Saving the world (adaptive marketing)

‘Adaptive’ is a buzzword in the marketing of educational products. Chris Dragon, President of Pearson Digital Learning, complained on the Pearson Research blog. that there are so many EdTech providers claiming to be ‘adaptive’ that you have to wonder if they are not using the term too loosely. He talks about semantic satiation, the process whereby ‘temporary loss of meaning [is] experienced when one is exposed to the uninterrupted repetition of a word or phrase’. He then goes on to claim that Pearson’s SuccessMaker (‘educational software that differentiates and personalizes K-8 reading and math instruction’) is the real adaptive McCoy.

‘Adaptive’ is also a buzzword in marketing itself. Google the phrase ‘adaptive marketing’ and you’ll quickly come up with things like Adaptive Marketing Set to Become the Next Big Thing or Adaptive marketing changes the name of the game. Adaptive marketing is what you might expect: the use of big data to track customers and enable ‘marketers to truly tailor their activities in rapid and unparalleled ways to meet their customers’ interests and needs’ (Advertising Age, February 2012). It strikes me that this sets up an extraordinary potential loop: students using adaptive learning software that generates a huge amount of data which could then be used by adaptive marketers to sell other products.

I decided it might be interesting to look at the way one adaptive software company markets itself. Knewton, for example, which claims its products are more adaptive than anybody else’s.

Knewton clearly spend a lot of time and money on their marketing efforts. There is their blog and a magazine called ‘The Knerd’. There are very regular interviews by senior executives with newspapers, magazines and other blogs. There are very frequent conference presentations. All of these are easily accessible, so it is quite easy to trace Knewton’s marketing message. And even easier when they are so open about it. David Liu, Chief Operating Officer has given an interview  in which he outlines his company’s marketing strategy. Knewton, he says, focuses on driving organic interests and traffic. To that end, we have a digital marketing group that’s highly skilled and focused on creating content marketing so users, influencers and partners alike can understand our product, the value we bring and how to work with us. We also use a lot of advanced digital and online lead generation type of techniques to target potential partners and users to be able to get the right people in those discussions.

The message consists of four main strands, which I will call EdTech, EduCation, EduBusiness and EdUtopia. Depending on the audience, the marketing message will be adapted, with one or other of these strands given more prominence.

1 EdTech

Hardly surprisingly, Knewton focuses on what they call their ‘heavy duty infrastructure for an adaptive world’. They are very proud of their adaptive credentials, their ‘rigorous data science’. The basic message is that ‘only Knewton provides true personalization for any student, anywhere’. They are not shy of using technical jargon and providing technical details to prove their point.

2 EduCation

The key message here is effectiveness (Knewton also uses the term ‘efficacy’). Statistics about growth in pass rates and reduction in withdrawal rates at institutions are cited. At the same time, teachers are directly appealed to with statements like ‘as a teacher, you get tools you never had before’ and ‘teachers will be able to add their own content, upload it, tag it and seamlessly use it’. Accompanying this fairly direct approach is a focus on buzz words and phrases which can be expected to resonate with teachers. Recent blog posts include in their headlines: ‘supporting creativity’, ‘student-centred learning’, ‘peer mentoring’, ‘formative evaluation’, ‘continuous assessment’, ‘learning styles’, ‘scaffolding instruction’, ‘real-world examples’, ‘enrichment’ or ‘lifelong learning’.

There is an apparent openness in Knewton’s readiness to communicate with the rest of the world. The blog invites readers to start discussions and post comments. Almost no one does. But one blog post by Jose Ferreira called ‘Rebooting Learning Styles’  provoked a flurry of highly critical and well-informed responses. These remain unanswered. A similar thing happened when David Liu did a guest post at eltjam. A flurry of criticism, but no response. My interpretation of this is that Knewton are a little scared of engaging in debate and of having their marketing message hijacked.

3 EduBusiness

Here’s a sample of ways that Knewton speak to potential customers and investors:

an enormous new market of online courses that bring high margin revenue and rapid growth for institutions that start offering them early and declining numbers for those who do not.

Because Knewton is trying to disrupt the traditional industry, we have nothing to lose—we’re not cannibalising ourselves—by partnering.

Unlike other groups dabbling in adaptive learning, Knewton doesn’t force you to buy pre-fabricated products using our own content. Our platform makes it possible for anyone — publishers, instructors, app developers, and others — to build her own adaptive applications using any content she likes.

The data platform industries tend to have a winner-take-all dynamic. You take that and multiply it by a very, very high-stakes product and you get an even more winner-take-all dynamic.

4 EdUtopia

I personally find this fourth strand the most interesting. Knewton are not unique in adopting this line, but it is a sign of their ambition that they choose to do so. All of the quotes that follow are from Jose Ferreira:

We can’t improve education by curing poverty. We have to cure poverty by improving education.

Edtech is our best hope to narrow — at scale — the Achievement Gap between rich and poor. Yet, for a time, it will increase that gap. Society must push past that unfortunate moment and use tech-assisted outcome improvements as the rationale to drive spending in poor schools.

I started Knewton to do my bit to fix the world’s education system. Education is among the most important problems we face, because it’s the ultimate “gateway” problem. That is, it drives virtually every global problem that we face as a species. But there’s a flip-side: if we can fix education, then we’ll dramatically improve the other problems, too. So in fact, I started Knewton not just to help fix education but to try to fix just about everything.

What if the girl who invents the cure for ovarian cancer is growing up in a Cambodian fishing village and otherwise wouldn’t have a chance? As distribution of technology continues to improve, adaptive learning will give her and similar students countless opportunities that they otherwise wouldn’t have.

But our ultimate vision – and what really motivated me to start the company – is to solve the access problem for the human race once and for all. Only 22% of the world finishes high school; only 55% finish sixth grade. This is a preventable tragedy. Adaptive learning can give students around the world access to high-quality education they wouldn’t otherwise have.