More than ever before, it is critical that
heads of school become integrally involved with marketing.
Why now, you ask? Because marketing has
morphed from being a fixed set of activities that emanates from a particular office
to something that now touches every department in a school.
When parents register their children at
your school, they are buying way more than an education. What was once a
product has become an experience. And parents – as customers – now see their
relationship with a school through the lens of that experience. A whole new
imperative for school marketing has been established.
This is what the people at McKinsey have to
say in a brilliant article called We’re all Marketers Now.
In today’s marketing environment, companies will be better off if they stop viewing customer engagement as a series of discrete interactions and instead think about it as customers do: a set of related interactions that, added together, make up the customer experience.
So, every interaction a parent has
contributes to the quality of her overall experience with your school. The
implications of that are far-reaching. As McKinsey puts it, “To engage
customers whenever and wherever they interact with a company … marketing must
pervade the entire organization.”
Putting that into practice, marketing has
to be part of every department’s plans and the way that every staff person
conducts himself. Interactions with the front office, teachers, educational
leaders, the business office – even custodians – all contribute to the parent
experience. Everyone now has some responsibility for marketing.
Now we get to the hard part. How exactly
will the marketing department extend its influence and provide direction and
support throughout the whole organization? And as the McKinsey article asks, “
… if everyone’s responsible for
marketing, who’s accountable?"
Realistically this is not something that
school admissions or marketing professionals are going to be able to deal with
on their own. Even directors of enrolment management or advancement don’t have
the implicit authority to put marketing on every department’s agenda and demand
accountability. You don’t have to be a clairvoyant, to see, as McKinsey does,
that, “Behind the scenes, that new reality creates a need for coordination and
conflict resolution mechanisms within and across functions ...”
Enter heads of school. It is only with
their involvement, influence and authority as well as their knowledge,
experience and judgment that a positive and pervasive parent experience can be
established.
Want to understand why that’s true? Who
else can persuasively speak to faculty about the ways in which they can
meaningfully contribute to the parent experience? Who is going to have the conversation
with the people in the business office about ensuring positive interactions
with parents?
How else can we ensure that the people who
guide parents into a school – the admissions department - remain part of the
parent experience and, in that way, contribute to retention success? And
finally, who will speak with trustees and lay people about the ways in which
their actions contribute to the parent experience and positive enrolment
results?
Only heads of school have the reach and the
credibility to raise the prominence of marketing and the parent experience. It
is only heads of school that can demand marketing accountability from every
department and every staff person.
I understand that the last thing that heads
need is more on their management plate. Ultimately, this may be a
responsibility that can be jointly assumed by heads and trustees or perhaps the
appropriate authority can be conveyed to someone else in the organization.
However, it seems inescapable to me that the head will have to maintain some
increased involvement in marketing.
In the past year as I have spoken at
admissions conferences about independent school marketing, I inevitably
have encountered professionals who are confounded by how they are going to affect the
necessary formidable change in their schools. As incredibly competent and well
meaning as they are, the answer is that marketing’s effect on enrollment (and
other) results will only be fully realized with the involvement of heads of
school.
What do you think?
