Keywords

1 Introduction and Background of Research

The importance of foreign language learning has always been known especially in the relations between countries and now, more than ever, its necessity is predominant. Although there is a well-established opinion about the predominance of the English language in the world, it has proven to be nothing less than a fallacy. According to David Graddol [1] “monoglot English graduates face a bleak economic future as qualified multilingual youngsters from other countries [who] are proving to have a competitive advantage over their British counterparts in global companies and organisations”.

The foreign language teaching industry is increasing its works worldwide. Thus, the background of the language teaching industry in Greece along with the realisation of the concept of an LTO and its importance in education need to be considered. In Greece, there has always been an interest in learning foreign languages due to the size of the country and its need for exterior social, political and financial relationships. Slowly, language education evolved into an industry and a working force needed to allow it to be established as such. Foreign language industry includes teachers, people in administration, authors, publishers, books vendors. As the years passed the little schools became educational organisations not only because of their size but mainly of their complex structure and the needs of the market. The concept of a Language Teaching Organisation (LTO) is now utilised to refer to the humble foreign languages’ schools of the past denoting the extensive forms and necessities of the modern educational tendencies. Typically, LTOs, according to Richards and Schmidt [2], offer courses designed to teach languages and they cater learners from a wide range of backgrounds including school students, university students, professionals and anyone who is interested in honing their language skills in a language. Their form can vary so we have language schools, online language learning platforms or private tutors. Nevertheless, there is an actual need of a comprehensive approach on how to establish the business and make it grow. It is due to the development of the modern world and the constant changes in the market, that the LTOs need to be established as entities and their growth is mandatory so that they adjust to the novelties seen in education and the needs of the market.

The aim of this paper is to trace the way of creating an LTO from scratch, especially when it comes to the use of SM principles, based on the case of the creation of the NSPLlab. A key point to be considered in the function of an LTO, though, is the mandatory interplay between educational aspects and managerial models especially because an LTO disposes of a dual nature: it is both an organization carrying educational values and a business comprising all the financial processes leading from its creation to its functionality and its future on-going development.

2 Strategic Marketing and Its Role in LTO Growth

2.1 Defining Strategic Marketing in the Context of LTOs

The importance of SM for educational institutions of any size is currently visualised as indispensable. SM exists because people have a need or a desire to get hold of a product or be offered a service. Marketing used to be thought as a variety of actions implemented to whichever venture that included the merchandise of products or services while the term of meta-marketing has been introduced concerning any kind of business, product, personality, location or objective.

So, we have reached the point of using SM in all kinds of business; thus, it would be unreasonable not to be utilised in the field of education in general and more specifically in foreign language education, sector which flourishes in almost every corner of the planet thanks to the interconnectivity among the peoples. The main reason why SM tends to be indispensable is the need of the LTOs to proliferate and expand their productivity in an effective way. Tailoring marketing strategies to the language teaching sector could have certain restrictions in order for an LTO to be successful in the business world. Taking care of the needs and the desires of the consumer can be quite challenging since being successful in a language examination depends on many parameters. Teacher and student work separately and together, each in their own special role. The teacher creates and delivers the classes, and the student pays attention to the classes and studies the material given. Long-term needs of the consumers and the society should be thought when creating the fundaments of the students’ future employee’s profile, that is, the necessary skills and certificates on their CVs. Another significant parameter is the ethical decisions made in managing an LTO, in which sometimes the educational value should be put over the financial profit of the business. This is why the relation between teacher and client should be characterised by clarity and ethics.

2.2 Market Analysis and Positioning

The first step in SM is to identify the target audience and their preferences. In this case, the target audience is everyone who needs for any reason, personal or societal, to learn a foreign language. They tend to prefer the procedure to be short and the result to be obvious quickly. Competition in the Greek language education market is ferocious since the service of foreign languages’ education is highly demanded since English is a language taught even from the kindergarten—in primary school in 2010, in kindergarten in 2021 [3]. Most children nowadays learn at least one foreign language and there are others who learn two or even more. Let alone the case of life-long education in which many individuals who already form part of the working force of the market need to develop their expertise in different languages or they simply try to reinforce their CV for their professional ascension or change of sector. Thus, the development of the sector of foreign language education demands for more people to engage to relevant professions. Therefore, positioning aims to include ‘the creation of a unique and compelling identity for the LTO in the minds of the target audience’ [4].

