EDUCATION AS A MARKETING TOOL

Many brands need to engage professional communities or consumers. Take for example a global coffee brand that wants to educate its consumers and independent barmen so that they can appreciate the value of Arabica coffee. In this case education is a marketing tool. After years of fun adverts, you can’t launch a boring educational activity to make them understand that your wine or your arabica coffee is better than the others.

Whenever you use education as a marketing tool, the correct use of edutainment can facilitate the growth of a customer or a professional community

Why don’t you build an edutainment academy?

In these images you can see the experience of an edutainment academy for barmen in Shanghai.

We all know that nowadays all stakeholders are interested in a dialogue with the organization based on “true infos”. And learning can be a joyful opportunity to live the brand experience.

When your employees or your sales force don’t know your company’s products, services or offerings and you know why, when your products, your services and your offerings are very complex and can only be appreciated by educated people, the correct use of edutainment can help your people learn more about your industry, your brand, your world.

STORYTELLING WORLDWIDE

Typical business language is understood by the managerial community all over the world. But when you want to generate a global corporate culture, shared by all your employees, you need to go further.

Through brand engagement you have to involve people from different functional backgrounds and geographical locations so that they play their role in accord with your brand identity.

A platform can unleash the powerful voice of thousands of frontline employees to share what they have learned from their daily interactions with customers. And storytelling is an extremely useful approach to engaging them in this platform.

Behaviours and stories can be interpreted differently in diverse cultures. Cinema has been practicing the continuous production of stories loved all over the world for decades. They are based on the common ground of emotions and feelings: the human experience

In this parody of Star Trek, produced by the employees of a global brand, the community imagined the company in 2300. The parody was the focus of a global discussion about various corporate problems that needed to be solved – immediately, not in 2300. Nowadays in all countries emerging society hates language that is too formal and rhetorical. People need action and true intentions in this decade of revolutions.

We’ve been practicing storytelling for 10 years in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Austria, UK, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Russia, U.S.A, Argentina, Egypt, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, China, Philippines, Indonesia, India.

There are stories loved in many cultures. And, as we know, the human brain always thinks through stories.

Our advice is to use storytelling to communicate to your frontline people the opportunity of sharing their insights on customer experience. 

CORPORATE MONSTERS AND PHANTOMS

Matching behaviour to belief: that’s a common issue for many organizations. What organization doesn’t have a soaring vision, lofty values and towering ambition?

But how many are honest about the challenges and failures they inevitably meet in the process of interacting with their customers, their people, their community? We know that openness and transparency are crucial for people to be able to take ownership of corporate convictions. And it’s crucial to keep the message simple.

Finding the culprit for a mistake is pointless. More than 70 companies have decided to use comedy to highlight typical kinds of behaviour that are not in keeping with their brand. With whom? With their employees of course.

Whenever you risk offending people by telling them they are wrong, the correct use of edutainment can be the solution to making people accept the issue: autonomy of all people in the community is the ultimate goal.

You can make people find the corporate monsters (behaviours not in keeping with your convictions) and the corporate phantoms (things we should do but don’t).

Is edutainment a brand new approach? Come on. It has existed for millennia in the form of parables and fables: they were and are forms of entertainment designed to educate as well as to amuse and to promote social change.

The term edutainment was used as early as 1948 by The Walt Disney Company to describe the True Life Adventures series.

And the noun edutainment was used by Robert Heyman in 1973 while producing documentaries for the National Geographic Society.

BRIGHT

Have your ever had the experience of participating in a learning programme where trainers, professors and colleagues used the jargon of their activity, profession, group or business? They communicated the closed world of their organizations, didn’t they?

In a world of connections, in social networks we all appreciate fast-answers and no-jargon guides. How often have you found the usual business classes full of buzzwords to be so boring?

You can experience the use of comedy to engage people in complex disciplines they find quite boring.

Bright Club is a successful British initiative: it is the thinking person’s variety night, blending comedy, music, art, new writing, science, performance, and anything else that can happen on a stage. Bright Club aims to bring scientific researchers together with a new audience, primarily 20-40 year olds who have no existing relationship with academia. It’s a great opportunity for academic staff to get experience of sharing what they do with a friendly, informal audience.

The mission of edutainment is to engage people so that they can appreciate complex issues by understanding the spirit of a discipline. Take your e-learning activities: movies, video, radio, and games are technological experiences where the quality of the entertainment increases the level of attention and interaction of your audience. To be sure that people don’t sleep while participating in your e-learning activities, the correct use of edutainment can be the solution.