The New Marketing Imperative for Private Schools

A line in Ken Auletta's new book, Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else), could, with a change to one word, apply to the private, independent school sector as well.

"Today, the consumer is in control, and increasingly the challenge for advertisers is to create experiences that people will want to have because they no longer have to have them (emphasis in the original)."

Replace "advertiser" with "school" and you have an almost perfect encapsulation of the problem facing admissions and marketing leaders in independent schools. With the trifecta of flat or declining demography in most markets, public schools that aren't getting worse (or might be getting better), and escalating tuition, very few parents have to buy their children's education from any particular school. They have choices, more so that ever before, and for the foreseeable future the winners will be those schools that parents want instead of need (with the exception of schools for special needs students).The problem is that school people tend to think of their school's value as being self-evident, something that parents should find obvious, rather than something that must be demonstrated again and again. First answer the question of why any parent should want their child to be at your school (and want so badly they will sacrifice to make it happen). Then prove that they get what they want. It's the new imperative.