SIG Selections 1997 - Special interest in ELT
The Role of Marketing in ELT

With increased competition from the growing number of EFL organizations, and the rapidly changing market, there are more and more challenges to be met:

• How can you attract more students?
• How can you keep customers satisfied?
• How can you develop new markets?
• How can you market more cost effectively?
• How can you create a competitive advantage?

...and

• How can you be more profitable?

The seminar on the role of marketing in ELT provides the basis for answering these questions but, perhaps more importantly at this stage, it also provides participants with the two 'Cs': Context and Confidence.

Most people who have been in ELT for some time already know a fair amount about marketing, and indeed may have been practising marketing for some time without calling it by that name. What the seminar aims to do is to put all that existing knowledge in a logical context and fill the bits of the jigsaw to give a clearer and more complete picture. Once that is in place, confidence in fighting for things which people previously only knew were right intuitively, becomes natural.

What is Marketing?

This is of course a key question, and one which crucially needs answering before any other interactive activity can take place. Even in top schools it seems that there is still divergence about what the word means with some people believing it to be synonymous with advertising, some with selling, and some just plainly confused. The Institute of Marketing provides a definition which reads as follows:

"Marketing is the management process responsible for anticipating, identifying and satisfying customer demands profitably", i.e. finding out what the customer wants, anticipating what they might want in the future, and making sure they get what they want, profitably.

In the context of a school this means providing courses people want, where they want them, when they want them, but it also implies internal market controls which ensure students' expectations are met and external market research which indicates possible areas of growth in demand.

As with many definitions this one is limited in its scope, and the implication from this definition would naturally be that there is only one customer in a school: the student. In reality there are many customer groups, both external (e.g. agents, consultants, host families) and internal (e.g. staff) and to ignore any of these is to seriously prejudice the effectiveness of the marketing effort.

The role of people

One of the key fundamental ideas running through all the marketing seminars is that everyone in an EFL organization, from caretaker to director, has a role to play in the marketing of the organization. In many cases seminar participants have pointed to receptionists and cleaners, and even in one case the driver of the school minibus, as key people influential in the students' happiness, due to their particular nature or attitude, and it is quite clear that if any of the internal or external clients are unhappy or demotivated this can have a negative effect on future student numbers.

The 'leaky barrel theory of marketing' illustrates that quite graphically, if you imagine two barrels, one small and one big, with the smaller feeding new students into the larger as a result of mailing, promotion, selling, brochures etc. Having arrived in the big barrel (i.e. the school) holes emerge through which students escape, for example, there isn't a class at the right level; classes are demotivating; the family is unhelpful; the food is bad; the social programme doesn't come up to expectations.

It is interesting to note that marketing effort in many schools continues to focus on external promotions - i.e. brochures, mailing, sales trips, and hugely expensive advertising and conferences, rather than truly recognising the importance of existing students, staff, and host families to future 'word of mouth' promotion. Proactive influencers such as teachers in the student's home country are very important in producing new students, but it is the internal influencers like staff and host families who get students to extend their stay and promote the institution when they leave.

Internal customer satisfaction is frequently only monitored by questionnaires filled in by students at the end of their course, by which point it is too late to rectify anything. Even when they are given out earlier it is quite evident that information collected is not necessarily the truth. Ex-students with the worst complaints are often actually found to have given 'goods' and even 'excellents' on questionnaires because they do not want to hurt anyone's feelings whilst they are still in the country, or because the questionnaires themselves are badly worded.

Marketing jargon

Marketing is full of jargon and acronyms, which often confuse the non-marketer, even more so when they are used incorrectly. The term 'cash cow' is one that is frequently used incorrectly. However, some of the acronyms are a useful check for anyone following a logical approach to marketing, and it is part of the confidence-building of the seminars that participants should feel comfortable with the major ones used. Before returning to the definition of marketing and looking at ways to ensure that you get the right product (course) in the right place at the right time, at a price which people are willing to pay, it is useful first to look at the USPs or unique selling points of the institution. This is often an interesting exercise as it forces people to think about what their institution has, and why students should choose them rather than anyone else. Interestingly the first thing that everyone always wants to put down is the quality of teaching - yet if we look at how students actually choose schools it is generally assumed that teaching will be fine in recognised schools. It is a myriad of other factors, including whether they like the agent or school representative that influence students' decisions. It is a people's business and it is critical for 'word of mouth' to reinforce the USPs of the school.

Getting the product right…

If we are actually going to provide courses and teaching that students want (and not necessarily what we think that students need) then it is clear that research in the form of audits needs to be completed at regular intervals.

The internal audit
The internal audit consists of two parts:
i) statistics
ii) evaluation

On the statistical side it is essential to decide on what you need to know to run the business effectively, and then to get the systems for monitoring the statistics in place. Although this seems obvious it is quite clear that in many schools information is still difficult to retrieve and year-on-year statistics impossible to compare. At the very least student numbers and weeks should be monitored, by time of year, age and course type. Agents' bookings and the percentage of agents to direct bookings is also useful. In terms of future business, enquiry monitoring can frequently point to increased or decreased demand in a market, and indicate areas for expansion.

