Educational providers in the marketplace: Schools’ marketing responses in Chile

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Highlights

  • Schools’ marketing strategies are influenced by endogenous and exogenous factors.

  • Marketing strategies need to be understood as a schools’ responses to market.

  • Schools use marketing to attract demand and to position themselves in the market.

Abstract

This paper proposes a framework for analysing the responses of educational providers in competitive contexts. The evidence presented is based on empirical research carried out in one Chilean municipality. The objective of the paper is to analyse the responses developed by the schools with which to position themselves in the Chilean education market. The results show how the schools’ external communication is related to a range of factors such as their perception of competition, their position in the local hierarchy and the characteristics of the local market, as well as the symbolic attributes oriented toward positioning themselves within the market. Different schools’ typologies were identified with regard to marketing strategies in terms of the form and intensity they took on.

Introduction

Education market policies have dramatically changed the management processes of schools, and how schools engage with their nearby external environment (Gewirtz, Ball, & Bowen, 1995; Jabbar, 2015, van Zanten, 2009; Woods, Bagley, & Glatter, 1998). However, research that addresses how schools respond to the incentives provided by the market remains scare, particularly in terms of the strategies that schools use to position themselves within the education market (Waslander, Pater, & van der Weide, 2010). In this context, marketing strategies are becoming an ever more important way to attract students. Nonetheless, the field of educational marketing in primary and secondary education remains under-analysed. Although the emergence of charter schools in the USA has increased interest in the marketing strategies developed by this typology of schools, schools’ marketing has been little analysed and un-theorized in the context of research into pro-market educational reforms research (Oplatka & Hemsley-Brown, 2004; Olson Beal, Stewart, & Lubienski, 2016), particularly in comparison with other dimensions of these reforms, such as their impact in terms of effectiveness and equity or families’ school choice strategies.

For several reasons, the Chilean education system is particularly appropriate for analysing the strategies developed by schools in order to communicate with their external environment. First, the Chilean education system is one of the most marketized in the world (Bellei & Vanni, 2015). The introduction of a universal voucher system, as well as a high level of freedom of school choice, have fostered school competition to attract students. Secondly, the strong knowledge of both the demand and supply sides of the education market rules, after more than 35 years of a market-oriented education system, enables an in-depth analysis of the behaviour and rationalities of the different actors that are part of the system, in both the offer and the demand sides. Although Chile is one of the most emblematic cases of the adoption of education market and privatization policies, the evidence for marketing strategies developed by educational providers is scare. The objective of this paper is to identify the marketing strategies developed by schools in the context of the Chilean education market, as well as the factors (endogenous and exogenous) influencing these strategies. The results presented in this article are based on an empirical research conducted in one municipality of the Santiago conurbation. The fieldwork for this research consisted of in-depth interviews with 14 principals from a sample of schools, selected based on their institutional and socioeconomic characteristics, as well as the analysis of the promotional materials and schools’ webpages.

The paper is organized as follows. The first section reviews the evidence concerning the responses of schools to the market environment and synthesizes the main results of the research. The second section presents and describes the analytical framework proposed for the analysis of the marketing processes developed by schools and described. In the third section, the case study approach and the methods used therein are presented. In the fourth section the key mediating factors and the different dimensions involved in educational marketing processes are analysed. In the fifth section, as a way to synthetize the main results obtained, marketing strategies’ typologies are presented. Finally, the paper outlines the main conclusions and proposes future research directions concerning school marketing.

Section snippets

Schools’ responses to marketized environments

Schools’ marketing strategies must be understood not as an isolated response, but as part of schools’ complex behaviour in competitive environments. In this sense, educational reforms that introduce choice and competition between schools imply the need for important changes in the management strategies adopted by these institutions. In recent decades, many educational systems have adopted this reform approach. Some of the most well-known and emblematic examples are United Kingdom, New Zealand

The role of marketing for schools

As shown above, marketing is one of schools’ responses identified in the literature concerning the behaviour of educational providers in competitive environments. However, the field of educational marketing in basic education (primary and secondary level) remains under-analysed (Oplatka & Hemsley-Brown, 2004). In fact, from a theoretical perspective there is a lack of a clear definition about what educational marketing entails and the specific activities, which make up or can be classified as a

School marketing analytical framework

On the basis of the literature analysed and the theoretical assumptions about the rationalities and objectives of educational marketing presented in the previous section, Fig. 1 illustrates the primary elements or dimensions that can be included in educational marketing processes, as well as the sequence and relationships between them. The diagram shows that educational marketing is composed of a number of activities developed by schools. At the same time, it is important to highlight that

The chilean education market

During the 1980s, and in the context of neoliberal reforms carried out in multiple sectors, Chile implemented an educational reform program based on school choice and competition between schools. These reforms are characterized by the creation of a single system of public financing (a voucher system), in which the government contributes a fixed amount for each student enrolled in public or subsidized private schools. Roughly 90% of Chilean students in primary and secondary schooling have their

Case study: data and methods

The results presented in this paper are based on a case study developed in one of the municipalities of Santiago (the Chilean capital). Several authors have highlighted that the dynamics and interactions of any education market should be analysed from a local perspective (Gewirtz et al., 1995, Lubienski, 2007, Woods et al., 1998). In this sense, LEMs represent a heuristic device, which is useful when analysing how schools and families respond to competition and choice, and how these responses

Marketing process and schools’ logics of action

This section analyses the points of view and rationalities expressed by school principals regarding three main dimensions of the marketing process: assessment of market position, market scanning and diversification, and promotional activities.

Marketing strategies typologies

From the analysis of the interviews with principals, and taking into account the main dimensions of education marketing processes, three different school typologies of school marketing can be identified (Table 2). These typologies are ‘ideal’ types (Priyadarshini, 2017) and presented as constructs or methodological tools for systematizing the evidence collected, as well as for facilitating an analysis of the phenomena of educational marketing. In Table 2, the different characteristics of each

Conclusions and discussion

Educational marketing is a strategic and management response from schools to the introduction of market-oriented policies and competitive environments. However, as marketing responses are not expected by education market theory, this field remains under-analysed in primary and secondary education by the academic literature. Overall, educational research has not sufficiently dealt with what educational marketing entails, what are the different processes that educational marketing involves, and

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and comments and to Xavier Bonal and Antoni Verger for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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  • Cited by (0)

    The research presented in this article has been supported by the projects “Public-Private Partnerships in Educational Governance: An Analysis of Its Dissemination, Implementation and Impact in a Globalizing World” (EDUPARTNER, Ref. GA-2012-322350, EU Program “PEOPLE”) and “Cuasi-mercados en educación en América Latina: Un análisis de su implementación e impacto sobre la desigualdad y la pobreza” (EDUMERCAL, Ref. CSO2011-22697, Spanish Ministry of Education).

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