Revamping the Marketing Mix for Elementary Schools in Taiwan

Due to the rapidly decreasing birth rate in Taiwan, many schools are now facing closure or merger with another school. Add to this the increasingly promotion for the “parental school choice program” in Taiwan has contributed to the ferocious competitions in educational market, and developing optimal marketing strategies has become a matter of survival for most schools. In this research we sent questionnaires to 500 principals in Taiwan to determine which marketing strategies they use, how frequently they use them, and their respective strengths. The results indicate that there are significant differences in which marketing strategies are used, as well as in how often they are implemented. Suggestions are given for schools to enhance the efficiency of their marketing strategies.


Introduction
The birth rate is steadily decreasing in most developed countries, and the birth rate in Taiwan is now among the lowest in the world.As the school-age population dramatically decreases, schools are forced to fiercely compete with each other for students.Because poor recruitment can result in a school being closed or merged with another school, schools at all levels feel compelled to resort to marketing practices in order to survive.
Add to this the increasingly strong calls in Taiwan to allow parents to freely choose which schools their children attend, and it's no wonder that schools engage in fierce competition with one another for students.Elementary school students in Taiwan are currently required to enrol at the school in their own school district.Nevertheless, swayed by the traditional Confucian doctrine that "to be a scholar is to be at the top of the society", many parents enrol their kids in a school outside of their own district so that they can receive the best education available.As a result, developing optimal marketing strategies has become a matter of survival for many schools.
However, most schools have little experience in marketing, and often do not possess the knowledge, skills, and resources necessary for developing a sound marketing plan.In selecting the best alternatives from an extremely huge pool of marketing tactics, most school administrators in Taiwan employ a "marketing mix" based on the four Ps proposed by McCarthy (1960).
Although the four Ps may provide general principles and toolkits that can be applied to most school marketing situations, such a standardized approach to selecting a marketing strategy often fails to bring about the desired results.There are a number of external (demand side) factors and internal (supply side) factors that need to be taken into consideration, e.g., faculty competence, school resources, cultural values, and community economics (Boulding & Lee, 1992;Varadarajan, 2010).Since each school operates in a unique environment, schools have to seriously consider various internal and external factors to develop a marketing strategy in accordance with the unique needs of the school.
School principals play a pivotal role in the formulation and implementation of a school's marketing strategy.Therefore, principals were targeted as the research participants in this study.The research questions of this study are as follows: 1) What do elementary school principals in Taiwan regard to be the most important school marketing tactics?
2) How often do schools use these tactics?
3) What are the main strengths of these various tactics?4) What influence do different background factors have on the marketing strategies adopted by school principals?

The Related Literature
In this section, we first delineate the emergence of school marketing, and then review the related literature on marketing mix.Thereafter, we discuss the four Ps included in the concept of marketing mix, i.e., product, price, place, and promotion.Kotler (1986) defines marketing as a human activity oriented to satisfying human needs and wishes through a process of exchange between suppliers and demanders.In its beginning stages, marketing was largely limited to industry, and only afterwards began to be used by other sectors, including education (Kotler & Fox, 1985).Sferle, Gârdan, Gudei, and Geangu (2012) argue that marketing is a useful way for a school to actively communicate and promote its purpose, values, and products to potential pupils, parents, staff, and the wider community.Ho (2010) asserts that a sound marketing strategy helps a school to provide appropriate products and services to its customers at the right time, right price, and right place.

The Emergence of School Marketing
By the 1990s a more competitive market environment coupled with increased freedom to choose the school one's children attend has brought about a situation in which schools have to compete among one another for pupils.This in turn forces schools to enhance their administrative efficiency and become more responsive to parents' needs.Even though after 2000 the educational policies of many governments began to favour cooperation rather than competition, this has had little effect in ameliorating the competition between schools, and school administrators continue to use marketing strategies to help ensure their survival (Bagley, 2006).
In recent years, most school administrators have come to regard the adoption of a marketing strategy as an essential element of a school's operations, since doing so helps the school rapidly respond to customer demands and the ever-changing external environment (Roberts, 1998).However, school administrators may face greater difficulties than their business counterparts in implementing a marketing strategy, because they not only have to persuade students to enrol, but also have to ensure that their students derive sufficient benefit from their school experience.Therefore, promotion and advertisement is far from enough; a school administrator has to develop a marketing plan that includes such elements as curriculum, tuition, location, and recruitment (Bassin, 1975).Hence, the marketing mix concept has come to be widely used by school administrators as a toolkit or set of guidelines for developing a marketing plan.

