The Ed Techie

Is marketing dead?

Chris Anderson posted on Google's attitude towards marketing, which was 'we know we're good, everyone will try us so don't do it.' I've been having a few discussions around marketing as part of the broadcast review, and how companies such as YouTube just completely ignore all the rules of marketing. Let's take adverts as the purest form of marketing (I know there are lots of other methods, but they are usually adverts dressed up), I see these as rather greedy chunks of resource. They don't do anything except say 'here I am, this is the product.' And they cost a lot of money to say this. If you take viral marketing in its proper sense, not in the 'marketing companies trying to do normal marketing in a viral way' sense, then it works because the resource does something. It entertains, it educates, it informs, it encourages dialogue, etc. Take YouTube - an advert for the site would be pretty pointless, but allowing people to actually share the content is powerful. A traditional marketing guy would never have understood that.

If one considers this in educational terms then perhaps the best form of marketing universities can do is to create educational content that is freely available. This then serves not one, but three functions:

i) It can be used by the university in its own courses.

ii) It fulfills an outreach/public good function as others can use it.

iii) It advertises the university.

Compare that with simply having an add that says 'gee it's fun to study at X' and I can see a time when traditional marketing begins to look like a shaky investment.

At the risk of incurring the wrath of those in marketing everywhere, I've never really understood it as an academic discipline either. This is after all a field whose Cistine Chapel is Gilette's 'Give away the razor, sell the blades' policy and whose Theory of Relativity is the rebranding of the viscosity of Heinz ketchup. I feel rather like marketing as Galbraith did of economic forecasting when he said "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

OpenLearn launch - a mild regret

The OpenLearn project was launched internally today - the official launch is October 25th. It looks very impressive, particularly when you know the problems of taking legacy material and getting it in suitable chunks and up online. I also think they've done some good things with the tools in the labspace area (I like the non-client based messenger particularly - I always wanted a tool like this where I could join in an informal real-time chat around a piece of content).

I was part of the team that worked on the bid last year to the Hewlett Foundation to get the project. In January I had a choice - either go full time on the project, or write my VLE book. I'm not particularly good at multitasking so couldn't do both. I felt that the VLE book wouldn't really wait - like many educational technology books, it feels as though it's obsolescing as you type. So my literary pretensions won out and I opted to spend four months writing the book. But sitting there today I would have to admit to a mild sense of regret at not being part of such an exciting project. One of those 'I need a parallel life' moments, when both routes are pretty good. Still, having said that, it probably wouldn't have been so successful if I'd been on board...