Le marketing scolaire : un état des pratiques dans les établissements secondaires en Province de Liège

Abstract

This research paper tries to verify if secondary schools from the Province of Liège resort to identical practices than those we can find in the typical marketing approach. The general question of our research was formulated as follow: “What is the state of the marketing practices in secondary schools from the Province of Liège compared to the theoretical marketing approach?”. This paper also allows to verify three hypotheses formulated on the basis of key stages of this marketing approach: (1) “Do the secondary schools from Liège build their educational and service offer on the basis of the demand?” (2) “Do they really know the criteria influencing the choice of their target audience?” (3) “Do the communication channels used by them highlight these various criteria?”. The first part of this paper was dedicated to the study of literary reviews. This study allowed to clarify the context of the research and to describe all the stages of the theoretical marketing approach. Then the second part was structured around two empirical studies: a qualitative survey in the form of interview realized with school principals and a quantitative survey in the form of questionnaire dedicated to parents of those schools. Our research finally demonstrated the presence of essential marketing practices within our school institutions from Liège, although these do not always seem to be aware of this. The strategy of the schools, though, is not the same as the one of the private companies. Indeed, schools do not generally take into account the demand to create their educational and service offer. To be able to create this demand, a school has to put forward – in particular in its promotional campaign – aspects of its offer that may interest its target audience. The results of our quantitative study prove that schools know actually well the selection criteria in which children and parents are interested. With the exception of certain traditional media, schools integrate well these criteria into the promotional means they use. The “events” channels, frequently used by the parents, are the ones which highlight most these important criteria.