Have You Heard #16: Truth in Edvertising
https://soundcloud.com/haveyouheardpodcast/truth-in-edvertising
School marketing is a fast growing - and completely unregulated - byproduct of the education marketplace. Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire explore the world of "edvertising" with researcher Sarah Butler Jessen. To market, to market!
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Jennifer: / I'm Jennifer Berkshire.
Jack: / And I'm Jack Schneider.
Jennifer: / And what you just heard is something that is increasingly common these days, a little snip it of school marketing.
You know Jack, we're so used to hearing about how our schools should function as a market place that we never really through about how one of the, I'll go ahead and say it, one of the noxious bi-products of a market place is marketing.
Jack: / Marketing is definitely something that comes with consumption. And particularly when consumers are tasked with figuring out what works for them, or what they want or what they should want. And particularly when the company or firm that is providing them with this service or product is not necessarily regulated in terms of what they say about the service that they're providing or the product that they're making.
Jennifer: / That's a really good point because I thought that I might start this episode with a little quiz and ask you if you could identify for us some of the differences between school marketing and some of the commercials that you watch on TV at night.
Jack: / I don't want TV at night. I'm a professor, I watch it all day long.
Jennifer: / Oh that's right. That's right. You know how you often find yourself watching a drug commercial and thinking to yourself ...
Jack: / Sure, during Oprah.
Jennifer: / "Maybe I should ask my doctor about Extruda."
Jack: / Yeah. That's right, and the side effect that is gigantic eyeball.
Jennifer: / What are some of the differences between marketing a school and say marketing a product like a drug or a dishwasher.
Jack: / It's a really interesting question.
The first very basic difference and really essential difference is that schools are not just private goods. Right so, a pharmaceutical product is a private good basically by definition. It is something that is going to cure me and my unique problem with whatever it is that Extruda is going to solve.
Jennifer: / This is a family show so I'm not going to go into detail for that particular question.
Jack: / That sounds sad for me.
So, in schooling certainly there is a private good aspect to it. But schooling is also a public good. It's something that benefits our society, our neighborhoods, our communities. It benefits the most advantaged, but it also benefits the least advantaged at least theoretically. So when we acting as consumers, we're only acting in alignment with the private good aspect of education.
So think for instance, buying an alarm for your house versus trying to cultivate safer cities or safer neighborhoods. Whereas one of those is an inherently private good. The alarm is only going to protect me and my family. The public good is going to benefit everyone in the community and that's not something I can promote via shopping.
I would say the next basic difference is that there are vulnerabilities to marketing that are pretty particular in education. So one of them is the quality of a school is really a multifaceted thing.
Jennifer: / Regular listeners of our show will know that this is something of a passion for you.
Jack: / A real passion of mine. And finally I would just say that there are all of these factors that make people inert consumers once they've chosen. We still have the fact that consumers might not be as alert and ready to switch products as say the consumers of breakfast cereal. So you take that first bit of, Apple Jacks is it?
Jennifer: / My favorite from childhood.
Jack: / The breakfast of champions. The breakfast of podcasters apparently.
So you take that first bite of Apple Jacks, and you're in heaven. And you convince me. And so this isn't marketing but it's a close cousin, word of mouth. You convince me to try Apple Jacks and I take a bite and I realize they're foul and noxious. I then have a task ahead of me, and that is simply to drop the Apple Jacks in the garbage, lose my 3 dollars investment and go to the store.
Jennifer: / And buy some Frankenberry.
Jack: / And buy some Coco Crisp. I have immediately gotten feedback in a way that you can't get in schools. This is another vulnerability to marketing. I've gotten immediate feedback, I've been able to switch instantaneously, which you can't do in schools unless you're really in pulling your kid out of school each week and finding a new school to take him or her.
Never mind the difficulties with regard to transportation or the fact that your child may have developed feelings of attachment to teachers or other students. None of this applies to Frankenberry or Coco Crisp for Apple Jacks. All of this makers marketing, when we're talking about schools just in much more complicated and potentially swampy enterprise.
Jennifer: / Well, I so appreciate your thoughtful explanation of the differences. I, of course had two much more obvious differences in mind and the first is something-
Jack: / That you thought of while you were having your bowl of Apple Jacks this morning.
Jennifer: / That's correct. The first is something that you mentioned right off the bat which is this idea that there really is no one, we have no entity that evaluates the claims being made in school marketing and this was made evident over the summer in kind of a dramatic way.
If you remember that our now President Trump went to visit a charter school in Cleveland and a lot of commentators pointed out that by the states measure's the school was failing but if you went to the school website, which is a form of marketing, it advertised itself as a top rated charter school and an award winning school.
The other obvious difference is just that the customer base is limited for schools in a way that it isn't for companies. Right? You have a finite number of kids and that means that when you're heavily marketing, those kids are going to have to come from somewhere. Well, overall though, I think you did a great job on the quiz and all the excitement, I almost forgot that we have an expert standing by and we should probably get her on the phone just as soon as we pause for this quick commercial break.
Ad for Success Academy: / I'm the class of 2032.
I'm the class of 2030.