Marketing Mix
In his 1965 article titled "The Concept of the Marketing Mix", Neil Borden traces the history of the term "marketing mix" back to a 1948 research bulletin written by James Culliton, who describes the role of a marketing manager as a mixer of marketing ingredients prepared by others or invented by himself (Gordon, 2012).In 1960 E. Jerome McCarthy reduced the concept of the marketing mix to the four Ps: product, price, place, and promotion (Gordon, 2012).
Since then the four Ps have been widely adopted by marketers around the world, albeit with certain modifications.Some scholars argue that while McCarthy's four Ps may be well suited for industry, they are less applicable to the service or public sectors.Kotler (1986), for example, claims that the service sector differs from the industrial sector due to four unique characteristics: intangibility, variability, perishability, and inseparability; and that this necessitates a different marketing mix for the service sector.Since educational institutions are part of the service sector, the tactics included in a school's marketing mix should be different from those used in industry (Filip, 2012).Kotler and Fox (1985) extended the four Ps to the seven Ps: product, price, place, promotion, people, process, and physical facilities.Gray (1991), however, claims that the seven Ps are excessively fragmentary and unwieldy; thus he simplifies them into the five Ps: product, price, place, promotion, and people.Although many modifications have been made to McCarthy's marketing mix, his original 4Ps survives in almost all these reformulations.Moreover, since the marketing-mix concept is almost always used in conjunction with the 4Ps (Quelch & Jocz, 2008), we adopted the 4Ps as the basic structure of our research, while making certain adaptations for the educational marketplace.

Product Strategy
Unlike industry, the main product of education is not very obvious.Since many teachers and parents see students' academic achievement as a school's most important purpose, academic achievement might be identified as a school's main product.Since curriculum and faculty are the key factors that influence student achievement, they are often identified by marketing scholars as the key elements of a school's marketing mix (Holcomb, 1993).
Enhancing product quality is the most important objective of school marketing, and schools have to adjust their curricula to meet the actual needs of their customers, as determined by the requirements of the contemporary labour market.For without a good product, any marketing efforts are either futile or deceitful (Roberts, 1998;Avram, Neagoe & Avram, 2010).Barnes (1993) laments that although a school's educational product is its most powerful marketing tool, most schools offer very similar products to their customers, and more than 85% of all educational offerings are indistinguishable from one another.Hence, an innovative curriculum can be an excellent selling point when engaging in school marketing.Ali-Choudhury, Bennett, and Savani (2009) interviewed 25 university marketing managers, and concluded that a university's overall reputation is a key element of its marketing mix.Therefore, a university needs to give much importance to its brand image, as defined by such elements as its educational identity, the employability of its graduates, their grades, and how well they perform in competitions.

Price Strategy
Setting a suitable price is crucial to marketing success.If the perceived price of a product is much higher than its perceived value, it will become a deterrent to customers.On the contrary, if the perceived price is too low, buyers will be wary about the quality of the product (Evans, 1995).
Price includes all the resources (financial costs, time, and social costs) that a customer has to pay in order to obtain the product (Mihai, 2013).School marketing is based on the premise that prospective students weigh the benefits against the costs to assess the value of attending an educational institution.An institution's long-term success is founded on offering its customers the best value for the price (Lindgreen, Hingley, Grant & Morgan, 2012).
There are three major pricing strategies: cost-oriented pricing, customer-oriented pricing, and competition-oriented pricing.Cost-oriented pricing refers to setting the price based on the cost of producing the product, and in the commonly used cost-plus pricing strategy the price is determined by adding a fixed percentage to the production cost.Customer-oriented pricing is setting a price that reflects the customer's perceived value of the product.Finally, competition-oriented pricing is setting prices on the basis of the prices charged by one's competitors (Kotler & Fox, 1985).Schools may choose one of these three pricing strategies, or may combine them into a hybrid pricing strategy.
Losike-Sedimo (2011) suggests that the chief consideration in deciding school fees should be whether or not they are affordable to students and parents.Since students at all levels and backgrounds give much importance to the cost of an education, college and university administrators have to take into account price elasticity of demand (PED) when making pricing decisions (Washburn & Petroshius, 2004).
Cost control is particularly important for schools, since they have a limited ability find extra income if costs increase.The expenses of an educational institution can be divided into fixed and variable expenses.The fixed expenses include such factors as facilities, overhead, the cost of securing and maintaining buildings, and staff salaries.The variable expenses are those that grow with enrolment, such as faculty salaries and materials for students (Wright & Holmberg-Wright, 2012).Thus school administrators need to carefully measure the fixed and variable costs when determining their school's optimal tuition (Washburn & Petroshius, 2004).
Finally, in the educational market, financial incentives and special offers should be seriously considered.Setting a price that is more attractive to students than that offered by competitors will retain a school's competitive edge when customers compare similar offers (Roberts, 1998).

