Marketing becomes crucial

Concepts from marketing: segmentation

Clearly, not all learners want the same thing.

What they want might vary widely depending on the type of company they are in, as we have seen. Likewise, different groups of learners within an organisation will have different needs and priorities.

Segmentation is the art (or science) of dividing up an audience into appropriate target groups for marketing purposes. It allows these sub-groups to be marketed to according to needs and motivators that they share in common. It also allows an appropriate allocation of resources among the various groups according to the value that can be expected to be derived as a result of marketing activity.

The learner-centric organisation will need to take this logic on board when marketing its learning provision internally. The first step in doing so is to establish what the various needs and motivators are.

Useful information in this line can often be derived from looking at take-up of existing learning programmes. For instance…

One of our delegates, from a leading telecommunications company, shared with us the results of an e-learning pilot that her company had undertaken. The programme, on leadership, required a fairly heavy commitment of time; 18 hours of self-directed study over a three-month period. Take-up was most enthusiastic and completions most numerous among fairly senior management figures - e.g. the head of sales and the head of technology. 95% of them said that they could apply things they had learned within the programme within one week - and were keen for the programme to be made available to their teams.

Less success was achieved at lower levels, however.

Probing the reasons behind this pattern of usage, it came to light that the programme had been trailed as something expensive for the company to provide (it was a 'big name' programme, with input from well-known figures such as Tom Peters) and that it had been explicitly stated that results would be monitored by Human Resources Development.

Apart from a possible use-it-or-lose-it effect at work here, the cost of the programme undoubtedly helped to motivate senior managers, who would see the price ticket, and high-profile branding, as indicating it was 'something for them', appropriate to their status within the organisation.

Lower-level staff, less used to making decisions about the allocation of their own time, perhaps, had problems making time available to do the programme. It was also possible that they saw leadership as less an issue for them than those 'further up the tree' - it is fairly common, in the leadership-obsessed climate of these times, to hear lack of leadership cited by upper management as an issue for those below them in the organisation. While many on the ground continue in assuming that leadership is exclusively the preserve of the 'higher-ups'.

The implication one might draw from this feedback is that, while the training might well 'trickle down', due to the enthusiasm of upper management levels, it would probably do so as a result of some form of compulsion, as a diktat from above. However, in the way that it was internally marketed at the outset, it was not effectively hitting the motivators of people lower down the chain.

Concepts from marketing: positioning

What we have seen in the example of this particular learning product is a positioning that hit all the buttons for one segment of the target audience, while struggling to get a toe-hold with the rest.

Positioning is the science (or art) of shaping the benefits of the service to provide a solution to identified issues/needs of individual segmented target groups.

Once we have identified a discrete group of learners as having particular needs and motivators, it is a question of teasing out the features of the learning experience on offer that will meet those needs, and positioning these as learner benefits appropriate to that particular group. 'Doing this learning will make your life easier/longer/richer in the following ways…'

Part of positioning the product is also working out questions of access and time commitment. Will the learners expect to do this learning on work time or at home (this judgement varies hugely at different levels of the organistion)? What commitment of time over all, and in chunks, is appropriate for their pattern of work?

Concepts from marketing: branding

Of all the marketing concepts bandied about in relation to motivating learners, more time is devoted to branding than to anything else. Why should this be?

We have already talked about the importance of location in the change-over from instructor-led training. In the good-old, bad-old days the bricks-and-mortar learning centre provided a solid and very tangible face for organisational learning. Big learning brands are almost always places (Ashridge, Roffey Park, Cambridge). If learning is a brand, the old-world brand values of learning were chiefly communicated through place (the learning centre) and people (the trainer).

A virtual learning experience goes through neither of these touch points, so other visible evidence of branding - graphics, copy style interface design, etc. - have to bear the weight of mediating the learner's experience with the learning.

In the case of a blended learning programme, which might use many different media, both on- and offline, from workbooks to collaborative websites, the brand is what draws together a potentially fragmented experience and makes it whole.

Essentially, the brand is the learner's experience.

Along with this pressure to embody and unify the learner's experience, the brand also has another important function to perform, of inciting desire.

As Jay Cross, co-author of 'Implementing E-learning' writes, 'A brand conveys benefits, values and personality…'. These have to be benefits that members of the target audience need to have, values that align with 'brand you', a personality the learner can aspire to be and share.

A highly successful example of how this can work is provided by Barclays' bu …take the lead portal (designed by Epic) which provides a highly inclusive vision of leadership for learners across the organisation.

However there is a flip side to this business of inciting desire, which came out of a discussion on the hot topic of leadership (see Think Tank reports Leadership and Leading Change) that ensued.

When you incite desire, you create discontent

What if your brand for leadership learning espouses a set of ideals that are patently not being followed by the current top management of the organisation? By inciting desire for a different style of leadership, do you risk fomenting discontent with the status quo? (We hasten to add that the discussion had moved well beyond the particular example offered by Barclays at this point, and into the realms of the hypothetical!).

It takes strong leadership to bring about a change that might threaten its own position!

On the one hand you might argue that it is the job of learning within an organisation to help bind the culture together - not sow the seeds of dissent. On the other you could say that an organisation which is dissatisfied with where it sits at present is one poised and ready to embrace change. In which case, where is the driving force for change most likely to emerge - from grass-roots discontent, or through the lead offered by top management?

These and other tough questions emerged as we continued to probe the implications of moving to learner-centric learning. This led us to consider the challenge this shift might pose to organisational leadership.

Next>>
Intro:Moving from 'training push' to 'learning pull'
What do learners want?
The challenge to organisational leadership