the target audience

Most rapid successes in the commercial world come from people who built something that they themselves would use, knowing (or hoping) that there were many others out there like them who would be similarly compelled. Their second advantage came from knowing themselves, and knowing where they'd go to shop for something like this, and how much they'd be willing to spend on it - thus was formed their marketing strategy.

But then the plague of success hits - they get bigger, hire more people, get an MBA intern. and fall into the trap of PowerPoint, market evaluation, quantitative and qualitative analyses, projections, focus groups, etc., and all of a sudden ideation and marketing become a process-laden mechanism that has its own definition of success and failure, which may or may not correlate to actual business success.

At this point, it's hard to identify that original company, its original passion and commitment to the audience, etc. At this point, things like Seth Godin's sugar-coated corporate speak emerge. Why? Because MBAs and lawyers and HR people get involved, and marketing becomes data-driven, lawsuit-proof, politically-correct "customer engagement tool" vs. the process of authentically and creatively driving demand to capacity.

This organization must get out of its strategic entrenchment and sense, respond and adapt. It must focus on what matters most, their knowledge and intimate understanding of their audience, its needs, its passions, and what the customer will pay for. They can do this by recapturing that which started them off on a path to success in the first place.

What if you didn't have that first-hand knowledge? Pete Reilly spoke of the need for new paradigms this week, specifically about why "shared pencil" and "many watching one" models for learning are not very effective, and proposes a new paradigm of "ubiquitous access" based on cloud computing and virtualization. Just two days before this, Scott McLeod wrote about the efficacy of netbooks in schools.

I admire both these gentlemen immensely - they are passionate, proven and respected educators (I am not); and while I wholeheartedly agree with their premise (that a paradigm shift is needed, as is better technology for learning), I worry that they might be missing a critical element.

The target audience.

Students are not adults. They have (as both Pete and Scott have spoken about many times) an absolute affinity with technology. The adult frame of reference is different, and the adult's filter is different, adults are not children.

The customer of a school system is the student. Like Google's advertising model, the students don't pay for the service, but if they aren't achieving the right outcomes, the funding/ads will dry up. Proof that the education system hasn't internalized this - "no child left behind," "education reform," abysmal graduation rates, etc.

What do students want? A friend was telling me recently that he bought his 14-year-old son an iPod Touch and an Acer Ferrari 1100 laptop. The former costs roughly a tenth of the latter. One day he walked in on his son doing homework with his Touch while the Ferrari sat, closed and untouched. Dad asked Son why he wasn't using the laptop (bigger screen, keyboard, faster, etc.), and Son said he was fine as-is. Dad then asked Son if he'd be good without the laptop altogether, and after a pause to think about it, Son said "yes." Dad took the laptop away Son hasn't yet asked for it.

I think Pete and Scott ought to reflect on the real needs of the customer. "Ubiquitous access" today is about mobile devices that the students already have or can get easily and cheaply. It's about schools and educators opening their minds to the idea that the customer and hence the target audience is not people like them. Students' use of technology is dramatically different from adults. Tomorrow it will change again.

The paradigm of teaching will need to adapt to the requirements and expectations of its customers, and engage them in their context. Most project-based learning schools already do this. What's more, in this new world, schools may have to re-think certain concepts - preventing text messaging (and the use of mobile phones) because it looks like "cheating" might be replaced with encouraging the use of text/mobile because it is teamwork. But as an adult, I'm sure this is already so last year...