I am the class of 2031.
I'm six years old and I'm the class of 2031.
I think what Success has really accomplished in the past ten years has been a coming the proof point. In American public education of what is possible. I've been with the network five years and I still get excited when I see kids that I don't know wearing Success Academy backpacks. I just love that a model that I have been a part of is touching lives and enriching lives of young people across the city in ways that I can't even really imagine.
Jennifer: / Welcome back. We're joined now by a special guest, Sarah Butler Jessen is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bowdoin College and she studies school marketing. Sarah, before we got you on the line, I played an ad from Success Academy and I picked it because Success is a very high profile New York charter network but also because I learned from your research that Success markets in way that's actually pretty typical of a large company. Meaning that they spend a lot of money.
Sarah Butler Jessen: / Success Academy has been one of the brand leaders in terms of developing their marketing model. They've been very advanced in terms of their uniformity and their branding across social media as well. They use all types of social media and are very highly branded. They have YouTube channel, all that they manage, they have professionally developed videos and they have a Twitter account, they even have an Instagram account which is sort of one step further than most of the larger CMO's or even educational organizations that we've seen.
There’s been a lot of talk about how much money they spend. We were able to look at some of their budgets from the 2012 and 2013 year, along with a bunch of other charter management and charter organizations in New York City authorized by SUNY. Again, as we raised in recent earlier article about the 2010 data, in Williamsburg and Cobble Hill in particular in that year, they're spending more than $1,000 per entered student on marketing alone.
It actually ends up being, if you look at their budget, after salaries, the second highest allotments on their budget. It's clearly a high priority for the organization.
Jack: / I'm wondering how uneven the marketing playing field here is because two questions jumped to mind for me. One is a question of who markets? And of course, traditional public schools are much less likely less to be marketing because they're simply aren't those incentives for them to be engaged in that practice.
Jennifer: / There's also not $1,000 a kid extra to spend on marketing.
Jack: / Right.
Sarah : / Right.
Jack: / Then the second question there is related to that and that's the question of who has the budget to do this?
Sarah : / Yes.
Jack: / And it seems to me like even independently operated charters would be at a disadvantage here relative to, for our non-insider acronym-knowing listeners, CMOs or Charter Management Organizations. So CMO's like Success Academy or KIPP or any of the other branded charters would be much more likely to have the capacity to engage in a really robust marketing campaign because of the CMO structure. So I'm wondering if you could speak to the degree to which this marketing playing field is level or not.
Sarah : / We've looked at the different types of schools and they included actually private institutions in our analysis. You know, just traditional private schools and we compared the way that they were using social media. In particular; YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and then also their websites because these becomes the major touch points for marketing campaigns these days.
What we found actually surprised us, Catherine DiMartino and I as part of the book at we're writing, was that the charter management organizations were just way ahead in terms of the execution of these marketing campaigns and the branded identities, even more so than the private schools.
Jennifer: / I want to stick with Success Academy for just a little bit longer. They recently announced that some 20,000 students had applied for roughly 3,200 available spots. I thought your research was really interesting about how the combination of their intense marketing and the level of demand itself is part of their brand. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Sarah : / We've actually been drawing on literature from the business sector because there's this base about marketing and advertising that already exists there. We figure if we're in this sort of world, we should be drawing on this research. And we found this great study by Ackerman from 2011 that shows that investing and marketing campaigns and creating demand, people interpret these types of investments and this high demand and they perceive it as, "Oh this must be a quality product." Right? That's something that we see in the private sector, where people perceive quality based on investments in these marketing campaigns and sort of demand that results from it.
There must be high competition for this product and therefore it must be of quality so that's how we perceive advertising campaigns. The same is true, we argue for schools and that investing and marketing and creating demand translates to perceptions of quality.
Jack: / Sarah, I just wanted to jump in here and make one observation since we're talking about perceptions of quality and that's that every year the Phi Delta Kappan survey that gauges the perceptions of American's about public schooling finds that perceptions of charter schools tend to be much higher among all Americans.
This is not a measure of the satisfaction of those sending their children to these schools. This is among all Americans, the perceptions of charter schools are much more positive than perceptions of traditional public schools. Perceptions of charter schools are basically in line with perceptions of private schools and it seems to me like this is, given the fact that most people have not actually set foot inside one, much less, all of the nations charter schools or private schools; this seems to me to be an indication of some of the influence of the successful branding that charter schools and private schools are engaged in.
Sarah : / I would definitely say that, that's true. I think that's part of the message and part of the marketing message also includes public relations and sort of getting the word out via media. We share a lot of stories, a lot of stuff on social media these days. If you were at all interested in education and you're following, you hear stories in the news and about these organizations and often the message itself is shaped by the organization and that is a piece of, you know, the overall picture becomes a piece of the brand that the organization is building for itself.
That is how you build a strong brand is to create the message around that image so that people immediately think, "Oh, KIPP." That's great. Kind of like how you respond to anything like coke or all those other brands, Nike. Right? You know that brand. They want to create that message and part of that is getting out mass words. People have these public perceptions about what it means to be a KIPP School and maintaining that is really, really critical for them.