One of the great benefits in selling into schools is the fact that around 70% of the advertising that reaches schools consists of little more than a statement of what the product or service is, rather than the benefit of using it.
In a further 20% of cases there is a benefit, but the benefit is so weak, or one that has been used so many times before, that it doesn’t work.
Perhaps the most common example of an overused benefit is “makes learning fun” (with all its variants such as “putting the fun back into teaching”). Another is “for teachers by teachers”.
The problem with phrases like these is twofold.
First they have been seen so many times in the past that they stop having any effect. For oft repeated phrases to work, they need to be original and either humorous or genuinely thought provoking.
Original phrases are good if you can find them, but you also have to be ready to use them over and over again in your advertising so that they become remembered and associated with your approach to advertising. That means you have to be ready for a long-term campaign.
The alternative is to come up with a benefit that is real, and which others are not using – and this is the bonus you get in selling to schools. Despite the fact that selling benefits works extremely well, most people aren’t doing it in teacher focussed advertising. Companies large and small, when selling to schools, tend to forget the first law of marketing and revert to selling by features rather than benefits. They tell us what is in the box, rather than what the box will do for the teacher.
Great benefits that can be used but are hardly used include, taking students up a grade in exam, enabling the teacher to teach a subject without recourse to any other material, reducing the time it takes to teach a subject, cutting the level of bullying in school within two weeks…
You can see at once the power of these statements compared with the power of the “making teaching fun” or “by teachers for teachers” statement. Both have benefits within them (if a lesson is fun, the children learn more; teachers ought to know what works in a school so their products should be good), but because the full details are not spelled out, the message is weakened.
What I do find sometimes is that people will say to me, “I can’t prove the benefits” and while I would never knowingly write an advert that the Advertising Standards Authority would object to, I know from experience that proof is not necessary in such adverts.
If you have an advert that is not benefit driven and you would like to know about ways of changing it, do send it to me (Tony@hamilton-house.com) and I will call you back with my thoughts. If you would like to look at an overall campaign that can change the whole way you advertise and bring in better results, you might want to look at our Velocity programme at http://www.velocity.ac/education.html – although we are also very happy to work on a job by job basis.
Tony Attwood