10 things to stop doing to new parents

I’m stuck on Starbucks. 

At least, I’m stuck on the principles that enabled company founder Howard Shultz turn the humble cup of coffee into a 21^st century art form.

Shultz’s dream, ironically, was less about the coffee and more about becoming a ‘third place’ in people’s lives: home, work, Starbucks.  He was also relentless in his commitment to the detail-oriented, genuine ‘experience’ that he wanted each and every one of his new ‘customers’ to feel, every time they walked into one of his stories.

But what’s all that got to do with those of us who support school admissions? 

At a time when many of us are gearing up to plan next year’s start-of-year orientation programmes for new families, here are 10 things that Starbucks has helped us stop doing at the International School of Brussels over recent years.

1. Stop assuming that they read.  We became convinced that 90% of our website and most of the information we were sending to our new families was overwhelming – at a time in their lives when they already felt overwhelmed.  So we created a dedicated ‘new family’ website that gave out information on a need to know basis with the sole purpose of surviving the first few days at ISB.

2. Stop giving out telephone numbers. We used to have telephone numbers for everything and everyone.  Ironically, though, people never knew who to ring or who to contact with their questions.  That is, until we started launching a dedicated ‘help desk’ the week before school opened – a one-stop-shop for all questions and inquiries.

3. Stop all those damn coffee mornings. Schools are notoriously complex and we forget how much we take for granted.  Many parents used to mistakenly assume that they had to attend every event we told them about (I’ll never forget the mum who willingly turned up for Meet the Coaches night, even though her son was only 3 years old).  We decided to make it simpler for parents, cut out half the meetings and tell them which ones were important and which were optional.

4. Stop overlooking the details. When you first arrive at a place, you always notice the details.  That’s often the difference between a 5-star hotel and a 3-star hotel.  It’s the details that take time to sort out, but we’ve started looking at them far more carefully recently.

5. Stop sending them down the road to buy a mug. There’s nothing worse than arriving in a new country and have to go straight into the city centre to buy a pile of stationary and books in a language that is not your own.  It’s for that reason we now give parents the option to purchase a Student Starter Pack containing everything their child will need for those first few days of school.

6. Stop changing the music every time they walk into the building. Maybe there’s no music in your school, but we’ve learnt that lack of coherence is really frustrating for families.  We are still working on making sure that we have one story to tell and that this story is evident in everything we do and say.

7. Stop treating them like the enemy. Corporations taught us this a decade ago.  We have to stop thinking that parents, with their anxieties and questions, are somehow the enemy.  A good day around new family orientation season is not a quiet day.  It’s a day when our phones are ringing off the hook, our inboxes are full, and our offices have queues of parents – each one of which is receiving the answers to their questions.  Every question answered is another problem solved for the first day of school.

8. Stop assuming they’ll remember you.  They won’t.  So wear a badge giving your name and offering to help.  Try it, it works!

9. Stop promising the earth.  Don’t oversell and promise a programme, a bus route or an after-school activity that you can’t deliver on.  We learned to our cost that over-selling always comes back to bite you in the end.

10. Stop thinking you’ve made it.  You never will.  Nor will we.  So ask new parents every year how they found the experience and how you can improve it next year.

If you stop doing at least half of the things in this list, I’ll guarantee that you’ll begin to notice the difference.

And if you really want to make a positive impression, start serving good coffee.

Are you happy with your family?

I have a sense that some families are beginning to resemble the landscape of modern cities.

A lot of people living in close proximity to one another, travelling up and down the house, going about their daily business, occasionally saying hello.   Sitting rooms that look more like cyber cafés than places to ‘sit’.  Bathrooms with queues and questionable levels of cleanliness from the person who came before me.  Dining room tables that may as well be called Starbucks – places to grab a quick coffee and a snack before rushing off towards whatever comes next.  Not to mention the ‘tourists’ – the people constantly travelling through – so you hardly know who’s visiting and who was actually born here. 

Is it just me and my family, or has something changed?  Am I the only one to wonder whether to touch the stair banister rail, in case of catching something?  Am I the only taxi driver who seems to be caught in a dead-end 24/7 job, taking these increasingly busy ‘city’ residents to wherever they decide they want to go next?

Ask any city dweller, though, and they all say the same thing: ‘I could not imagine living anywhere else.  I love the drama, the buzz, the fact that the city never sleeps’.

I am not sleeping much right now either.

