By Ed Pierce, Fleet Industry Marketer
I have often been asked to extend effective marketing communications techniques to other business audiences – industry influentials, employees, strategic partners and others. After many years, one soon realizes that, although strategies vary by audience and other situational factors, the goal remains the same.
In every case, we strive to invoke a “call to action.” As it turns out, the same objective applies to education, too. Imparting information is only the first step in a process that hopefully leads to the betterment of a student who will become engaged.
Adult education experts call this “transformative learning,” and this educational philosophy suggests that meaningful learning happens only when people use what is taught to challenge their own deep-seated assumptions on a topic – an especially difficult task when dealing with adults who have full-time jobs, families, and entrenched belief systems. Fleet and safety managers need only think about the work involved in changing driver behavior to appreciate the educational challenge!
But, those who study the cognitive and emotional obstacles to learning have identified some key transformative learning concepts that can help businesses build effective “transformative marketing” programs:
1. Effective learning (and communication) requires engagement on many levels. For example, in the realm of driver behavior, an appeal for a change has monetary, safety, employment, societal and other implications.
2. Challenging a wide range of assumptions is a multi-step process. An effective educator-communicator must identify outcomes at the start and then specify all the steps required to achieve them.
3. Every teacher-communicator must explore the assumptions for each new assignment and then develop a customized approach to establishing tasks and measuring success.
If you have any questions, comments or opinions that you’d like to share, write to me at [email protected].