Place Strategy
Place refers to how a product is distributed so as to be available to customers at the right place and at the right time (Evans, 1995).Barnes (1993) identified three major dimensions of the place category as it applies to school marketing: geographical location; environment; and accessibility.
Locality is one of the most important factors of a marketing strategy, and this is especially true for schools.Schools located in a remote area usually have difficulty attracting students, and parents are often reluctant to send their kids to a school located in a low-income area (Bagley, Woods, & Glatter, 1996).
Although it is difficult to change a school's location, Lovelock, Vandermerwe, and Lewis (1999) argue that physical environment is a crucial but often ignored element of school marketing.A well designed environment (especially the school's buildings and facilities) promptly catch a customer's attention, and also deliver the message that the quality of the institution is on par with the attractiveness of its campus.
Other factors to be considered with respect to the place category include where and how courses are offered, the quality and ambience of the classrooms, the comfort and convenience of the campus, and the school buildings themselves (Evans, 1995).Moreover, safety is of prime concern to parents, and schools need to ensure parents that they are offering a safe learning environment and transportation services (Holcomb, 1993).Lovelock, Vandermerwe, and Lewis (1999) point out that commuting time is also a major concern of parents.The starting and closing time of a school is important to parents who have to take their kids to school and pick them up after school, and a flexible starting and closing time will increase the school's attractiveness to parents who have difficulty adhering to the school's regular timetable (Evans, 1995).

Promotion Strategy
Advertising usually refers to attracting the attention of prospective customers by placing promotional messages in such media as newspapers, magazines, television, and the internet.Indeed, advertising has long been the most commonly used tool in school marketing (Silk, 2006).
However, advertising can be expensive and the public's faith in the veracity of advertisements is on the decrease.As a result, the use of sales promotions has increased dramatically in recent years, mainly because they can readily target a specific audience.Some schools use coupons and price discounts to attract students at the last minute (Evans, 1995).Moreover, encouraging students to visit the campus is also a very useful marketing tactic, especially when students are indecisive as to which school they would like to attend (Washburn & Petroshius, 2004).
Public relations is another important promotional tool often used by schools.Unlike advertising which directs a single message to the target audience, public relations delivers many interconnected messages to larger, unspecified audiences or stakeholders.The public relations mechanisms commonly adopted by schools include press conferences, participation in community activities, and trade fairs (Barnes, 1993;Kliminski, 2000).

Research Methodology
The main goals of this research were to determine which school marketing tactics principals regard to be most important; how often they use them; the respective strengths of these various tactics; and the influence the principals' background factors have on the marketing strategies they adopt.ANOVA and a t-test were used to measure the differences between the mean scores of such factors as school type, school location, principal's gender, and principal's level of education.Finally, correspondence analysis (CA) was used to create a perceptual map clarifying the respective strengths of the various marketing tactics.