But, then again, I would probably say the same thing.  I wouldn’t want it any other way.  And, in this respect, I know that I am not alone.

40 years ago, a BBC survey was conducted to look at family life in Britain.  People were asked whether they felt positive about the future of their family and who they were happiest with.

Like me, you might reasonably have assumed that, 40 years on, we have become less positive about family life and less dependent on our family as a source of happiness.  But the evidence (from 2007) seems to suggest otherwise.  Despite the rise in divorce, changes in the role of technology and the fact that both parents often have to work, 93% of us seem to believe that our experience of family life is happy and positive.  75% of us feel positive about the future of our family – even if we are generally more ‘concerned’ about the state of family life in society.  Remarkably, 73% of us even suggest that we are happiest around our close family members – as opposed to friends, colleagues or being on their own.

And as for the taxi drivers, otherwise known as parents, there is also good news. Children are today far more likely to acknowledge the fact that their parents did their best for them as they were growing up.

So despite the mess, the noise and the tourists, it seems we can’t quite give up the idea of modern family life.

Last night, two men were arrested outside our front door in a normally quiet part of our city.  It wasn’t pretty and who knows what had led up to this point.

The last words I heard, as the younger man was bundled into the car stayed with me all evening: ‘Don’t hurt my Dad! Please, don’t hurt my Dad!’

It made me reflect.

Families, like cities, sometimes break down.  The infrastructure stops working and sitting beside those glittering shop windows, with only a box for shelter, you will always find people with untold stories of unimaginable pain, injustice and a lack of love.

Families have untold stories too.  But then, in the end, what is a city except a collection of families?

And yet, it seems, despite its faults and despite the pressures of modern family and city life, we aren’t anywhere close to giving up on either dream now or anytime in the future.

Something of a shared history and purpose

One of the most interesting pieces of memorabilia I have found in our school offices is a framed photo from 1951, depicting the AWCB as the first home of the International School of Brussels (ISB). Of course, this is hardly surprising, given that both the Club and School (back then known as the American School of Brussels) were established to serve an expatriate community, predominantly from the US, settling in Brussels.

A lot has changed since these early days. Both the Club and School have literally ‘grown up and moved home’. The School has become one of the largest and most reputable international schools in Europe, with 1500 students from 70 countries. Likewise, the Club today offers a wide range of essential community services to literally hundreds of members from both the US community, as well as those of us who come from ‘the rest of the world’. Yes, things have changed from their modest beginnings. The spirit of these two organizations, however, seems to remain.

Starbucks as the 'third place'But how do we capture this spirit? Well, perhaps we should turn to another great US institution – Starbucks. Although I am yet to experience it for myself, I understand that this coffee experience has finally reached as far as our airport in Zaventem. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but you have to admire their business vision for its absolutely simplicity: ‘Starbucks as the third place: home, work, Starbucks’.

And for many people, Starbucks really is their third place: somewhere to experience a cup of coffee, conversation and a moment ‘away’ from the hustle and bustle of work and home. For a couple of years now, some of us at ISB have taken this idea and begun to think about our school in a similar way: work, home, ISB. After all, we know that for many members of our community, where they work, where they live and where their kids go to school are the three key determining factors for a happy expatriate assignment. It goes without saying that AWCB is clearly also a ‘third place’ for many of its members.

So, given our shared history and shared sense of purpose, it felt only natural that these two grown up institutions should begin to move forward with a new, better defined, partnership. After all, the whole point of a partnership is that together we can go further than we could go alone.

After months of planning, the first visible signs of this new partnership came together in the early days of September 2008. A new school year brought a new range of online and other services to families arriving at ISB. We also wanted to offer them a course that addressed the transition into life in Belgium – and clearly, with its renowned ‘Hints Course’, the Club was the place to seek some advice.

To cut a long story short, we ended up offering a ‘mini-hints’ seminar, hosted at ISB with input from regular Hints trainers, for over 50 members of the ISB community. Afterwards, many of the participants expressed great interest in finding out more about the Club and joining the regular Hints course. The response was overwhelmingly positive.

Working together, I do believe that created a win-win situation for both Club and School. We should be proud of ourselves for that. So my hope is that, over the next few years, we will find many more ways to work more closely together as together we continue proudly to serve the Belgian expatriate community.

This article was first published in Rendezvous Magazine (AWCB) in December 2008.

Click here to view in PDF format.

Branding your school (Part 1)

Like it or not, we are all branded.

Regardless of our age, where in the world we come from or what we believe, all of us carry the marks (some would say scars) of a relentless culture of global enterprise. The everyday objects that surround us are no longer valuable simply because of what they do, but because of what they symbolize. From the cup of coffee in your hand, to the watch on your wrist, to the pen in your pocket – everything is carefully designed to set you apart (or so the makers promise). They are icons of status, power, wealth or simply plain ‘cool’.

We live in a branded universe.

As well as being branded by external objects, we each have a personal brand: Me^®. We carefully construct our identity by choosing to dress in a certain way, buy certain accessories and live a certain kind of lifestyle, albeit chosen or forced upon us. And most of us, over the years, become quite expert in managing Me^®. Standing in front of the mirror each morning, we are chief executives of a truly unique product.

So what about My School^® or My Network^® (ECIS perhaps)? Charged as guardians of the brands that define the present and future of international schools around the world, how are we doing at managing these more complex brand identities?

The purpose of this article is simply to catch a glimpse across the fence at what others are saying about brand management in other industries and to think about what this might mean for the future of international schools.

Now whatever you think about branding, marketing and all those off-the-shelf business books, I urge you to read on because here are 10 lessons that you and your school really can’t afford to ignore. Read them in any order, one at a time or all at once. They are all connected and all point to a very different and exciting future.

Lesson 1: All aboard the ‘Cluetrain’

I once applied for a job with Sony. I didn’t get the job. But I did come away with a book recommendation that changed my view on communications forever: The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual (Locke et al., 2000).

Four statements will capture the essence of the key ideas: 

• ‘Markets are nothing more than conversations... Our only hope is to talk.’
• ‘Conversations are a profound act of humanity. So once were markets.’
• ‘The only advertising that was ever truly effective was word of mouth, which is nothing more than conversation. Now word of mouth has gone global.’
• Further, these voices are telling one another the truth based on their real experiences.’

Reading this book again, I find myself believing more than ever that it is time for international schools to get aboard the Cluetrain and join the market revolution that has already changed the way many companies construct their brand and do business. In a world now accustomed to Web 2.0 and the power of social networking, it is time to ‘cut the crap’ and start communicating in ways that people understanding. Forget the jargon and educational clichés. Starting talking to your customers as people, friends, partners. Listen to their ideas. Tell them stories that ring true. Most of all, stop seeing your customers as ‘the enemy’ when, in fact, they are your most important advocates.

Lesson 2: Funky hedgehogs

Most of us have read and been influenced by Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t (Collins, 2001). Personally, I have always been intrigued, if not a little confused by what he calls ‘the hedgehog concept’. In his follow-up essay, Good to Great and the Social Sectors (Collins, 2006), Collins explores what this might look like for organizations such as schools. Greatness, he explains, is all about being best in the world at something, being passionate about it and having an effective resource engine comprising of time, money and brand.

There is the ‘B’ word again.

Brand is clearly important to Collins. It is a component of ‘greatness’. Unfortunately, though, Collins is not particularly helpful when it comes to understanding what the word actually means. For that, I have to turn to another one of the titles that almost every airport bookshop in the world seems to be selling these days in their popular business section: Funky Business Forever: How to Enjoy Capitalism (Ridderstrǻle and Nordström, 2007).

The point about brands, Ridderstǻle and Nordström suggest, is that they are always more than the sum of their parts. Think of The Coca-Cola Company. When we think of Coca-Cola, we associate various things with it – a logo, perhaps an advert, a certain packaging, a price-value proposition, its history, reputation or simply a recent advertising campaign. All of these components are part of what makes Coca-Cola a powerful brand. But in other sense the brand is always more than the sum of these parts. According to the authors of Funky Business, brand is actually more to do with a ‘promise’ or ‘contract’ with every customer. Another way of putting it might be to say that a brand is all about a relationship of trust that is built between the Company and its customer.

When prospective families choose our schools, they are literally ‘entrusting’ their children to our care. So what kind of value propositions are we offering to these families? If we are going to be great schools, we need to spend more time thinking about the promise and contract we are building with our current and future markets.

Lesson 3: The next now

Imagining the school of the future is something I have been interested in for a while now, but not in the sense of 2001: Space Odyssey or fantasy-filled images of children being taught by robots. I am much more concerned with what today’s best business minds are saying about the future of commerce and how this will shape and impact the business model of tomorrow’s schools.

Today’s reality is simple: like it or not, families, companies and organizations purchase international school education in just the same way as they buy a new BMW, Apple iPod or pair of Chanel sunglasses. International schools are symbols of status and the purchasers of our services demand the same standards of service, after-care support and ‘packaging’ as any other luxury item they might choose to spend their money on.

And if we are to believe Salzman and Matathia (2007), only those brands with a combination of ‘global relevance’ and ‘hyperlocal desirability’ will survive. Our task is therefore to discover the educational equivalent of HSBC, which recently reinvented itself around the ‘promise’ of being ‘the world’s local bank’. Our customers, in other words, are becoming much more demanding. They want the best of both worlds. They want to be reassured that our brand is truly global in scope, ambition and relevance. Yet, at the same time, they want to be reassured that each school is deeply rooted in the local context.

Likewise, Dean Crutchfield, marketing guru from Google, recently explained, today’s customers want more and more precision, reciprocity and flexibility: ‘We live in a world flooded by spam, so you had better know me as a customer; you had also better let me speak as well and please listen to my feedback and ideas; and then lets discuss exactly how we might do business together.’

Once again, the Cluetrain has left the station: a global conversation has begun. The old rules of the game are changing. But are you on-board?

Lesson 4: Fancy a coffee break?

It certainly might be a good time to take a break and reflect on the impact of these ideas for your school communications and marketing strategies. For those brave enough to read on, however, there is another question to consider that has bugged me for a while now: what are we actually selling? I know that the grass is always greener on the other side, but honestly, it does seem easier for the guys over there in Coca-Cola, Nike or Apple. They sell ‘stuff’. We sell... well, education. But what exactly is it? How does one package it, describe it, let alone guarantee it?

The more we thought about this question at the International School of Brussels, the more we kept coming back to one simple concept: the ISB experience. That, it seems, is what families are purchasing for their children – a transforming experience that promises to shape the present and leave an indelible mark on the future.

That’s the idea anyway. And it is encouraging to see how other companies are picking up big time on this notion of selling an ‘experience’. Take Starbucks for example, driven by the dream of becoming the ‘third place’. In his book entitled The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary (2006), Joseph Michelli makes constant reference to the fact that much of Howard Schultz’s success in building this global brand can be attributed to the fact that Starbucks is not, in the end, about coffee, but about serving up an ‘experience’ that becomes a key component to people’s lives. Home, work, Starbucks: it really is the ‘third place’.

Now the problem with ‘experiences’ of any kind – but particularly the good ones – is that they are notoriously difficult to bottle and keep. Words are too mundane. Pictures fade. Sound is susceptible to different styles and taste. At ISB, we are therefore constantly wrestling with what it means to be an international school. Dare we believe we can become, for many expatriate families arriving in Brussels, the ‘third place’? Home, work... ISB.

Lesson 5: Coherence, coherence, coherence

If building a brand is all about holding ‘conversations’ and selling an ‘experience’, you had better make sure that it is coherent. Incoherence offers only a mortal blow to any brand or value proposition you may want to establish with you customer. Of course, there are some things you cannot control. If word of mouth, as was already suggested, is key to successful brand development in the new marketplace, you can’t expect and, in fact, don’t want everyone parroting the same lousy script. At the same time, though, you cannot simply assume that key messages will be heard loud and clear without some kind of management.

Looking at the issue in another way, international schools are extremely complex types of organizations. Each school offers one promise to the market, but this is applied and takes form in multiple contexts to multiple audiences, often in multiple languages. You therefore have to wrestle with the whole ‘loose-tight’ thing and try to ensure that the same story is being told – even if from different vantage points.

A simple example (really, a work-in-progress) will suffice. ISB had been involved in ‘environmental action’ for a number of years. However, if you asked people what exactly was being done and why, you could expect a range of wildly different responses. It was for this reason that ISBEarth was launched as a banner to capture and communicate the schools work in this area. By managing the brand and developing an organizational model, the school immediately had a frame of reference by which it could look at what the students were learning, how we organized ourselves, the partners we were developing, as well as the actions that parents, students and faculty were taking – discovering both areas of great coherence and, crucially, areas were there remained huge inconsistency that needed immediate attention.

The lesson from brands all across the world is simple. Make sure that if you stand for something, you practice what you preach at all levels of your organisation. The customers of today are extremely savvy and will see straight through and often expose, mercilessly, any inconsistencies.

This article was first published in The International Schools Journal (ECIS), November 2008.

Click here to view in PDF format.