© Jiří Andreas | Dreamstime.com
The idea of running a school district like a business has been a hot topic for the last few years. Because I come from the world of business I have some sympathy for that concept. However schools are not businesses. We don’t produce a product or service like a for-profit organization and we under a whole different economic model. There are concepts from the business world which we can and should incorporate into our thinking. One of them is the concept of brand and marketing that brand.
The first steps in marketing is determining the three P’s, product, place and promotion. So what is our product? Is is an educated kid? How do we define educated? Some would define educated based on standardized test scores, some on job skills and readiness to enter the workforce. The correct answer is what YOU (your district) decides is your product.
Personally I do not think the student is the product, I feel the student is the customer. The product is the education, or the educational opportunities. The old saying about leading a horse to water applies here. We need to market the opportunities that our districts provide. It is up to the students (our customers) to take advantage of our product.
Let’s look at a non-school example of what I mean. We sell trucks. Our trucks are the most comfortable, best looking trucks on the road. We also have the largest carrying capacity in our class, we can carry ten tons in a load. All of our competitors can only carry six tons. We sell this truck to Mr. Smith. He may be a lazy person and gets tired after loading only 5 tons of freight in the truck. Is our fault that on average our competitors trucks haul more per load? In the world of business of course not, but in our world it is most definitely our fault.
That’s what I mean about education being different from business. We are responsible for our customers use of the product we provide. How can marketing help? Once we get our three P’s decided we will talk about target audiences and then how to put it all together to improve our district.
The next P is place. Place is easy, or is it? While we all have district boundaries, do they define where we do our marketing? I strongly say NO! If we limit ourselves to only face to face education we can market to students in nearby communities, and never forget our own district. There are competitors out there marketing to the students sitting in our very own classrooms.
If we remove the limits of face to face, then our marketing area is greatly expanded, probably to our states borders and possibly beyond. Is that large of a marketing area good? That depends on your district. Remember this is your marketing plan, you get to decide.
Now the biggie, promotion. How do we promote our district? There is no one (or easy) answer. Businesses spend a lot of time and money finding the correct mix of marketing campaigns. Millions are spent on hiring marketing consultants and experts to help companies figure it all out. There is no way that I, in a short blog post, could ever tell you how to promote your district. First off I don’t even know your district. But I do have a few ideas to help you along the path, that is another blog.
We have our three P’s, what we need now is a target audience. The audience should be the decision makers. In families the true decision makes depends on the age of the children. With younger students the parent(s) decide on the school their children attend. With older children it becomes a joint decision, or even the kid’s choice. In the past families voted with their feet. They choose a house based on the school their children would attend. In this era of choice, open enrollment and online learning, parents have a greater range of options. While you should target parents with your marketing, don’t forget children.
There is is, you have decided on the three P’s of marketing and selected your target audience(s). What’s next? In my next post on marketing I will talk about the two key decisions your district need to make before you even think about writing one word of marketing.
