The Hindu Business Line : What's marketing B-schools all about

How should you market B-schools? Not as you sell shampoos but there is a case to study markets analytically and engineer strategies akin to those of mainstream industry.

IS higher education a product, or a service that can be marketed like one? Do the principles of strategic marketing apply to, for example, business schools? Is it a sacrilege, as it appears to some, to use these terms with reference to a sacred calling and a social service? Within every vocation (I hesitate to call them businesses) such as education, therapy and journalism, there is a sense of dichotomy and unease in approaching these questions. Look at the factors in favour of using the marketing or commercial language. There are providers and customers or beneficiaries of the service; there is certainly a substantial price to be paid, an act of exchange, and there is an act of deliberate customer choice involved in buying a magazine or going to a particular hospital or advanced college; and there are indeed alternative modes and sources of getting the benefits desired. Except perhaps in the case of the medical profession (and that too in a limited sense if you don't consider corporate hospitals), there is solicitation of customers too, through explicit advertising.

Some of the realities of the market place are sufficiently present in all the three cases to warrant treating them as business enterprises. "Do you really want a newspaper or an institute of higher learning to be marketed like a bottle of shampoo?" is the incredulous retort from some traditionalists. Nevertheless, they too will have to confront the reality that as long as there is no element of subsidy — as in school education — one will have to concede the need to look at markets analytically, by types of consumers and their expectations, and develop strategy on very similar lines to those of mainstream industry.

The common but fatal error, however, is to jump from this point to thinking of the end product of, say, journalism or education as the purely physical ones. Neither a business school nor a newspaper office is a factory. This literal-minded approach is surely sloppy and superficial thinking. Let us narrow down the field to consider just two specific cases, dailies and business schools, though clearly this could even apply to a library.

We must never consider a newspaper or a diploma as the real deliverable. We are delivering a very personal customer experience. What the reader experiences in reading a daily is far more than the consumption of news. It is rather a familiar, reassuring start to the day, along with the morning cup of a steaming brew. It is so much a part of personal morning ritual that people confess to missing something on the odd day that their favourite paper isn't available. Then there is the important element of a truly individual experience, the specially savoured pleasures like reading a favourite column or supplement, a regular feature, doing the crossword, the stock market report and so on. In fact, we can call the newspaper a vehicle in the `creation of customer experience,' which the British Airways CEO defined as the ultimate goal of his business some ten years ago, long before the phrase became fashionable academic jargon!

In much the same way, a good business school does not merely supply lectures, classes, books and then a diploma at the end of it, but creates an ambience that enables the student (fresh out of college or a senior executive) to share learning with a diverse group, living together on campus for the duration. The business networks and friends made at such places last a lifetime. The bonds of the old school tie are very real and rewarding, and in truth one of the invisible add-ons that the prestigious Ivy League institutions offer, which goes some way to justify both their image and the price. In India, the IIMs for a long time tended to concentrate on being a supply centre of graduates, processed from the best of the undergraduate colleges, to feed the coveted campus placement season. They measured their success predominantly by the headlines about starting salaries. Only recently have they formulated plans to go after the mid-career manager market in an aggressive way although the Management Education Programme (MEP) of IIM Ahmedabad was one of the earliest to identify the opportunity as far back as the mid-'70s.

Today, the biggest opportunity segment in this league is that of international programmes on Indian campuses. You could see it is another case of the widespread phenomenon of beating the geography and time constraints, through offshoring or outsourcing. Some schools have started addressing this segment, which is growing slowly but steadily. Besides the older IIMs, both the Indian School of Business and Great Lakes Institute of Management are focussed on this by establishing a name for high quality programmes with international faculty. Addressing the continuous professional development segment fits them especially well in three ways. Firstly, the top segment of the executive market is one that could appreciate the value, and afford to pay for the costs, of the model of providing internationally sourced education in India. Secondly, the short duration course is a good fit with the "flying professor" concept, in that one could maximise the contribution for a week of a visiting academic's time far easier in teaching a quickie rather than a longer MBA module. Thirdly, the blend of Indian managers' local experience and knowledge and the fruits of international research, cases and so on provide a good learning mix, which would be lost on the much younger full time degree student.

Teaching the mature executive requires delivering a very different "user experience" and thus a different set of skills and another recipe altogether. The school that blends both Indian and foreign (not necessarily only American please note) teachers would offer an unbeatable combination to the corporate sector which is in desperate need of developing a cadre of up-to-date senior management, in short order. Another element of the customer experience that would almost equal the overseas visit to a foreign campus would be achieved if we managed to bring in participants from other countries. Rubbing shoulders (and clinking glasses) with classmates from the corporate sector from all over the world is the great bonus that accrues when you attend a programme away from India. This is difficult to reproduce entirely in a domestic event, although many, including some associations, have attempted a multi-country design involving part of the time being spent on another campus, abroad. As more and more companies are seeing the world as their market and need a globally-oriented manager, they will presumably be willing to pay the kind of fees that would make such programme worthwhile.

The key, however, is to focus on the fact that the game is not about running programmes but delivering learning experiences and opportunities for self-development through dialogue and reflection. Therefore, the design and the staffing of the courses must be a high priority for joint effort by the corporate sector and the academic establishment. It is far more akin to marketing a highly personalised service such as a hotel or airline. To adopt manufacturing and engineering industry analogies would be unwise in the extreme. And finally, this is an opportunity for the really committed NRI to act out his or her good intentions.

(The author is a student and observer of markets, people and organisations.)

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