Design of the Questionnaire
A self-developed questionnaire consisting of four parts was used in this research as the main instrument for data collection.In the first section, participants were asked to provide their demographic information.Next, in the second section of the questionnaire the participants were asked to rate the importance of the 12 most commonly used marketing tactics by using the following 5-point Likert scale: 1) not important, 2) somewhat important, 3) important, 4) very important, and 5) extremely important.In the third section the participants were asked to indicate how frequently they used these 12 marketing tactics by using the following 5-point scale: 1) never, 2) seldom, 3) sometimes, 4) often, and 5) very often.In the last part the participants were asked to rate the relative strengths of these 12 tactics.The Cronbach's alpha for the questionnaire was 0.808, indicating a high degree of reliability.Thereafter, factor analysis was carried out, and the KMO value of 0.796 and the Bartlett value of 1554.259(sig.0.000) indicated that the data gathered was adequate for factor analysis.The total explained variance for factor analysis was 69.91, indicating that the validity of the questionnaire was adequate.The factor analysis formed the 12 marketing tactics into four groups, as shown in Table 1.Price consisted of four tactics; Promotion and Product each consisted of three tactics; and Place consisted of two tactics.It may be noticed that, according to the literature review, Flexible Start and Close Time should be classified under Place.However, the factor analysis classified it under Price.After discussing this with several marketing scholars, we decided to follow the results of the factor analysis and classify it under Price.

Research Participants and Sampling Methods
Since principals play a pivotal role in school marketing, they were selected as the target group for participation in this research.The questionnaire was mailed to 500 principals at elementary schools across Taiwan, of which 358 were filled out and returned, resulting in a response rate of 71.6%.
Of those who returned the questionnaire, 243 were male, and 114 were female; 36 held no more than a bachelor's degree, while 315 held a graduate degree; 5 participants worked at private schools, while 348 worked at a public schools; 160 worked at schools located in a city, 122 worked at schools in a town, and 73 worked at schools in a remote area (see Table 2).

Research Results
In this section we first present the descriptive data for each marketing tactic, followed by the results of differentiation analysis.Finally, we present a perceptual map illustrating each tactic's unique marketing strengths.

Strategies Adopted and Frequency of Implementation
Figure 1 shows that the participants give much importance to Quality Faculty, Innovative Curriculum, Location, and Buildings and Facilities.However it can also be seen that the marketing mixes actually used by the participants make significantly less use of Location than of Buildings and Facilities.This is probably because once a school is established, it is very difficult to move to another location or make changes to the community in which it is situated, including the local transportation system.By contrast, it is comparatively easy for a school to make changes to Buildings and Facilities.Thus the participants naturally feel that it is more worthwhile to expend their resources on improving their Buildings and Facilities.
Figure 1.The importance and frequency of implementation of the 12 marketing tactics

Difference Analysis
Table 3 shows that the principals at schools located in towns and remote areas gave significantly more importance to the Price category than did their counterparts at city schools.Moreover, it can also be seen that the principals at schools located in remote areas gave significantly more emphasis to the Promotion category than did the principals at city schools.As for the frequency of implementation, the principals at remote schools implemented the Price and Promotion tactics more often than their counterparts in towns and cities.This is probably because the decline in the number of students is much more serious in remote areas than it is in towns and cities, and because most students living in remote areas are eager to study in towns or cities.As a result, there are few students left in rural areas.Since many schools in remote areas have been closed or merged in the past decade, in comparison to their counterparts in towns and cities, principals at remote schools tend to heavily rely on school marketing tactics in a desperate struggle to keep their schools open.Next, we compared the responses of the male and female participants.Table 4 shows that in comparison to the male participants, the female principals gave more importance to Promotion and also implemented it more frequently.This result is rather interesting, but the reason for it is not clear.Finally, Table 5 indicates that with respect to level of education there were no significant differences in the perceived importance of the 12 marketing tactics.However, principals with a graduate degree implemented the marketing tactics in the Product, Place, and Promotion categories more often than did the principals with no more than a bachelor's degree.
A possible explanation for this phenomenon is that although almost all principals agree that marketing is very important to their schools' survival, they have very different competence in implementing these tactics.Most principals completed their bachelor's degree over ten years ago, at which time very few training programs for teachers or administrators offered courses in school marketing.As a result, few principals without a graduate degree have received any formal training in school marketing, and while they may be convinced of its importance in such a highly competitive market, they are also very limited in their ability to effectively implement a school marketing strategy.By contrast, most principals with a graduate degree completed their schooling less than ten years ago, and during the past decade teacher and administrator training programs have begun to give great emphasis to courses in school marketing.This is probably why the participants with a graduate degree make more use of various school marketing tactics.

