Education in New India is a commodity, uses branding to arouse consumerist desires

Education in India turning out to be another precious commodity, employing marketing and branding strategies to arouse consumerist desires of elite global schooling.

Most parents can see the sea-change that the education system in India has undergone post-liberalisation.

Just go through any advertisement (for admission) and you will wonder about the transformation (at least in the way everything is marketed nowadays).

• A forty-feet long school-ad depicts a ten-year-old playing golf.
• A child is spotted with an aeroplane – representing the pilot-ambition.
• Schools are adding “Global / International” to their names (Parental aspirations ensured ‘local’ was long ack replaced by ‘global’. )

This is how schools are trying to get a competitive advantage through differentiation. If you have studied management, you can see how schools are using Porter’s generic strategies.

Every year when the admission process starts, the advertisements for school admissions look like advertisements for real estate:

• Both are sufficiently expensive.
• Both arouse customer interest by using images of global facilities (state-of-the-art infrastructure, air-conditioned, CCTV, sports facilities) in manicured built-environments isolated from their surroundings.
• Both hint at the social strata, where children of a certain class can socialise with similar ones.

Kids may not know their tables and spellings, but they already know about ‘class’ (high class, bakwaas, and so on). This is what marketers have learnt, how to use branding to turn anything into a precious commodity.

But when applied to education, its is also partly responsible for the class divide that exists within most societies. While politicians and city planners are thinking of ways to reduce ‘divide’ among people, what they don’t see is that its the education system that is feeding the great ‘divide’.

There is a reason why people, including students of course, are the happiest in Scandinavian countries.

This image-driven projection of schools as ‘global’, offering world-class-everything, is nothing but a strategy to justify the high fees that some of these institutions command.

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