Chuck English
President and Founder
English Marketing Works
Author of Marketing that Works blog
When parents register their children at your school, what are they buying?
Your
answer might be a great education or perhaps a great future. I say it’s
the experience of getting that great education and not just for the
student but for the parent as well.
Let’s explore this by looking
at a little marketing theory. In 1960, E. Jerome McCarthy proposed a
formulation for effective marketing or what was called a “marketing mix”
based on 4 P’s – product, promotion, price and place. The idea was that
the right combination of these ingredients was a recipe for marketing
success.
For the purposes of this discussion we are only concerned
with the P that is Product. The idea was that marketing success
requires a product that meets the needs and interests of the buyer.
That’s why products are often given new looks, new names or become “new
and improved.” Product development is often based on market research.
But what if there was a different way of looking at Product? A great post
from ad agency Olgilvy and Mather proposes 4 E’s to replace the 4P’s
mentioned above. In their formulation, the P of Product becomes the E of
Experience.
The rationale is that it’s no longer good enough to
focus on the attributes of the product. What’s more important is the way
in which the customer interacts with the product. What consumers are
really buying is the experience of using the product. The Apple Parenthood ad makes that point.
More
than that, it’s also the experience of acquiring the product that
shapes decisions. People shop at Whole Foods not just because of what
they can buy there but because of the experience of buying it.
Applying
all of this to independent schools is as challenging as it is
important. But don’t let that dissuade you from consider the
implications for your school. Here are some ways that you can get
started.
Define the experience. What is the
experience you want students and parents to have at your school? At its
core this is a branding exercise. What makes your school unique? What is
its essence? Defining the experience is a matter of taking the brand
and operationalizing it. You need to ensure that in every interaction
that a student or parent has with the school the experience consistently
reflects the school’s brand.
Deliver the experience.
Understand that the experience is shaped in every classroom, meeting
room and office. It is a product of online interactions and face-to-face
meetings. The experience is delivered by teachers, administrators,
front office staff, and even custodians. Every interaction whether it’s a
parent teacher conference, a tour by a prospective parent, a meeting
about tuition contributes to the experience. A great article by McKinsey, defines customer engagement as “a set of related interactions that, added together, make up the customer experience.”
Re-think the role of marketing.
That same McKinsey article says that the goal of today’s marketing
department is to “orchestrate the delivery of the end-to-end customer
experience.” To do that the activities of your marketing department
can’t be limited to advertising, the website and social media. Every
staff member and even every board member needs to clearly understand the
experience and the ways in which they can convey that in all their
interactions. For that to happen, marketing has to have a seat at many
tables – orientation for new staff, parent teacher conference planning,
board member induction and admissions planning – just to name a few.
What’s
implicit in all of this is a view of parents (and to a degree students)
as customers. As many schools face enrollment declines and the
challenge of making the case for independent school education, those
that are prepared to do what’s necessary to deliver a consistent
customer experience are more likely to be successful.