Navigating the EdTech landscape: Dream-selling Versus Necessity

Authored by Ravi Bhushan, Founder & CEO, BrightCHAMPS.

One of the most longstanding debates within sales is that of the (healthy) tension between authentic advertising and brand-building and ROI and sales-driven marketing. Should marketers say what is strictly true or should they say what helps the business sell? And are the two mutually exclusive?

A viral example of this million-dollar question was when an influencer recently called out a leading chocolate brand for advertising its chocolate milk powder as health drink with immunity benefits.

A case could be made that if it looks like chocolate, tastes like chocolate, is sold by a chocolate company… It really shouldn’t be all that surprising to anyone that it is, in fact, chocolate. Regardless of what the packaging says or how it’s being advertised.

An equally strong case could also be made that boasting about the health benefits of powdered chocolate, especially to kids, is akin to lying, and doesn’t matter if the fine print on the packaging covers every legally necessary caveat.

The thing is, at its core, advertising is about selling not the product itself, but a story about its potential. All of advertising is selling a dream. Sometimes the dream is functional – like the ability to procure something for half the price others are paying for it. So, sales and discounts. More often, the dream is motivational. It’s about being and doing more, better, different. About reaching for a reality we might not even have considered for ourselves.

It helps that food is easy to understand and make up one’s mind about. There is enough scientific evidence to help quickly crunch and add up numbers. RDA charts can be pulled up, regardless of what is being advertised.

But when it comes to evolving industries like edtech, things get a lot more difficult. So many variables have to come together to help an educational claim hold up in the court of public opinion. There’s no precise science to tell a user what is an objectively great class or product.

Within the prevailing narrative about edtech in the country, it can be hard to believe that most of the industry is filled with hardworking, learning-obsessed folks genuinely trying to create phenomenal opportunities for the future of the world – kids. Sure, a few bad apples might be making the cart a bit wobbly right now. But education and learning is a product that will never have a market fit.

Which is not to say that every class, every learning experience, every interaction with a fellow student or teacher is a uniformly pleasant experience for every parent and child, all the time, every time.

It is undeniably unpleasant when a great teacher, a kid really hit her stride, is replaced by an equally great teacher, but for whatever reason the child is not talking to them. Of course it is frustrating to wait while customer service teams investigate complaints and try to explain to an irate parent there is no way we can bring back an employee who has quit and moved countries because the student wants to learn from that first teacher and no one else.

So it is understandable when that parent leaves angry comments under said edtech’s ad that speaks about its teaching team’s heft. Was their experience of an unscheduled teacher change true? Yes. Is it also demonstrably true that most good edtechs spend a significant portion of their reserves in training teachers in global best practices and specific pedagogical style and curriculum and deserve to advertise their teachers? Also unequivocally, yes.

None of this is meant to be a defence for outlandish claims within advertising.

But we have to understand that edtech is an industry that’s still in its infancy. It is an industry that’s still figuring out its playbook, its moral centre, its responsibilities.

It’s an industry that is still learning, and most of this learning happens during screaming midnight matches arguing over the line that separates “Your child will be the next Zuck” and “Your child can be the next Murthy”.

Let’s address the elephant in the room. The ‘your child can/will/has the potential to be so-and-so’ is the ad that landed so many in edtech into trouble. More so, all of us are some shades of guilty. Almost all of us made varying degrees of the assertion; in much the same way comics sometimes make jokes that age really badly. But ed-tech also listened and learned, and it got better.

When one belongs to an industry that doesn’t have a playbook, an assembly line, an RDA, or a mathematical formula that can help the industry land at absolutes, a lot of it boils down to gut instinct and what feels right. And a great filter to use when faced with the moral dilemma of whether something is okay is: just because it’s legally okay, does not make it morally sound.