Kindergarten Marketing Strategies Under Low Birth-rate Trend: An Application of 4C Framework of Strategic Marketing Analysis

[[abstract]]Owing to the economic, social structure, as well as value systems changes, the role women are expected to play in both society and family has been significantly different from centuries or even decades ago. At the same time, low birth-rate has becoming a trend among developed countries, including Taiwan. The declining birth-rate also has been threatening certain industrial developments. For education industry, kindergartens are among the institutions whose survival are severely jeopardized. Practitioners have to develop the skills of strategic thinking, insights of the market, and responsiveness to the market changes, to be able to survive under the dire competitions. This study is to explore competitive strategies for kindergartens from the viewpoints of strategic marketing. Institutions from public and private sectors in Tainan area are selected as research objectives, whose administrators are interviewed to collect primary data, where 4C framework of strategic marketing analysis are employed for case analyses. Specifically, unit cost of buyer benefit, information searching cost, moral hazard cost, and asset specifity cost are analyzed and compared among cases, in an effort to search for possible explanations as well as solutions for success. It is found that, emphasize and creation of buyer benefit is the foremost issue in marketing strategy formulation. In addition to price differentiation, diversity as well as abundance of curriculum and activities, and cultivation of multiple abilities in the learning processes, are primary concerns to parents’ benefits. Secondly, except for words of mouth and referrals, information searching cost could be significantly reduced through conducting events such as sports games, recitals, participating in community activities. Thirdly, creating multiple channels and opportunities of interaction with parents would be beneficial to building up the trust, and further to lower moral hazard cost. Lastly, among asset specifities, psychological identity, such as parents are alumnus, is the most influential factor in making their ultimate selection of kindergarten. At the same time, to establishing close relationships between parent and teachers would be the primary way to build up asset specifity in term of customer loyalty