Students or Parents?

> If you were marketing an educational
> product, who would you market to first?
> Students or students' parents?

Linda,

Playing with semantics...

I am a student (of the masters, as Gordon would say; of those who have gone down the road I want to go down; of those who possess knowledge I wish to have; and so on), and marketing to my parents to get them to buy it for me would be a waste of time.

From a typical high-school student point of view... while many parents would buy something to help their little darlings get better grades, the little darlings would not be interested. (Just like the parents who hire tutors for their children while the child doesn't care one little bit.)

From a Seeds of Wisdom board point of view...

Are any of the visitors here high school students? And if so, THEY have come here to learn off their own bat. So they would be prime targets in my opinion.

However, if you are asking because you want to develop a marketing system around your math thing - which you linked to in your post - then I can't see any "school" use.

Calculating a tip... or mileage on a trip... or whatnot, doesn't get me better grades. And in school, I am allowed to use a calculator anyway.

As an adult out in the real world, I find the possibilities intriguing. Then again, in high school I always reckoned everyone should have been doing "maths in society" (called veggie math because only those who couldn't handle higher level math did it) because it had an actual real world use, whereas the higher math being taught (absolute values, differentiation, etc.) had no immediate real world use. So my comments are slanted.

Also, seeing as I have heard of Trackenberg (sp?) I am already drawn to these types of mental tricks.

Personally, I think adults are more likely to go for your product. For their own use. And some for those who do home schooling. That's my "opnion" - untested.

If you truly want to know who to market to... go into the market and ask them. Stand outside a school and do a survey of the students. Go to a junior school and survey the waiting parents.

Michael Ross