On the evaluation side, students' and staff comments need to be evaluated in relation to the four Ps - to which incidentally I always add another P and an S:

• Product
• Price
• Place (location)
• Promotion
• People (Staff)
• Service

The last P and S do not appear in any marketing textbooks but, in view of the nature of the business and the fact that the 'product' is actually a service, the people that perform it and the service that surrounds the delivery are crucial. Those schools which do provide a superlative service on the administration side are a pleasure to work with, and invariably full.

The external audit
The external audit can also be performed in relation to the classic external marketing acronym - PEST. However, again I add another two letters relating particularly to the ELT industry: E and C.

Hence the evaluation undertaken is of:

• Political factors (e.g. wars, internal conflict)
• Economic factors (recession, devaluation, unemployment)
• Social factors (changes in fashion)
• Technological factors (the use of e-mail, CD ROM)
• Educational factors (changes to the year students start learning English in-country)
• Competition - which of course is key if you are always trying to keep one step ahead.

The right place, the right time, the right price…

Again it might seem obvious, but it is crucial that a school is located in a place where students want to come or are able to come. One school in Brasil situated itself in an amazing building right in the centre of town. The trouble was they were catering for kids and parents did not want to come to the centre as there was nowhere to park. Elsewhere schools have sprung up in areas which were dangerous or isolated, with similarly negative effects. Good premises are simply not sufficient to counteract a bad location.

Clearly, in terms of time, no-one is going to run afternoon classes when people only want the morning or vice-versa; but wrong or inflexible start dates can have a terrible effect on bookings if flights don't match, for example. Where course dates are fixed in advance, working with key agents to find the most convenient dates for both parties is invaluable.

The right price is a difficult one, particularly if quality is being aimed for, as quality does not come cheap. The important thing in this instance is to provide clearly perceived value for money.

Internal marketing

As with the internal audit, internal marketing or promotion refers to things within the school or institution's control. Again there are two parts:
i) marketing to existing students
ii) marketing to staff

Marketing to existing students
This seems to imply a proactive approach to dealing with the student, and in a sense I think that this is what needs to happen if students are to leave entirely satisfied. We have already touched on some of the problems with questionnaires, and ways must be found to monitor the reliability of the experience the student is having more effectively, either by tutorials, or focus groups, or the monitoring of complaints made to staff, or indeed all of these.

Two of the key reasons why reliability seems to fail are communication problems and the unkept promise, the latter when students are promised something either in their own country or indeed once they are in the school, which then does not materialise. Ways need to be found, not of encouraging complaints for the sake of it, but of discovering any valid or indeed invalid complaints a student might have and dealing with them effectively and immediately.

At the same time marketing to existing students implies an open and non-defensive attitude. Most problems can be solved, but a confrontation, or an exchange implying it is really all the student's fault rarely helps the situation.

Marketing to staff
A well motivated, happy staff where people feel appreciated and valued is invaluable in terms of creating happy students. It sounds trite put like this, but the opposite scenario can reduce student numbers in droves. Generally speaking, people in EFL like other people, so the attitude does not start off wrong. However, things can change where staff are allowed to stagnate or not given the developmental opportunities they need, or when they are not consulted on possible changes which will affect them.

External marketing

If someone comes in new to marketing, this is invariably what they think they should be doing: producing brochures, mailing to everyone on the mailing list, organizing conferences, producing ads, and possibly doing a few trips abroad. And most of this is useful. But this is where the problem of semantics comes in. Although this may be referred to as external marketing it is really promotion, and all the activities contained here are tactics rather than strategies. Tactics can keep people busy for years, but any results are extremely difficult to see if there are no benchmarks for evaluation and if promotion is not seen against the backdrop of clear objectives and wider strategies. Selling is actually a part of promotion, which in turn is a part of marketing, and an easy way of remembering the difference is if you imagine a selling approach as 'this is what we've got - do you want to buy it?' and a marketing approach as 'what do you want, and can we provide it?'

Product positioning

Finally a word on product positioning where so many schools run into problems - particularly when they open branches.

One of the problems that people in marketing face when they are trying to sell courses is that the product itself is intangible: you can't see it, you can't touch it - you really have to experience it to know it.

However, expectations are created by what people can in fact see, or what they can deduce. If the price is very high, for example, expectations of both the course, and the accommodation, etc., are correspondingly high. If the premises are of extremely poor quality, or badly maintained, then that is likely to give the opposite expectations of the course. Other things which influence are the service you receive when you phone for information, staff attitude or appearance, promotional materials, school resources or location.

The three crucial things to remember are firstly that value for money is generally perceived when other aspects of the school are at a higher level than the price would suggest. Secondly, a coherent image depends on all aspects of the institution being correspondingly good and in line with the price. But lastly, nothing is going to work unless the reliability of the teaching and the service surrounding it reach the student's expectations when they actually arrive. One unhappy student can tell at least nine others. A school has to really exceed students' expectations if we want them to be proactive in their praise.

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