Is it possible for your school to stand out in a sea of sameness?
To be effective with any content marketing strategy, you’ve got to develop a distinctive — as opposed to distinct — point of view for the story you’re telling or the value you’re delivering at your school.
Distinct. Distinctive. These terms are sometimes used interchangeably. The difference we’re getting at is subtle. We typically describe a thing as ‘distinct from’ — meaning separate from — other things. But we don’t say ‘distinctive from’. Something is either distinctive or it’s not. To be distinctive is to be in a class of your own among others, standing out as unique. A duck is a distinct kind of bird. A purple duck would be a distinctive duck.
Most school Heads and their marketing teams avoid developing a distinctive point of view because they are totally content with being distinct. In other words — we most often differentiate on being a duck but are afraid to actually figure out how we might be a purple duck.
Questions emerge: “What if we’re wrong?” or “What if people don’t like it?” or “What if a prospective parent — or even worse, a current parent — disagrees?”
Our answer: for your school to be right for someone, you have to be willing to be wrong for someone else.
We’ll let that answer sit with you for just a moment because we understand the magnitude of the implications for school Heads.
- Teachers, on the whole, want to please. This is a good thing for a profession that flourishes when relationships between teachers, their students and their families are strong. Before you know it, the classroom teacher — who has seen first-hand the value of agreeable relationships — has become a school Head and is responsible for leading a small team of marketers. Actively choosing to be the wrong choice for some families does not fit with our natural instincts.
- Despite public perceptions, few schools Heads are overwhelmed with enrolment enquiries. Each indication of interest is gold, and it feels promiscuous to squander interest from any prospective family.
But the fact remains that it is better to be judged than it is to be ignored.
Normally when schools think of being different, it’s by differentiating our content. We think, narrowly, of how we differ – how we’re distinct. If you are a K-12 co-educational school you might claim the best pastoral care, academic rigour or facilities. That’s distinct. If we, rather, began offering parents a program of education and support to nurture and grow their children into well rounded adults who contribute to society – well then that might be distinctive.
Being only distinct limits our ability to stand out, especially in primary and secondary education where our competitors are not wrong – and we, in fact, have much in common with them.
Look at the top five Independent school brands in your state. They are all mostly telling the same distinct story, namely, that they deliver great student outcomes. None of those stories are distinctive.
We don’t have to oppose our competitors to tell a distinctive story.
We can agree on a topic and share a familiar story – even as we create a distinctive point of view. Think about books or movies. You could argue that the world doesn’t need another boy-meets-girl-wins-girl-loses-girl-wins-girl-back story. But when Say Anything, When Harry Met Sally and The Princess Bride came out, people flocked to those distinctive versions of the same old story. Each movie was in a class of its own.
At imageseven we regularly see this when consulting with school Heads and their teams. There is so much that is similar about the product delivered by Australian schools. The curriculum is essentially the same across the nation and ultimately, all Year 12 graduates are ranked on a common scale. Our analysis almost always reveals all the competitor schools in a particular market are targeting parents with the same old story: We’re credible academically, we care for your child and look at our facilities.
In our Message Architecture Program workshops, we help school Heads and executive teams get alignment on a distinctive point of view. What if you offered the best aspects of both single gender and co-education? What if your breadth of opportunities was specifically designed intentionally to help students discover their passions? What if we viewed education and support of parents as a true partnership in which parent participation is mandatory?
Of course, it is up to the school to decide if any concept is right for them and must decide if they can execute it consistently over time. One thing is for sure: it is distinctive. It’s a purple duck in a room full of brown mallards. That’s the point. If you’re trying to tell a story that everyone will like or agree with, be ready for no one to care.
That’s the one way you don’t want to be distinctive.
