I think about this in terms of the body.

The website is the musculoskeletal system. It's the structure that holds the institution's public identity together and provides the launch points outward, into email engagement, event participation, mailed print materials, alumni outreach, social presence, admissions campaigns. Every one of those channels is an organ in the same body. They serve different purposes. But they all need to be fed from the same heart.

When the heart is strong, when there's a clear, governing idea about what this institution is and who it's for, the organs function in concert. The email doesn't contradict the homepage. The viewbook reinforces what the website establishes. The admissions counselor's talking points echo the same core claim. The program pages demonstrate it with their own evidence. Not identical language. Shared meaning.

When the heart is weak, every organ compensates on its own. The admissions team develops messaging that works for yield but doesn't connect to the institutional brand. The advancement office tells a story that resonates with donors but confuses prospective students. Individual departments build microsites that solve their own communication problems without reference to the whole. The result is an institution that functions but has no cohesion. Everything works in isolation.

That's what Blanding is often detecting. Not that the writing is bad. That the body isn't connected.

The Redesign as an Opportunity

A website redesign is one of the best opportunities most institutions will have to force the real conversation about brand strategy. Not because the website is the most important thing. But because it touches everything. It requires decisions about audience priority, message hierarchy, content structure, and institutional voice that can't be faked or deferred. The site won't build itself without answers to those questions.

That can be the moment where real progress happens on the systemic messaging, audience, and prioritization issues that have been deferred for years. But only if leadership is on board for the plan, and only if the strategy work is baked into the engagement from the start, built into the research, the discovery, the content strategy. Not bolted on at the end during a migration process.

When that happens, the website becomes more than a prettier container with better navigation. It becomes the forcing function that makes the institution articulate what it actually stands for, for whom, and in what order of priority. It gives the communications team something they've never had: a strategic framework with institutional authority behind it, one that governs not just the site but every channel that extends from it.

When it doesn't happen, you get what most redesigns produce. Better templates. Cleaner navigation. More video content. A stats and facts module. And content that sounds oddly familiar. Because the underlying messaging architecture was never resolved, the new site becomes a polished expression of the same ambiguity.

I've seen both outcomes. The difference is rarely the budget. It's whether leadership decided this was the moment to do the real work, or whether they treated it as another facelift.

The Real Goal

None of this means the answer is to become louder or sharper for its own sake. Some institutions should sound measured. Some should lead with trust. Some should foreground intellectual seriousness. Some should feel expansive and welcoming. Voice matters, but voice is not the system.

The real goal is delivering meaning with structure.

A university is not a startup. A college is not a consumer packaged good. The goal is not to compress a complex institution into one slogan and force everything else to orbit around it. That kind of simplification can create its own distortion. What strong institutions do instead is harder. They build a messaging system with hierarchy. They know the difference between a core institutional idea and the audience-specific narratives that interpret it. They understand when a proof point is evidence and when it's being asked to stand in for positioning. They recognize that different audiences should encounter different entry points into the same institution, as long as those entry points are coherent rather than opportunistic.

Where to Start

If you are reading this and recognizing the pattern, there are two good places to begin.

First, see where your language is telling on you. We built Blanding to make that visible. It evaluates a four-page sample of higher ed websites across brand clarity, language quality, strategy, and AI readiness, not to grade your copy, but to surface where unresolved strategy may be showing up in your public-facing language and how your digital presence compares with the institutions you actually compete with.

Second, start the larger conversation. I have spent 25+ years conducting digital brand strategy audits and building brand strategy and digital experiences for higher education institutions, including Brown, Yale, Bucknell, Amherst, Kenyon, and dozens more. If you are approaching brand strategy, a website redesign, or enrollment marketing work and want to ensure the strategic thinking underneath it is sound, schedule a 30-minute call or email me at th@helloadeo.com

*Blanding scores are from adeo's proprietary audit framework. Scores are directional and have not been independently verified. Methodology available on request.

Tracey Halvorsen is the CEO of adeo, a brand, digital, and marketing agency in headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland.