Modern marketing is characterized by customer orientation and activities that are intended to make an organization responsive to an ever-changing environment. South African educational organizations and institutions have however paid less attention to - and dedicated fewer human and financial resources to - marketing their services and products. This is in part due to the fact that marketing considerations have traditionally not been included in a meaningful way in many educational institutions’ strategic planning processes.

Organizations, which have as their core business, production of educational resources, need to recognize that good marketing - rather than ad hoc, fragmented marketing activities - is essential. Good marketing requires establishment and maintenance of a customer orientation, as well as development of systems and human capacity to respond to a dynamic environment. In the case of SABC Education, this will in turn, contribute to ensuring sustainability and continued development of an effective school service.

The marketing strategy of SABC Education is, and will continue to be, directly influenced by the organizational structure of the public broadcaster and content of South African broadcasting policies. As we described in chapter one, SABC Education Radio and Television are responsible for implementing the educational policies of the public broadcaster. SABC support service units, therefore, will carry out some of SABC Education’s strategic marketing activities, while other strategic activities have to be carried out by the units themselves. This chapter focuses on the latter.

Marketing can be described as the anticipation and measurement of the importance of needs and wants of a given group of consumers, and development of a response or flow of need-satisfying goods and services(Boyd, H.W. and Walker, O.C. 1990). In generic terms, marketing includes several activities that assist an organization to identify and respond to customers’ needs and wants, namely:
•    Targeting those markets most compatible with an organization’s resources;
•    Developing products that meet the needs of the target market better than competitive products;
•    Making products readily available;
•    Developing customer awareness of capabilities of an organization’s line of products; and
•    Obtaining feedback from the market about the success of the organization’s products and programmes.(Boyd, H.W. and Walker, O.C. 1990)

As we mentioned, modern marketing strategies are characterized by a focus on customers and their needs(Boyd, H.W. and Walker, O.C. 1990). This has two main implications for SABC Educational Radio and Television.

First, it is absolutely critical that SABC Education commits itself to increasing customer awareness. The major consumers of SABC Education services and products will be teachers and students, and SABC Education must set up systems that are teacher- and student-friendly. We discuss how this can be done later in this chapter.

Second, SABC Education must develop products that meet the needs of the target market better than competitive products. How SABC Education becomes competitive is something quite different from how FMCG (or Fast Moving Consumer Goods) companies do this. For example, in FMCG markets, products such as baked beans are developed to respond to a need, namely hunger. Educational products such as video resources however are developed with more than just need in mind. Educational need does not always translate effectively into an entertaining and effective educational broadcast resource. If educational products are developed in response to need only, the product does not translate effectively into an educationally useful resource. Educational resource development is complex – although companies which develop ultra-distance running shoes spend millions on research and development, and would argue that this too is complex – and must take into consideration the educational, psychological and moral impact of the resource, as well as who defines what teachers and students need or want.

Designing a marketing strategy for educational services and resources involves making many tactical decisions. These decisions, like those for any other product or service, can be classified into product offering; price; promotion; and place. Although decisions are tactical, the ‘4 Ps’ are controllable in the sense that as a marketing mix, each element must support decisions made about the other three elements. We mention this because it facilitates easy separation of activities that are specific to product development processes, and those that are specific to promotion processes. The diagram below - adapted from Boyd and Walker’s Decisions within the four elements of the marketing mix (Boyd, H.W. and Walker, O.C. P.31)- better illustrates some of these decisions:

SABC Education will need to direct human and financial resources in four major areas, namely:
•    Developing educational resources and services;
•    Ensuring that the resources and services are widely available;
•    Determining competitive pricing for resources and services; and
•    Ensuring that people have knowledge and awareness of what are the resources and what the service does.

SABC Education’s main product is a school broadcast service, which includes a range of broadcasting and non-broadcasting goods and services. Non-broadcasting support resources and services (for example, promotional calendars or teacher training sessions) are usually regarded as secondary products by educational broadcasters. We however argue that, like the actual broadcast programmes, these are primary products.

SABC Education currently markets and promotes educational resources (for example, Agri-Hour or Take 5) independently of one another. However, as has been suggested in chapter five, a school broadcasting service is more than a series of inserts on Take 5; it is a service that cuts across all SABC programmes, platforms and departments. In the remaining sections of this chapter, we focus on only one aspect of the marketing process – promotional decisions and activities – and make recommendations for effectively promoting the school broadcast service in its entirety.

Promotion decisions involve decisions about advertising and publicizing the school-based educational broadcasting service, as well as personal selling and sales promotion. One of the factors that determine the success of advertising or selling the service, is design of the promotion message. Clearly, the design of the promotion message will be affected by contextual realities – which we described in chapter one – such as teacher anxiety, student apathy or the highly charged atmosphere of schooling. It is essential, therefore, that SABC Education pay careful attention to what message is being promoted, because interpretation by the target audience could be very different from the intended message. Poorly conceived messages could be perceived to constitute a lack of regard for teacher unions, or low levels of accountability, or failure to consult with educational ‘stakeholders’. If ignored, contextual realities will negatively impact on the effectiveness of the communication process, and may result in unintended negative perceptions of the service. A situational analysis often provides important information, around which an appropriate message can be designed. SABC Education Television has already accumulated much of this type of information from its various commissioned research projects on target audiences, television viewing patterns, and so on. Data needs to be effectively integrated into a marketing situational analysis.

Determining promotional objectives and the likelihood of success rests to a large extent on identifying, in statement form:
•    Who is included in the target audience;
•    How the target audience should change;
•    How fast the change should occur; and
•    The degree of change required.(Boyd, H.W. and Walker, O.C. p.559)
Each component of promotion, namely advertising, publicity, sales promotion, and personal selling, requires its own promotional objective. For example, a promotional objective for advertising a school service may be stated as:

Creating awareness of the school service among 50% of parents with school-going children between the ages of five to 18 years within the next eight months.

This simple statement describes the target audience (parents of school-going children); how the target audience is required to change (become aware of the service); the extent of change required (from 0% to 50% of the target audience); and how fast that change occurs (over a period of eight months).

SABC Education, for example, could set some of the following promotional objectives:
•    Advertising – to build awareness of the school service among 35% of primary school teachers.
•    Personal selling – to place SABC Education video resources in 100% of Gauteng teacher centres.
•    Sales promotion – to place a mixed media, interactive display of SABC Education videos and print support in 80% of national retail outlets selling books and videos.
•    Publicity – to place articles (for example, press releases or refereed articles) about the service in three national-circulation newspapers and one South African educational journal.

The objectives set will also determine what technologies and media will be used to deliver a promotional message most effectively. Commercial advertising for educational products may be more effective via radio than billboards because of better national radio coverage. However, personal selling, not telephonic sales, may be more effective because small groups of teachers can then meet with SABC representatives. Obviously, SABC Education is well positioned to take advantage of mass advertising on air but, as the previous example suggests, it is very important that public relations and publicity promotional strategies are also used to enhance the overall promotion of the service. Promotion can also take the form of publicity. Publicity, typically achieved through articles published in newspapers, does have the advantage of providing an extra degree of credibility to an organization and its service, usually at little cost(Boyd, H.W. and Walker, O.C. p.568). Given the current climate, it is essential that SABC Education use public relations strategies to enhance the credibility of the organization and its school service. SABC Education Television has used publicity to promote platforms such as Take 5 and Dumani in several newspapers, and this is a strength upon which the unit must continue to build. But publicity also includes personal contact (in the form of liaison), and should not be neglected in the pursuit of newspaper publicity only.

Although we discuss research activities in detail in chapter thirteen of this report, it is necessary to mention that evaluation of promotion is an essential ongoing activity. This involves finding out whether or not the objectives of various promotional activities have been achieved. It is necessary to gather information continuously, for example, the extent of distribution to formal education settings such as teacher centres, national sales figures of Take 5 videocassettes, or national broadcasting coverage or footprints. Market research and evaluation of promotion activities are, however, quite different from evaluation of the educational effectiveness of a broadcast’s impact. While both information-generating processes must feed into all SABC Education activities, information from one cannot be substituted for the other.

Chapter seven introduced the idea of an information base for the school-based service and illustrated the concept by focusing on research information. In this section, we examine promotional information that should be a essential component of this information base. We outline a range of promotion options available to SABC Education, focusing on the use of the Internet, print, and broadcasts. We also offer a detailed discussion of how the service can be promoted to teachers and students. Chapter twelve provides a detailed description of the recommended use of all appropriate technologies to support the school-based service. This section will focus solely on the promotional potentials of the Internet, print and broadcasts. Building an information base is an ongoing and key promotional activity, which cuts across all technologies. We recommend that basic promotional information should first be compiled in an electronic database, before being used for specific purposes, as it can then be used cheaply and easily in many ways.

Internet-based promotion refers to the use of web sites and Internet communication technologies, such as e-mail and facsimile services. Simplistically, web sites can offer an additional means of accessing promotional information distributed in print. This conception is restrictive as it takes no account of significant developments in the digitization of information, functionality of electronic databases, speed and storage capacity of computer hardware, and rapid developments in cheap electronic communication, more and more aspects of which can increasingly be automated(These developments were explained in detail in chapter seven). At a minimum, designers of promotional materials for a web environment should at least consider the following advantages that the Internet offers over print:
•    Promotional information about the service can be up-dated regularly;
•    Navigation and search possibilities provide a wider scope of promotion;
•    Online ordering facilities can offer an additional means of requesting products;
•    Requests for information can be automated without incurring administrative costs;
•    E-mail communication facilities allow for queries, feedback, comments to reach the SABC, and could provide important information for evaluating the effectiveness of the promotional strategy; and
•    Electronic information services, such as facsimile and e-mail distribution lists can be used to distribute promotional material about the school service.

Various types of information, such as an overview of the school service, platform descriptions, scheduling information, and available resources can be used for promotion. To illustrate the promotional potential of a web site we examine how promotional information about available resources could be accessed via a web site. An obvious way of distributing information about available resources is by producing a printed catalogue. This web site description is not intended to replace print production, and has been included to show how web-based and print-based promotion can be complementary. A first step in developing a web site on available resources is to ensure that all the necessary information has been generated, collated, and sensibly stored. As outlined in chapter seven, a well-designed management information system is essential for successful promotional activities. Once a database of information about available resources has been developed, adding a web-based interface would increase the access to this information. Users should be able to browse through a catalogue, organised according to the intended age range, or search for resources on a specific topic. Adding a key word search facility would further enhance this. The web site should be designed to facilitate smooth navigation through the resource catalogue, in multiple ways. The site should consist primarily of text and graphics, but, where appropriate, video or audio clips from cassettes could be an optional component.

Other types of promotional information could be accessed in similar ways. For example, each educational television broadcasting platform, such as Educator Express, Dumani or Take Five could have its own web page. This simply offer promotional information about each series, but could grow if specific series chose to invest in a more substantial web presence. SABC Education’s web site should aim to give users an overview of the service, this may include making the contact details of relevant staff members available. If organised appropriately, a huge volume of promotional information, can accessed via a web site. It is important to realise, however, that a web site itself needs promotion. Web sites do not promote themselves they simply give users access to promotional information once they have located the web site.

In contrast, Internet communication technologies can be used to directly promote and raise awareness about the school service. SABC Education should including school service information in existing educational facsimile and e-mail services, like EduFax and Prodder. This would be a cheap and efficient means of promoting the service. In chapter twelve, we recommend that SABC Education establish its own electronic information service. This can be used to push promotional information to users, whereas a web interface allows users to extract or pull information of their choice from the information base. Electronic distribution lists can also be used to distribute promotional information chosen by SABC. These services can be automated directly from a well-designed database, and hence will reduce the administrative cost of maintaining such a service. The potential uses of both web sites and electronic information services will be described in more detail in chapter twelve.

A mutually supportive relationship between print and web-based promotion must be established to provided cohesion to the service, and an integrated promotional strategy for the school service. In this section, we described specific print-based promotion options for SABC Education.

SABC Education Update
Information about the service must be distributed monthly by facsimile and in articles or features contained in existing publications. Information should be targeted at contact persons in provincial education departments, departmental subject advisors, district managers and district officers, teacher centres, teacher union media officers and teacher training institutions. Regularly updating these lists is essential and must focus on the contact details, and information about the service. For example, information that can be mentioned includes:

•     Descriptions of SABC education platforms such as Take 5 with a promotional emphasis on how they support schooling;
•    Suggested ways in which broadcasts (not produced by SABC Education) such as 50/50 or Two Way can be used to support schooling;
•    Using programming schedules for the month ahead, with details of the area of focus for each episode, broadcast times, and possible curriculum links to promote use of the service;
•    Promotion of relevant SABC Education activities and events such as Take 5’s road show;
•    Advertising new resources or promoting sales through including contact details for ordering resources;
•    Publicising the service and organization by including contact details of SABC Education staff who will provide more information or visit a teacher centre;
•    Publicising new developments in SABC Education as well as summaries of important research findings and new programmes in development.

Establishing relationships with contact people at TV Talk, The Teacher, SADTU News, and NAPTOSA’s newsletter, Edgars and Sales House Club Magazine, South African Council of Churches Newsletter, and affiliate publications such as district and teacher centre publications is very important and must be a key liaison task.

Education for You Brochure and Poster (Education for You’ is being gradually phased in as the new identity for SABC Education services. These brochures provide one area for using the new identity and logo. In interviews with marketing specialists, it was pointed out to SAIDE researchers that the Learn ‘n Live logo was inappropriate and ineffective; while the Education for You logo and icons (alphabetical blocks) was not clearly visible)
A brochure describing the school service, its broadcasts and the non-broadcast support services must be developed. Information included in the brochure must be relevant for between six to 12 months. Information about different education platforms or programmes, targeted learning areas, broadcasts times, channels or stations, and a brief outline of possible uses must be included. A promotional poster can accompany this brochure.

The brochure and poster should be distributed to district offices, teacher centres, teacher education institutions, and provincial departments. The promotional resource should be made available at various sites, where teachers collect information about professional development activities, occurring at regional and district level. Teacher centre coordinators, district officers, or educators at teacher training institutions should be able to order more of these promotional resources for distribution, if necessary. To facilitate this, contact details for ordering additional copies should be printed on the brochure and the poster. Initially, postal distribution should be limited to district offices, provincial departments, teacher centres and teacher training institutions. It should also be possible to distribute these promotional resources at national supermarket chain stores (such as Shoprite-Checkers or Pick ‘n Pay) as well as petrol stations. In this way, teachers, parents and students can collect promotional resources at sites situated close to their homes or schools.

Teacher’s and Facilitator’s Guides
A guide or booklet explaining how to integrate audio and video resources into the classroom and media management should be produced. A more detailed description is provided in chapter twelve of this report. These guides should be distributed to teacher training institutions, district offices, learning and teaching services at provincial departments, and teacher’s centres, as part of a promotional and support strategy. As stated in chapter nine, some of these guides will be distributed free of charge as part of a particular promotion strategy, while others will be available on request. SABC Education should also use the teacher’s guide as a mechanism for generating income.

A similar guide can be developed for facilitating workshops or sessions aimed at developing teachers technical and educational capacity to use audio and video resources more effectively in classrooms. This guide can be distributed, on similar principles to the teacher’s guide, to teacher education providers, district offices, and teacher centres.

Radio and Television-based Promotion
Television and radio-based promotion are, in terms of per unit cost; effective ways of reaching large numbers of people when compared with face-to-face promotion. Television’s advantage is that is can demonstrate how the product can be used and a range of consumers’ responses to the product. Disadvantages of using television are that, in comparison to radio, production costs are high and overall costs are increased by factors like frequency (how often a broadcast occurs), exposure and optimal reach. Radio, on the other hand, is less expensive and has the added advantage of being able to focus promotion to specific audiences such as teenagers or Zulu-speakers. But a drawback of radio promotion is that:

It reaches people mostly when they are doing something else – working, driving, or walking. And is often used to reinforce TV advertising.(Boyd, H.W. and Walker, O.C. p.599)

Overall, however, radio and television remain two of the most successful ways to convey information to large numbers of people within the target audience. Television and radio promotion should not only occur via the public broadcaster’s channels and radio stations. SABC Education can enter link up with community radio stations, especially those that have moved into supporting educational initiatives such as DYR in KwaZulu-Natal. This could offer more effective reach to promotion campaigns. Similarly, in-store television promotion is available in most urban-based shopping malls, and may be an additional way to promote the service to urban-based teachers, parents and students.

To promote the school service effectively opportunity and planning must be integrated. Integration and cross-referral between radio and television is also essential. In order to illustrate what integration and referral mean, the metaphor of a hyper-textual page is used. The hyper-text metaphor illustrate how different levels of entry and informatic pathways that will be possible for students watching a school service programme on television. The informatic pathways (on a web page this would consist of tagged URL addresses, which if ‘clicked’, link the user to another web site) are created by the service planners. The planning process provides users with a range of possible journeys along the informatic pathway between different programmes. Difference viewers will travel different pathways or make different links.

For example, a recent initiative by READ and McCarthy Motors distributed books to rural schools. This initiative could form the thematic content of several different broadcasts cutting across the school service. This content provides a range of possible ‘links’ between various platforms, which are appealing to general audiences, but still able to support schooling. An insert on for example, using luxury four-wheel-drive vehicles to distribute books to remote rural schools, can be featured in Drive Time, with the focus on the merits of particular makes of four-wheel-drive vehicles. Similarly, an insert in Educator Express can tackle the issue from a discussion of the role of organizations such as READ in promoting literacy in rural areas. Take 5 can also pick up on the initiative and reinforce the importance of reading as fun but still support the fact that as a skill, reading requires practice. Additional possibilities exist such as a travel documentary on this journey of four-wheel-drive vehicles through difficult rural terrain, which in any other form of vehicle could not be reached. The adult viewer may travel an informatic pathway from the Drive Team insert, to a documentary to a Current Affairs programme; while a child viewer may travel an informative pathway from Take 5 to a children’s news feature to the documentary. The informatic journeys will be different but are integrated into a coherent and flexible promotion strategy.

This conceptualisation assumes that collaboration between SABC Education Television and Radio, other SABC departments, channels and stations exists or can potentially exist. It assumes, too, that the content can be reversioned to suit particular niche groups within a general audience watching or listening to the broadcast. It is also assumed that informatic pathways will crossover between radio and television; and for this reason, a certain level of support of each unit’s initiatives is required. Continuity announcers, on both radio and television, will need to create awareness of forthcoming broadcasts. Similarly, print, telephonic, and Internet technologies should be used to promote informatic links between a range of different broadcast programmes; or between inserts and features, which allow the user to forge his or her own journey through the broadcasts.

Radio and television-based promotion commonly uses commercial advertisements such as a self-contained thirty-second broadcast. Advertising before or during educational broadcasts however requires that the planners of the service attend to more than just their own product promotion. There are several important considerations that need to be taken, and we illustrate some of these with reference to use of advertising aimed at children.

Commercial Advertising To Children: An International Example
Including commercial advertising in educational broadcasts aimed at students and children is controversial. Different international broadcasters have responded differently to this debate. Canada’s TV Ontario for example states that it offers ‘Ontario viewers a non-commercial primetime alternative to mainstream broadcasts(http://www.tvo.org/who/overviewTVO/basfacts.html).’ Similarly, Cable in the Classroom provides over 540 hours a month of commercial free television to schools.

In March 1998, the Independent Television Commission (ITC) published a review of research findings on the influence of television advertising on children, entitled Emulation, Fears and Understanding, which was intended to assess the appropriateness of ITC rules and guidelines for advertising aimed at children(ITC News Release, 27/98: Embargoed for 10.30 hours Tuesdays 3 March, Influence of TV adverting on children reviewed by ITC). The report states that children can distinguish between commercials and ‘the rest of television’ from a very early age, but are not sure about the purpose of advertising. The ITC review found that fast-paced commercials with loud music tend to result in greater emulation than slower-paced ones. It also found that at different ages, different things (such as noises, characters, content) frightened children.

Including advertising in educational broadcast airtime has educational implications. Given that some broadcasters reversion educational material into ‘teacher friendly’ or ‘bite-size’ modules intended for use in the classroom, it is educationally sensible that these modules be free of commercial advertising to avoid interruptions in viewing. Similarly, no advertisements should be included in programmes scheduled for block taping purposes. And if advertising is included, it should be between topics and must not interrupt the educational sequence of the programme.

In response to the need to monitor advertising in educational broadcasting services, the ITC’s code for advertising standards and practice, focuses on advertising targeted at children and/or transmitted during children’s programmes(http://www.itc.org.uk). Given that the SABC’s schools broadcasting services will be directed at children, the ITC standards, can be useful for determining how advertising can be used effectively within the SABC Education service. Only three main guidelines are described here, namely defining the child audience; scheduling advertising, and determining advertised content.

The ITC Code defines children as individuals younger than 15 years of age. Briefly, the Code states that during times when significant numbers of children are likely to be viewing, no product or service may be advertised (and no method of advertising may be used) which might result in harm to them physically, mentally or morally. No method of advertising, which takes advantage of the natural credulity and sense of loyalty of children, make be used. This statement is premised on the assumption that children's ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy varies according to their age and individual personality. With this in mind, no unreasonable expectation of performance of toys and games may be stimulated by, for example, the excessive use of imaginary backgrounds or special effects. Similarly, advertisements for toys, games and other products of interest to children may not mislead children, and must take into account, the child's immaturity of judgement and experience. For example, the true size of a product must be made easy to judge, preferably by showing it in relation to some common object against which it can be judged. In any demonstration, it must be made clear whether or not the toy can move independently or only through manual operation. And conflating qualities of a toy with its real life counterpart, such as a toy car and a Formula 1 vehicle, should be handled with restraint or avoided. Advertisements for a drawing, construction, craft or modelling toy-kit should show results reasonably attainable by the average child, using assembly methods that have not been exaggerated.

With regard to competitions, the advertisement must submitted in advance to the licensee, the rules governing the competition. The value of the prizes and the chances of winning should not be exaggerated. Similarly, advertisements should not exhort children to purchase or to ask their parents or others to make enquiries or purchases. This includes reference to the fact that unless children themselves buy or encourage other people to buy a product or service, then they will be failing in some duty or lacking in loyalty. The ITC Code also states that no advertisement may lead children to believe that if they do not have or use the product or service advertised they will be inferior in some way to other children or liable to be held in contempt or ridicule. And no advertisement may invite children to purchase products by mail or telephone.

The ITC Code recommends that advertisements for certain types of products must not be transmitted during children's programmes, or in the advertisement breaks immediately before or after these programmes. These products include: alcoholic drinks; liqueur chocolates; matches; medicines; vitamins or other dietary supplements; slimming products, treatments and establishments; 15 and 18 rated film trailers; lotteries; pools or bingo. Additional restrictions are applied to alcoholic drinks; slimming products, treatments and establishments and lotteries, pools and bingo(See respectively Rules on Advertising Breaks sections 4.2.1 and 4.2.7 (as amended December 1992), Code rules 19(a) and Appendix 3/35(a)); such as screening the following after 21h00:
•    Advertisements in which children are shown having any medicine, or vitamin or other dietary supplement administered to them;
•    Advertisements for medicines, or vitamins or other dietary supplements which use techniques that are likely to appeal particularly to children, such as cartoons, toys or characters of special interest to children.
•    No advertisement should show a child self-administering medicines or vitamins or other dietary supplements unless the Commission gives prior permission; and
•    Advertisements in which personalities or other characters (including puppets etc) who appear regularly in any children's television programme, present or positively endorse products or services of particular interest to children. This does not apply to public service advertisements or to characters specially created for advertisements.

Other restrictions apply to advertisements for merchandise, which may not be broadcasts two hours before or after transmission of a children’s programme. Similarly, advertisements which contain material that might frighten or cause distress, must be subject to appropriate restrictions on times of transmission designed to minimise the risk that children in the relevant age group will see them. Film trailers for 15 or 18 rated films must not be shown in or around children's programmes and, depending on content, may require more rigorous timing restrictions.

The content of advertisements is discussed in the ITC Code. Some examples are provided to illustrate the argument made in the ITC report. For example, advertisements for expensive toys, games and similar products must include an indication of their price. With regard to child safety, the Code recommends that if children are seen or heard in advertisements, the issue of safety must be considered because in some circumstances, bad examples set by adults may also encourage dangerous emulation by children. For example, a concern with road safety should ensure that children are not shown to be:
•    Unattended in street scenes unless they are obviously old enough to be responsible for their own safety;
•    Playing in the road;
•    Stepping carelessly off the pavement or crossing the road without due care;
•    Crossing busy streets without using pedestrian crossings;
•    Ignoring road regulations for pedestrians, cyclists or passengers.
Other recommendations relating to issues of child sexuality (for example, children may not be portrayed in a sexually provocative manner); and child behaviour (for example, children may not be portrayed as unmannered or poorly behaved) seem more difficult to regulate or define, than the road safety criteria established above.

Using television and radio-based promotion does not only rely on advertising strategies. Continuity announcers and programme presenters should be used to inform audiences of forthcoming broadcasts or print-based products within the service, and to raise awareness about the service with very little additional expense.

The success of a promotional strategy is to a large extent dependent on how precisely marketing teams identify a target audience; and the extent to which they confidently and creatively, promote the service to that target group. SABC Education promotions will be largely directed at teachers, and careful attention must be given to who that group is, and how best to promote to teachers. Some recommendations are made but these are prefaced by some important considerations about teachers, public perceptions of teaching, and the status of professional identity of educators.

Considering the Target Audience
If teachers’ perceptions of themselves and/or their profession are negative or if teachers perceive the Department of Education, students and the wider community hold negative attitudes to teachers, then they will resist using SABC Education resources in their classrooms. A second source of resistance may arise from professional isolation, which exists between teachers.

These two factors are important in the development of a promotional strategy that targets teachers. According to Rolf Horneij, there are a number of ways of promoting a school service to teachers, and which have made it easier for teachers to use broadcast products:

The most basic way of giving service to teachers is to tell them that we exist and that we have programmes for them to use in the classroom.(Meyer, M, p.130)

In Belgium, educational producers keep teachers informed through promotional activities, such as recurrent broadcasts of a programme, which contain excerpts from forthcoming programmes; or comments and visits to classes in which these programmes have been used(Meyer, M, p.130). French, German and Dutch broadcasters provided printed teachers’ guides with information about radio and television broadcast schedules as well as worksheets for pupils, and suggestions for further reading for teachers. The assumption that teachers will just know how to use a television or a radio or that the educational potential of radio or television is self-evident, is something which educational broadcasters have realized they cannot make because it was rarely formed part of teachers’ initial training.(Martin, P. 1992)

Promotions targeting teachers therefore must use a strategic combination of media, and the message conveyed must be carefully developed. For example, SAIDE researchers interviewed teachers from several schools in the greater Johannesburg area to discuss their opinions of the current SABC Education promotional poster, Tips For Teachers, and pamphlets(Based on interviews with teachers from eleven private and state-funded schools located in townships and suburbs in Johannesburg, Gauteng). While no attempt is made to argue that their responses for representative of all teachers, it is interesting that not only were teachers not aware of these promotional resources but felt that the Tips For Teachers was patronising. They did however comment on the ‘excellent readability’ of SABC Education Radio’s broadcast schedule tables.

Promotional Media
Print-based promotion is traditionally, a common way of communicating information about a schools service to teachers. Calendars, which include information about block broadcasts scheduled by the broadcaster, could be used for general promotional marketing purposes with teachers. Annotated or extensive catalogues containing information about audio or videocassette products or radio and television broadcasts can be purchased or distributed without charge, during a particular promotional campaign. Distribution should include distribution to teacher education institutions, district offices, teacher centres, public libraries, and non-governmental resource centres, specifically because information about the service should remain at one point in the information flow (such as a catalogue remaining unread in the principal’s office). All possible efforts should be made to ensure that information to flow to teachers, educators, educational stakeholders, happens effectively and efficiently. Distributing to teacher education institutions, is an important strategy for achieving this, because if educators are to integrate audio-visual resources effectively into teaching processes, it is unlikely that without support from teacher education providers, use and awareness of resources will not filter through to individual teachers.

Promotional information using a range of media should be sent out in well in advance (but retrospective information can be provided, and is useful for encouraging purchasing of teacher’s guides or videocassettes). Advance information allows teachers to plan to record a programme, or view it as an informed user, who intends integrating it into her classroom activities. TV Talk, a magazine sent to licensed television viewers, is an SABC publication, which can be used as a communication tool and can be sent to teacher centres, teacher education institutions and schools. TV Talk could be used to provide information to teachers on how to use inserts from a range of educational programmes or other programmes such as 50/50 as educational resources. It is possible for promotional information to be clearly differentiated from the rest of TV Talk by page colour coding, and options for detaching these Teachers’ Pages from the rest of the magazine.

Distribution of information to schools needs to be strategically handled, and this is an important lesson from international broadcasting experience. Posters and pamphlets of broadcast schedules should be sent to schools throughout the year, and well in advance of the broadcast, so that teachers can adequately plan their use of these resources. Promoting resources to associations such as the Association of Mathematics Educationalists of South Africa (AMESA), is also important. SABC Education should attempt to ensure that these associations are informed about how teachers can use various resources to support teaching, and where to purchase these resources. This is an important strategy for developing and penetrating potential environments of use.

Face-to-face promotion is typified by limited scope because it depends on human resources available to effect promotion. For this reason, it is the most resource-intensive form of promotion(Boyd, H.W. and Walker, O.C. p.564) but it has the advantages of permitting flexible presentation; of gaining an immediate response to the product; and of ensuring that teachers’ perceptions of the service, and the broadcaster are positively enhanced. Face-to-face promotion can also involve inviting teachers to visit the SABC’s headquarters, or regional radio stations, to see production processes. At present, SABC hosts public tours that can be used as part of a teacher promotion activity. SABC tours could be publicised in Educator Express or in print-based publications such as The Teacher, SADTU News or TV Talk. SABC Education, would however, need to consider subsidising some of these tours. What face-to-face promotion can also offer, is the opportunity to collect teachers’ opinions of resources.

An important part of promotion to teachers, must be emphasis on motivational promotion, and not just awareness-raising campaigns. Motivation to use resources should be the responsibility of the broadcaster, and includes addressing behavioural and emotional factors. We briefly outline some elements of a motivational promotion strategy below.

The first and most obvious strategy for promoting SABC Education’s service is the development and provision of excellent quality audio and video resources intended for broadcasting. By providing an excellent service, SABC Education will significantly motivate teachers to use its products and services. Other strategies are however also important.

Step One: Motivate By Informing
At the most basic level, motivation to use the service begins with providing information about the fact that a service exists. This information can be broadcast during peak adult viewing times so that both teachers and adult family members (parents or grandparents) are made aware of the existence of the service. Teachers can also be informed about the service by promotional activities directed and distributed at teacher centres, teacher education institutions, district offices, and provincial departments of education.

Step Two: Credibility through Publicity
A second step involves publicity activities, such as using existing publications, in which SABC Education explicitly outlines its motives for providing the service. It is essential that the general public and teachers be informed about budgets, scope, objectives, and management of the process. Furthermore, SABC Education should use promotional activities to support professional support networks, for example, including information on the importance of professional contact between teachers. In this way, teachers will realize that SABC Education is interested and thoroughly committed to supporting the teaching profession. Distributing information will be greatly assisted by compiling and maintaining an e-mail and facsimile distribution service. This can be enhanced through regular publicity statements included in teacher publications.

Step Three: Promote the Teacher, not the Technology
The next step demands a range of promotion mix activities, in which the message ‘promote the teacher, not the technology’ is explicit. As a public commercial broadcaster, the SABC needs to ensure that significant portion of its promotional activities focus on teachers, and not only its programmes. A thirty-second public service message, broadcast on radio and television, on the importance of teachers in society, is one example of what is meant by promoting the teacher and not the technology. Through promotional activities such as these, there is potential to motivate teachers to use the products, because SABC Education is marketing itself as committed to teachers, and teacher-issues. It is essential that the SABC be teacher-friendly and set up open and professional channels of communication with teachers.

Step Four: Indirect Marketing
The concerns with supporting professionalism in the teaching profession can be enhanced by radio and television broadcasts. Teachers will be motivated to use a service if the SABC addresses them as professionals, and informs the general public about the important roles and responsibilities of these professionals. It is essential that promotion aim at building teachers’ confidence, and sense of professional status. In this way, use of indirect appeals to teachers’ can be achieved by targeting programmes at the general public, to inform them about the importance of teachers in society. For example, these issues can form the basis of a co-production between SABC Education and Two Way or the Felicia Mabuza-Suttle Show.

Step Five: Promote Teachers’ Voices
Motivational promotion should include activities that allow teachers to directly and indirectly contribute to the development of resources. Teachers will be motivated to use the service if they believe that, as teachers, they have positive contributions to make. SABC Education’s competitive advantage in two important mass communication media – namely, radio and television - needs to be exploited and SABC must encourage teachers to express themselves through these media. Teachers, and not just their union representatives, or academics, should be continuously encouraged to participate in live call-in talk shows on radio. This means that the broadcaster is actively allowing teachers the opportunity to communicate with their colleagues.

Promoting teachers’ voices means that SABC Education should draw teachers’ into the production processes, and not treat teachers only as the subject matter of Educator Express inserts. The possibility of secondment of teachers has been discussed in chapter nine, but is mentioned here as an effective way of promoting the service to teachers within a district or cluster of schools.

Step Six: Listen to and Liaise with Teachers
Teachers will use a service if they believe that resources meet their needs as teachers. This means that SABC Education should try to include teachers in production processes, and establish a liaison network with teachers in schools, who can collect data from their schools and classrooms. The appointment of liaison officers will in show that SABC Education is serious about (and actually carries out) face-to-face liaison and regular contact with teachers. The emphasis on face-to-face contact is deliberately highlighted as a promotion strategy for teachers. Teacher support networks need to be established, and SABC Education can directly offer assistance through support and initial coordination. SABC Education staff must meet with training teachers and educators, or hold seminars at these institutions. Seconded teachers, too, can be given responsibility for educational liaison; and will have the dual affect of combating professional isolation, and improving communication between broadcaster and teachers.

Step Seven: Extend the Range of Resources
At present, the SABC Education Television provides one product to teachers in the form of Educator Express, and a limited amount of promotion, in the form of a printed pamphlet, Tips for Teachers. A wider range of resources and promotional activities are required. Resources, such as programmes for teachers, can motivate them to use additional broadcast programmes, such as the Foundation Phase service. It is also important to provide resources that attempt to meet their professional needs.

A wider range of product differentiation is also required, such as teachers’ programmes, which accompany broadcasts to students. These teacher programmes’ can be broadcast on weekends and promotion of this product via TV Talk or The Teacher is a critical way of motivating teachers to use and continue to use radio and television in their classrooms.

Step Eight: Link Product Use to Peer Appraisal Systems
The partnership with the Department of Education provides the SABC with a real opportunity to link the use of SABC Education products – such as radio and television programmes – to the teacher appraisal tools. Although this is a difficult process, it is possible to introduce into peer appraisal systems, a focus on use of resources by teachers. How the link is conceptualised may take the form of additional ‘points’ being awarded to a teacher whose peers regard her use of radio in the classroom as effective. This is one way in which teachers’ use of the service could increase their opportunities for promotion or accreditation.

Promotional Strategies Targeting Students

Given that as a group, South African students are diverse, a single or homogeneous promotion strategy will not be effective. For this reason, it is important that a combination of promotional activities be designed, and integrated, into the school service promotion strategy.

It is important that many of the promotional activities aimed at students be interactive. What this means is that students should be able to interact in a number of ways with the activity and the medium. Similarly, most of this promotion should be focused on promoting ‘hip’ and entertaining messages about being a student in South Africa.

Foundation Phase Students
A fan club can be established for students in Foundation Phase, and based around characters from the television platforms such as Dumani. The private broadcasting channel, MNET, for example operates a very successful KTV fan club but it is recommended that younger children be targeted by the SABC Education fan club. KTV also has a Wall of Friendship insert, which is a short broadcast, informing viewers about members’ names, ages, hobbies and photographs of friends of the fan club and KTV service. Activities could be announced during broadcasting or requests for write-ins and phone-ins could be set up. A similar Wall of Friendship could be established at very little extra cost, which has the added advantage of maintaining viewers’ interest of multiple broadcast sessions. The key here is that the fan club encourages students to interact with the medium (television) during and beyond the actual viewing time. The fan club can be supported by promotional posters, or give aways, and ‘prizes’ (such as SABC Education T-shirts or videocassettes), which students can collect either on request or distribution points such as petrol stations or shopping centres.

Print promotion aimed at Foundation Phase students should include use of posters and/or swap-cards of presenters or characters featured in the Foundation Phase service. Students should be required to collect these from petrol stations or by writing-in to SABC Education. The intention here is to maintain viewer loyalty, and/or encourage new viewers, through attractive, fun and entertaining posters, stickers, or swap-cards. TV Talk and other publications can include fan club news (preferably clearly marked as fan club pages; and detachable from the rest of the publication) or tasks (for example, colouring-in or story writing activities), at very little extra cost.

Given, too, that more and more children will be able to access the Internet in the next few years, the fan club and the posters should be included on the SABC Education web site. Posters and fan club newsletters should be able to be downloaded from the site; and students’ feedback should be encouraged. This can be achieved by setting up discussion groups for students or notice boards on which students can record comments, suggestions, among others. On-line chat sessions between students and presenters should also be set up; and presenters’ e-mail addresses should be given so those students can interact with them.

Secondary School Students
Again, given the emphasis on interactivity, road shows and school visits by Take 5 presenters, for example, has been and will remain an extremely effective promotion strategy. Road shows are, however, time and resource intensive, but SABC Education road shows can piggyback on, for example, the Coca-Cola road show. It is important that the road show promotes not just ‘dry’ educational messages, but focuses on issues that face youth, such as drug, alcohol and sexual abuse; and unemployment. Continuity is a critical consideration, and there should be attempts to revisit particular areas or schools, which the road show has targeted. In this way, there is evidence that SABC Education is perceived to ‘want to’ visit a particular area, rather than merely obliged to ‘stop there’ along the route.

Print promotion, in the form of posters, is also a viable option, and students should be encouraged to request posters from SABC Education or collect them from libraries, petrol stations, youth and church organization offices. Posters should feature presenters and students with nationally identifiable celebrities, such as Lucky Dube, Abashante, or Rebecca Malope, and sporting celebrities such as Baby Jake Madlala, Brendon Augustine, or Penny Heyns. In this way, the service is promoted as ‘aligned’ with role models, innovators, and the general trends in the music and sporting industry, and youth market. Stickers and cards are also a viable promotion option.

Radio promotion is a very effective promotion strategy for these students, and in particular, radio stations targeting youth audiences such as Radio Metro, 5FM and community radio stations such as DYR, should be continuously used to promote the service. Radio promotion has been under-used, and hence, the Media Officer should liaise continuously with radio station managers to arrange interviews between Take 5 presenters and radio presenters; or even set-up phone-ins on major radio stations such as Radio Metro. Other options include advertising or general announcements about what is happening over the next few months. The latter could be achieved through joint SABC and corporate sector sponsorship and included in for example, a ‘SABC Education and Pepsi Youth Update’ listing important events from across the country in support of schooling, employment, life skills, sports and entertainment. Promotional activities should focus on presenting a message that television and radio broadcasts which support schooling are ‘hip’ and ‘entertaining’. But other messages will have to be promoted alongside this such as anti-drug messages or information about toll-free counselling services such as Childline or Rape Crisis.

Internet-based promotion is important, and links can be forged with SchoolNet and other school- and/or youth-related web sites. It is recommended however that in the initial stages, the SABC Education web site should focus most of its energies to setting up web pages targeting younger students, (such as Foundation Phase service target audiences), who are on-line.