Can marketing lead education?
Summary and analysis of replies to an earlier query

This debate is not closed. Please continue to send me your thoughts on
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If there are any marketing specialists reading this, I hope no offence is
taken. Also, please accept my apologies if I have not credited your
contribution, but there were so many of you and I'm assuming that most would
prefer to be anonymous as your situation may be sensitive.

In my organisation, Education is directed by a Marketing department with a
broad and strategic role. Education supports the market-led strategy rather
than Marketing supporting programmes. Education is a route to market to
build the institution. I wondered if this was unique and what kinds of
debates others were having about the differences between marketing, audience
development and education. What emerged is that there are as many paradigms
for distinctions and tensions as there are different organisations.
For example:
"We are working with a relatively homogenous audience and we know what they
need/want while Marketing are trying to be all things to all people and
therefore have to be more bland."
...compared with:
"In Education we're trying to create layered interpretation for a range of
different needs, whereas Marketing demands that we target a single
audience..."

Some felt the growth of audience/market research was a really positive force
for education. On the other hand, many were suffering because the
qualitative nature of education was not always recognised - the role of
transforming individuals as opposed to aiming for 'key performance
indicators' such as visitor numbers.

There were a range of different scenarios in terms of who does marketing and
education:
        *       Some wished for a more marketing-led approach as they lacked
visitors - "We dream of having a marketing department at all". Where there
were marketing staff, some wanted more marketing support for education
programmes rather than a focus on exhibitions/tourists/'the public'.
        *       Education staff in small organisations often do both
marketing and education. "I liked the set-up because I could justify my
marketing activities within the general educational aims that I regarded as
the more important work (i.e. marketing it as a place to learn), and I could
justify the loss-making nature of education by subsidising it beside an
overtly commercial department...The downside was that I sometimes found
myself viewing education as part of the marketing work - always looking for
marketing and PR opportunities in my educational work."
        *       A few organisations are able to employ 'marketeers' to
specialise in education, some within education teams, some in marketing
teams. One of these specialists said "on the marketing side, activities have
to be well planned a long way in advance to really do them justice in terms
of publicity". Marketeers can make educators better planners.
        *       A version of the above is that in one case, the Education
manager manages the Marketing team, and this works well.
        *       A situation that does cause real problems for Education is
Marketing being in a strong strategic position, and being very controlling
of messages, planning priorities, display/exhibition look and feel,
publicity timescales. We know that impoverished schools and community groups
do not respond to being marketed at with glossy brochures and strong brands,
and you can feel sneaky and ghettoised if you undercut that with your own
low-scale tactics. One respondent wondered if marketeers were necessary when
Education produced the meat of all their publicity and gave all the leads on
where to send it.
        *       We hear of practice that is more collaborative, which does
not use a market-led marketing paradigm, but focuses on access-led audience
development. Partnerships, communications and learning activities are
integral parts of projects and exhibitions. However, this is not always
perfect because it can result in role confusion, and it can mean that the
essential jobs of press, design etc get neglected. Or on the other hand,
some staff feel that they can't get on with the work of 'community
development' because they're called upon to do pure marketing. In large
organisations, several departments can have a brief for public access, and
layers of curating/interpretation, audience development and education may be
built up. When a marketeer is called an 'audience development officer' it
can conflict with the roles of interpretation/outreach/access staff. What is
clear is that the latter need to be valued, and that they need marketing
support. "Maybe one day you can persuade the powers that be that the skills
of a good educationalist can beat those of any marketing guru!"


Audience development and education
The difference between marketing and education is quite clear cut, but the
emerging role of audience development raises questions about the role of
education. Audience development is an outcome of good education work.
Perhaps we can define education as the activity, content and contact with
learners, whereas audience development is the bridge-building work that gets
them in.

Here's a very clear definition: "I firmly believe that museum educators are
audience advocates. We provide learning opportunities / intellectual
access...to enable a wide range of people to visit...and learn from our
collections. Marketing for me is about issuing a message to people: this is
what we are, this is what we do, you can come and see/do this. Audience
development is about ensuring that people who don't visit are CHOOSING not
to visit, rather than not visiting because they perceive some sort of
barrier (physical/real or perceived). The two inevitably cross over at some
points, but audience development is about knowing your visitors, identifying
your non-visitors and establishing why they are non-visitors and looking at
ways of providing access to your collections for those potential visitors.
This is the remit of museum educators whose expertise is in providing access
for different learning styles, rather than the remit of the marketeer, whose
expertise is a different kind of engagement."

