Education by hype

MARKETING: Is an educational institution only as good as its advertising?

Perhaps it started a couple of years back when Arindam Chaudhary's management institute IIPM (Indian Institute of Planning and Management) came out with full page ads screaming: "Dare to think beyond IIMs".

Ads for educational institutions? It had never happened before, so you could be excused for sneering, and sneer people did. But clearly, the strategy seemed to be working, and it launched a slew of branding initiatives for other educational institutions.

The Amity group came out with TV commercials in addition to a host of print ads. The Rai University did a lot of advertising, as did Wellingkar's Institute in Mumbai.

More recently, full page newspaper advertisements and hoardings announced the launch of Mother's Pride, bringing the competitive education paradigm down to the youngest age group.

Amity, in just a couple of years, has grown into a fairly popular institute "" and the role of advertising in it, though debatable, cannot be easily discounted. Its 80 schools and colleges offer courses in most disciplines, and it has 30,000 students passing through its portals each year.

Three years back, those numbers were closer to 20,000. Even IIPM has doubled its student population in the last few years. For the bottomline is that today kindergartens, schools, colleges, B-schools and international universities are all part of the educational advertising bandwagon.

Which leads us to the question: Can we make brands out of education institutes? And is there need for education institutes to come out with regular advertisements?

"Why not?" asks Mohit Beotra, president, Lowe Delhi. "In this competitive scenario, people want to differentiate their products, and advertising helps in that."

According to Adex figures, education occupied the top slot in print advertising this year from January to June 2006. Education as a category was the top spender in print with 41 per cent share of total advertising with Chaudhary's Planman group leading the charge.

Now, with increasing competition, if the trend continues, educational institutions will need to spend more on advertising and use other marketing techniques to communicate their product message.

Says Santosh Desai, president, McCann Eriksson, "Advertising should not be limited to enticing students but should be genuine and must address their needs."

The shift is already evident. Even foreign universities like Wigan & Leigh advertise heavily to differentiate themselves from the rest of the crowd. "It is, at the end of the day, telling people about the courses and facilities but in a unique manner," adds Beotra.

Lowe, which handles Wigan & Leigh's creative output, has been doing a lot of activities including below the line, like education fairs and regular print ads to promote its client. Wigan & Leigh has a budget of Rs 6 crore for its promotional activities.

However, there is a contradictory view on the need to advertise educational insitutions. "IITs and IIMs are brands in their own right that were not created because of advertising," says Anand Halve, partner, Brand Chlorophyll.

"There is nothing wrong in advertising, but the product or service should match up to the promises made by these institutions," he adds.

Clearly, advertising can pull in the students (and their money), but it cannot create institutions. That still requires a good, old-fashioned slog the hard way.