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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.
Jennifer:
I want to share another quick little bit of audio. This comes from the KIPP website.
It's from their brand center and here they lay out what they call their brand
Guidelines. Let's take a listen.
KIPP ad:
Welcome to the KIPP Brand Guidelines video. This is the guide for KIPP’s brand for
anyone in the KIPP team and family. You're watching this because you chose to
come to KIPP. Do you remember why? Do you remember the associations you had
with KIPP even before you got here? These associations are all part of the KIPP
brand and that's what a brand is. A set of associations you have with a given
organization or product.
Ultimately, a brand is a promise that we make to everyone in the team and family.
KIPPsters, families, teachers, staff, community members, board members, funders
and supporters. The promise tells people, "This what you can expect from us."
Jennifer:
As you could hear in that message that's on the KIPP website, they see their brand
as far larger than just being about a school, the students who attend it and the
parents who choose to send their kids there.
Sarah :
Yes.
Jennifer:
There's really an entire universe and they seem to have an expectation of brand
fidelity.
Sarah :
Yes, they do! They're one of the brands, they are the brand leader, let me just say
that. That KIPP is really the brand leader in terms of that consistent message and
that sort of national marketing and branding. They invested quite a while ago in
developing the brand and have a five person marketing team at the organization. At
least a five person, I haven't checked recently. Their marketing and their branding
isn't just for, as you say, for students and parents. In fact, I think there's a moment
when they're going through it and they say, "This is help what finds talent,"
meaning teachers and potential funders so for marketing, on a national level, we're
not really marketing to students and parents. We're really marketing to potential
teacher recruits and to funders of the organization.
The marketing and the branding and the quality of brand becomes cyclical in that
they invest in the quality of the brand and the marketing and then they get more
investors which will then allow them to continue to invest and build this brand and
market it. That's the idea, it's the way to survive in the market. That becomes part
of the market survival strategy.
Jennifer:
Earlier we heard a commercial from Success Academy that featured elementary
school students announcing the year that they would be graduating from college
and I think a lot of people would hear that and think, "Well, what could possibly be
wrong with that?" It's aspirational, it's inspirational, I'm curious about what
concerns you as a researcher about something like that.
Sarah :
I'm a huge fan of holding high standards but I think that when you only have
elementary schools and you have your kids being part of this, on the class as this, it
starts to feel more like a marketing gimmick right? Than something that you totally
know is the case.
To me, this gets back to another issue about school marketing and that is many of
these things, and this is sort of the tricky thing to figure out is many of these things
feel like promises. Right? So, KIPP says in their video, "Our brand is our promise,"
right? The question to the degree to be delivered upon is really important it speaks
of lack of regulation that's going on right now.
In the private sector, advertising, marketing is very heavily regulated. If you're a
food product, you can't say, "We're 100% organic," unless you really are.
Jack:
And then you'll go to Harvard if you eat us.
Sarah :
That's right. I have questions about the degree to which that we should be able to
say those kinds of things and make those promises. I think that it's a fine line
between holding these high expectations and making it a promise of something that
may just be a piece to get more applicants. Right? Lack of regulation then gets into
this, it’s tricky, it gets into a tricky business about this industry of marketing and
advertising is blowing up and it's way ahead of any regulation.
Information is really, really important. Information is critical for the market like
structures and education, if we're going to continue forward with having school
choice, it's going to be really critical but there's just a lack of regulation that we're
drawing on the private sector in terms of its model of how to market and how to
brand but we're not regulating it in the way that the private sector regulates it.
Jennifer:
When Jack and I started out this episode, we talked a little bit about how one of the
key differences between marketing for a company and marketing for a school is that
as a company you're after increased revenue and you're after market share, you're
after customers and for a school you're after parents and students and in most
communities, your potential customer base is, the aggregate customer base is
limited. Right? There are only a certain number of students.
Sarah :
Yes.
Jennifer:
I'm thinking about the time I just spent in Detroit which it has too many schools and
totally unregulated marketplace and marketing that is unregulated and so you see
marketing used to poach students constantly. They'll do these things like, if you
come to our school, we'll give you a laptop and lower level stuff too. We'll give you
a pair of shoes and it just seemed like the very worst- Just as we talk a lot about the
dangers of an unregulated education market place, you could really see the sort of
worst kind of predatory marketing.
Sarah :
Yes. That's one of the questions, I mean there are all kinds of questions about how
markets really work in public education, when you really start to peel back the
layers, it's a very different type of system than a private sector. We require our
students to go to school. We don't require everybody to own an IPad. Right? It's a
very different type of system in which the market structures are now embedded.
As one of my students said the other day, we were talking about this, she said,
"Well, everybody has to go somewhere," so in a market based system, marketing
becomes key to this competition when you have to get everybody sort of sorted
into their schools.
Without any sort of regulation, I mean it's open to things like, "I'll promise you a
pair of shoes." There are gimmicks but then it gets back to this larger question of,
what are we spending our budget on? Are we spending it on shoes? Right? Or are
we spending it teachers and support systems for students. That's where we start to
go. The more you invest in marketing, in order to compete, presumably more
money is not spent on the pedagogical or services, pericardial innovations or
services. That was really the intention to a degree. That's one thing markets in the
first place was for pedagogical innovations to occur or organizational changes to
occur. It wasn't to spur marketing but that's really what we're seeing. Marketing is
exploding instead.
Jennifer:
So I will confess that I am sort of obsessed with the unintended of consequences of
education reform and this seems like such a huge one. Right? That this education
marketing is just exploding and in fact when I spoke with Sarah and her colleague
Catherine last summer for something else I was working on, they said there's
actually a burgeoning field of education marketing consultants who help schools
navigate this thicket and think about what their message is, what their brand is and
who they want to aim it at.
Jack:
One of the things that came out of our conversation was some regulation around
the kinds of messages that can be spent and I would say also some regulation
around how much spending can happen. At least with regard to public dollars. We
know that our Supreme Court will continue to view money as voice whenever they
inherit problems with that. With regard to expenditures that are being made by
institutions that are receiving public funding. So this would be traditional public
schools and charter schools and possibly in some states, private schools that are
receiving public tax dollars. We may see the development of regulations around
how much per pupil can be spent on marketing.
Of course, this is a zero sum game. Every dollar that is spent on marketing is not
spent on the children themselves unlike let's say cereal, where an expanded
marketing program can lead to an expanded customer base which then actually
pays for the marketing.
One of the things that again that came out of this conversation today is because of
the nature of schools, that isn't going to happen. There are a fixed number of seats
and so ultimately, we have this question of how do we keep these worst abuses
from happening without let's say, clamping down on free speech or denying people
access to information, which though it may be of inconsistent quality, does have the
potential to be of high quality.
Jennifer:
I think it's only appropriate to send off this episode with a final ad and I picked a
good one. This is for a K12 virtual school and I have a feeling that Jack is going to be
so moved by this ad that he's probably going to enroll.
Jack:
I'll enroll somebody in it. We'll check in next episode to see who's signed up.
Jennifer:
Until next episode, I'm Jennifer Berkshire.
Jack:
And I'm Jack Schneider.
Jennifer:
And this is Have you Heard.
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