So, generally education and audience development are seen almost as the same
thing:
"I don't see many differences between Audience Development and Education in
the cultural sector because we're marketing an educational product.
Commercial marketing for industry would be a different matter." This is
right, but tensions do occur if your managers perceive your cultural
organisation as an industry, your programmes as products and your learners
as customers. In a perverse way, the Government engenders that situation at
the level of resourcing/best value/KPI's/encouraging commercial development,
despite its emphasis on social inclusion and learning.

Sometimes attempts by education to get out of their niche and contribute to
strategic 'audience advocacy' for the whole organisation, can be
misinterpreted as a desire for market research. Or their suggestions can be
taken up by others who don't then involve the education staff. Marketeers
are generally perceived to interpret audience development as 'getting more
of the same visitors in'. If they do more than this, then it is generally
work that focuses on the quality of the environment, physical access issues
or getting visitors to return, rather than work about how visitors make
meaning from their visit.

One contributor, to whom I'm very grateful, offers the following thoughtful
analysis:

"The argument [given by others for excluding education from public
access/audience development work] is that surely this is about exhibition
programmes and not about education. I feel the generative nature of
education is not understood, and the model presently being adopted within
the organisation has reverted to the Curator (selects objects/writes text) -
Designer (produces and installs exhibition) - Educator (organises and
delivers materials and activities for schools and general visitors)
framework for communication/development. So where do active
audiences/evaluation frameworks fit into this picture? Who indeed is the
general visitor? (No one seems to know!!) Attempts to define a way to
integrate education into this context risk being misunderstood as
'interfering' and the role of education (and by association, the active
learner) marginalised....

My feeling is that market research is a useful tool to gain a demographic
profile of museum users, who comes/who doesn't etc and can be used as a
basis for access. Discussion with others directly involved in museum
development work suggests that market research overlaps with audience
development for qualitative/quantitative evaluation/stats, focus group work
etc. What it doesn't do is the social learning bit - how people learn in
relation to others or provide information to promote learning activities.

The education role is central to how people learn. This is unique to
audience development. The 'why' word is the bit the market researchers cover
less adequately. The following framework to help us understand how people
like to receive and process information, shows four questions how, why, what
and if, presented in quadrants (adapted from Kolb and McCarthy):

what                                     why
the big picture                      what's in it for me?
demographic profile             why should I be interested?
(visual analysis)                   (auditory model)

how                                       if (what if....)
behavioural analysis             creative individualistic people who
activity                                  like to discover things for
themselves
                                              learn by trial and error.
Spontaneous
(hands-on
kinaesthetic model)              (Non-specific model)

Market research tends toward the what and how quadrants as you can see...Our
work represents the other
half of the picture. The work may be considered to be specific to key
audiences and empowering visitors/learners to 'own' their history. I suggest
our starting point (common ground) is that both market researchers and
education/audience development work see people as individuals with common
behaviour patterns. Different tools of analysis will suit particular
learning styles: 'what' - questionnaire ' how' - interview for example.
Where 'why' or ' if ' tools need to be considered, focus group activities or
working with a specific audience would be required, or where you wish to
demonstrate impact on learning (e.g. Inspiring Learning framework). My only
concern is that this need may not be identified if marketing/others perceive
changes in audience behaviour (e.g. increase visitor figures) to be the sole
performance indicator. We need therefore to be asking what people are taking
away from the learning experience as well as would they come back again? We
need to build into our work effectual evaluation mechanisms to enhance and
demonstrate the processes of what/how on the left quadrants. Evaluation
then, would demonstrate key audience objectives and measure impact (to
inspire learning). My guess is, there will be great demand for evaluation
methodology on GEM training in the future.

Conclusion: We have a great deal to gain by working together...Perhaps one
of the outcomes of all your discussions will include the need for learning /
audience advocacy in relation to museum development? If we don't get this
right education will get boxed in with niche audiences and the learner will
have little or no voice into museum practice. They will simply be a
statistic."



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