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Return to Bulletin Home - November 2006
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Five Big Ideas From Berlin
Berlin's expanded seminar schedule included presentations by international marketing consultants Thijs van Vugt and Tim Rogers. This year's ICEF Berlin Workshop featured a full schedule of market intelligence seminars—triple the number offered in 2005—with topics ranging from best marketing and recruitment practices to detailed explorations of current market trends. Despite the breadth of topics, certain themes relevant to both agents and education providers cropped up repeatedly: 1. Know your brand, and communicate it consistently: What are your most compelling competitive advantages? Caring staff, top-notch instructors, intensive career counselling, beautiful surroundings, low rates of crime, state-of-the-art technology, etc.? Identify these in your marketing plan, and focus your communications and staff on presenting them persuasively to target markets. An essential condition for a consistent brand is that you—and your organisation—believe in it, and back it up. For example, if you say you are the foremost national provider of tourism education, make sure you have ample evidence to support this claim. Remember that every person and institution you communicate with can influence your brand—positively or negatively. Deliver the same branding message to all your stakeholders, and stand behind it in everything you do. Staff and representatives throughout your organisation should know the core branding mission so they can deliver on-point and quality service. 2. Meet the expectations you have set: Your branding efforts shouldn't stop once you have secured payment from your target consumer (e.g., once you have received tuition fees from a student, or as an agent, your commission fees). In fact, convincing your consumer to buy is just the beginning. Now, it's time to deliver on the promise. If you are an education provider, do everything possible to make the student's experience (a) what they expected it to be, (b) a rewarding and pleasurable time, and (c) something they can use effectively when they leave your institution. There are few bigger business errors than promising something that can't be (and/or is not) delivered; on the flip side, there is much to be gained from a sincere, successful effort to meet students' expectations. In the latter case, your students will return home with a lasting, positive impression of your institution, and when they share this impression, they do so in a market you likely want to continue cultivating. Their testimony is gold! If you are an agent, meeting the expectations you have raised on the part of the institution is just as crucial, for similarly long-term reasons. Good agents work for the success of their institution-partners; the better this goes, the more likely the institution is: (a) to continue the relationship, fuelling the agent's stability, and (b) to provide excellent references for the agent to other enquiring institutions, thereby broadening the agent's potential client base. 3. See the full potential of students. Both agents and education providers know that students are the most important part of their business, but they may not yet be maximising their students' true potential. Beyond tuition fees, students can be valuable marketing resources. For example, current students can provide information on their home markets: take 10 students for coffee, and ask them all about the environment from which they've come. What are the top schools? What educational priorities have their systems set? What is the local marketplace asking for in terms of skills? The list of questions is endless, and 10 students provide 10 different points of view. Current students can also be affordably employed to work on institutional marketing initiatives like emailing/phoning prospects or responding to queries, updating databases, and working on web projects. Once they have graduated, students can continue to be resources. They can (and will!) provide word-of-mouth—which reinforces how important it is that they have a positive experience at your institution—liaise with governmental/other bodies for the institution, and suggest promising recruitment avenues. Efforts like these make sense to alumni students, as the more successful and respected their alma mater is, the better their credentials look.
4. Promote (and deliver!) a full experience to students, not just a set of courses. When students choose to study abroad, they aren't basing their decision solely on the educational credentials of the institution. They are choosing to live abroad, not just to study abroad. Institutions and agents who promote and deliver a rich experience to students—including quality accommodations, culture, recreation, and networks through which to make friends—will be going a long way toward meeting the expectations of students (see #2). Respected credentials and transferable skills are essential, but less tangible, contextual deliverables such as those listed in this paragraph help to form a lasting impression of the institution in the student's mind. In this business, long-term goals are crucial to sustainability and success. 5. Good communications pave the way to success. Whether communicating with each other or with students, the best agents and institutions have well-considered, regularly scheduled, clear, up-to-date, and accurate messages, materials, and protocols in place. Agents and institutions who have been told exactly what the other is looking for (a) can more easily and efficiently provide what is desired, b) not waste time guessing and getting things wrong, (c) provide ideas for further ways to accomplish goals. Likewise, students who understand what is being promised, who receive quality services that meet their expectations, and who are treated respectfully and enthusiastically prior to, during, and following their actual period of study are more likely to be happy customers. Good communications are simply good business.
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