Perceptual Map
The last step was to use CA to produce a perceptual map illustrating the correspondence between the 12 marketing tactics and the seven relative strengths of a tactic as determined by the responses in the last part of the questionnaire.The first singular value was 0.312, the second singular value was 0.222, and the chi-square value was 1372.858(sig.= 0.000), indicating that the perceptual map created by CA is valid and feasible.
From the perceptual map it can be seen that the tactics and strengths generally cluster into four groups: Flexible

Conclusions and Suggestions
A sound marketing plan has become essential for the survival of schools at the elementary level, especially in markets where the birth rate is rapidly declining.This is especially true in Taiwan, where schools fiercely compete to recruit students.Thus the purpose of this research was to investigate the marketing mixes adopted by elementary school principals in their efforts to survive in Taiwan's highly competitive educational market place.
The results indicate that school principals believe that the three most important tactics for elementary school marketing are Innovative Curriculum, Quality Faculty, and Location.However, since once a school is established it has little control over Location, principals give more attention to improving their school's Buildings and Facilities.It was also found that principals give relatively less importance to and make less use of Advertising, Sales Promotions, and Flexible Start and Close Time.Thus it is suggested that in a situation in which most schools are concentrating their marketing resources on Innovative Curriculum and Quality Faculty while neglecting Advertising and Sales Promotions, a school which does make frequent use of Advertising and Sales Promotions is likely to stand out from the crowd.
The results also indicate that school marketing is given the most importance and made use of most frequently in remote areas, for this is where recruiting students is most difficult.As indicated in the literature review, a school's location is basically fixed, yet Location has a major influence on a school's ability to recruit new students.Undoubtedly, rural schools face the most difficultly in recruiting students, mainly due to the excessive commuting time involved and the reluctance of parents to send their children to a school located in an area they perceive as being economically disadvantaged.Despite the great effort rural schools put into marketing, for the most part the most they can hope for is to keep local students from leaving for other areas.This is why the participants gave so much importance to Location, even though not much can be done to make improvements in this area.
It was also found that the educational level of the participants had little bearing on the importance they gave to the 12 marketing tactics, yet it did have a major bearing on the frequency with which they used these tactics.This is mainly because in Taiwan most principals with a graduate degree have received formal training in school marketing, whereas few principals with only a bachelor's degree have such training.Thus it is suggested that administrators at schools facing great difficulty in recruiting students should take every opportunity to strengthen their marketing skills.
From the CA it can be seen that different marketing tactics have different strengths; this is something a school needs to be aware of when formulating its marketing mix.For example, a school which finds itself in danger of being closed due to low enrolment should make use of a variety of marketing tactics which bring quick results, such as engaging in advertising campaigns and sales promotions, as well as offering scholarships and discounts on such daily expenses as lunch and transportation.However, schools which are not in such a desperate situation would be better off concentrating their marketing efforts on product differentiation, so as to avoid getting involved in a price war with their competitors.The most effective ways for a school to stand out from the competition are by recruiting a high quality faculty and developing an innovative curriculum, both of which bring long-term benefits and are difficult to be copied by the competition.
Finally, it should be noted that in this study we used a mainly quantitative methodology to determine the current trends in school marketing, and have not made an in-depth inquiry into the reasons underlying these trends.For example, the results indicate that female principals give more importance to Sales Promotions and also make more use of them; yet the reason for this gender difference remains unclear.Thus it is suggested that a qualitative study be carried out in the future to provide further insight into the results of the present study.

Table 1 .
Factor analysis of the 12 marketing tactics

Table 2 .
Demographic characteristics of the participants

Table 3 .
Importance and frequency of implementation of the four Ps for principals in different areas

Table 4 .
Importance and frequency of implementation of the four Ps for with respect to gender

Table 5 .
Importance and frequency of implementation of the four Ps with respect to level of education Time has the strength of Low Cost; Discounted Lunch and Transportation, Low Tuition, Advertising, Sales Promotions, and Scholarships enjoy the strengths of Easy Implementation and Quick Results; Public Relations, Buildings and Facilities, Location, and Strong Reputation share the strengths of Public Approval and Faculty Support; and Innovative Curriculum and Quality Faculty are Difficult for competitors to Copy and have Long-lasting Effects.