ABSTRACT
The promotion of educational organisations, activities and events is a ubiquitous part of contemporary education landscapes, in which schools and universities compete for students, rankings, funding and sponsors in what is commonly referred to as the global education market. This chapter considers three common forms of promotional texts – prospectuses, websites and experiential marketing – and some of the ways that these can be utilised as sites of scholarly analysis. While their formats and uses vary, each type of promotional text typically endeavours to communicate with current and prospective stakeholder networks, building brand recognition, consumer satisfaction and loyalty. This chapter shows how visual, discourse analytic and ethnographic methods can be used to identify messaging strategies and to interrogate claims, assumptions and norms in educational promotions. Research examples illustrate how different methodological and theoretical approaches can be used to generate insights into the representational practices and organisational cultures of particular educational institutions, as well as the broader discursive terrain within which these are situated. These in turn, this chapter argues, can provide researchers with valuable contextual and site-specific information for better understanding what educational organisations say about themselves in promotional texts, what they do in everyday practices and why it matters.
