Posted on Feb 18, 2013

The Value of Education in Marketing

The value of education means knowledge, skill and judgment acquired by learning and instruction.

Marketing Questions:

How are you helping your customers to help educate other customers?
What one tool or media is the best way to transfer relevant knowledge to your customers? How do you know?
Do you treat the need to educate customers as a necessary evil or an opportunity to build a connection with the brand? What about educating your sales people?
Which is the bigger problem your customers experience with your products and services: knowing what to do with it, or knowing how to use it?
When you educate your customers, employees, sales people, and channel partners, are you addressing all 3 needs of visual learners, auditory learners, and kinesthetic learners?

Edutainment: education through entertainment

We clearly live in a media-rich world:

from watching a cooking show on TV to experiencing outer space in the movie theater
from listening to an expert guitar player on an iPod to watching him play in a video online
from playing an on-line role-play game to showing your moves playing the Wii

Yet, we still treat education like the 1950’s classroom, ushering in ‘students’ to sit down, shut up, take notes, and learn something. And not just children. We do this to our employees, sales people, channel partners, and yes, even customers.

But…

What if employees could listen to a podcast of fun, enjoyable stories that described the challenges people were having and how they used your product or service to solve them?
What if sales people could enjoy a fun video game that incorporated your product into it, and they received points for using it correctly?
What if customers could attend an online trade-show where they could design their own avatar, dress as they like, and were provided with the challenge of a scavenger hunt that included your product or service?

Imagine a world where everyone thought of education and learning as fun….