2.3 Branding and Communication Strategies

One very important step in the success of a business is the crafting of a compelling brand identity. As Aaker [5] defines it, branding involves the creation of a distinctive identity, that is a name, a logo, and a visual representation of the LTO’s values and promises. Choosing the appropriate communication channels to reach the target audience of this specific business is of great importance, especially when it comes to its expansion to new products, that is new services (Facebook, Instagram, Local Guide-directory, mouth-to-mouth). There is a variety of techniques and strategies that can be utilised to enhance the SM plan of the LTO as presented by Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick [6]. Social media marketing, content marketing, email, search engine optimization (SEO) are some of these strategies which could reach more students.

2.4 Growth Strategies

Expanding course offerings based on market demand is one step that we always take. For example, due to the new state regulations about public language education, mentioned beforehand, there is an ascending demand for courses for nursery school students. Exploring partnerships with schools, businesses, and organizations is another important step. Collaborations can be held in a variety of ways. Get in contact with big businesses who might need the foreign language education for their employees for in-house classes delivery. The aim of this paper is to present the steps initiated for the creation of an LTO following the marketing strategies presented.

3 Methodological Considerations

This research employed literature review search where keywords, like “LTO”, “foreign language education”, “foreign language school”, “Strategic Marketing”, were searched in well-known databases such as Google Scholar, Research Gate, Academia and in the online libraries of the Hellenic American University’s online library, and the Paris University of Nanterre, where we had access at the time. By using the literature review we traced the path for a better conception of the creation of our LTO based on state-of-the-art terminology and tools. Since September of 2018, we have studied and implemented, sometimes by trial and error, all the strategies stated above to establish our LTO in a more sustainable way. And this is what we present here as a case study of the foundation and growth of a small LTO located on an island in Greece: the NSPLlab.

4 Detailed Account of the Creation and Foundation of NSPLlab

In September 2018, we created an LTO on the island of Aegina. It is a small, home-run business. The bedrock service offered in the NSPLlab is the teaching of three highly demanded foreign languages in the Greek market: English, French and Spanish. Candidates, who are locals of all ages (children—4 years old- and adults), are prepared for all kind of language exams offered in Greece for all levels. There is also an offer in classes and advisory services for university entry in Greece and abroad, for instance, France.

NSPLlab is totally centralised, as seen in White et al. [7], due to its small size, since it is smaller than the private language schools that exist at Aegina or in Greece, where the managers are teachers of English, but they also hire one or more teachers to work for them. Nonetheless, there is only one person who works for NSPLlab for the moment being. Therefore, we have been assigned with a variety of roles: we are the Manager, controlling the totality of the works and the director of studies choosing the right material. We are the Human Resources Manager, since we are the one who decides what certificates are necessary to add to our CV so as to be the best teacher possibly for our students. We hold the finances of the business, being an Accountancy Certificate holder, but we have also hired an external accountant to advise us when needed. We are a secretary and an organiser. And, last and most important of all, we teach and prepare our students for any kind of exams they need or wish to take. In a nutshell, we have all the responsibility of the LTO, and decisions are made purely by one person as seen in Drucker [8]. Although, during its first year of operation, we did not want to advertise our work or many people to be aware of its existence due to personal reasons and lack of self-confidence. But in the second year we left the vision of our little LTO be communicated to the public through a variety of marketing-oriented activities explained in this article. The success of NSPLlab is depicted to the results it has so far and are mainly based on the number of the effective: We started our LTO just having 10 students from my private classes from previous years to reach the 45 students in the beginning of the 6th year. Number which oscillated throughout the years, with students enrolling themselves even in the middle of the school year or others attaining their goals.

5 Challenges in the Foundation and the Management of the LTO

The creation of the brand name is of our inspiration, and it was completed last year with the help of a graphic designer (Yellowfish). In this case, we tried to establish a unique brand name, difficult to copy, using the initials of the owner’s full name: Nektarios Stylianou Pavlou Language lab (NSPLlab) which, we believe, is a lot catchier than simply “Foreign Language School Nektarios Pavlou”, which name we had rejected from the beginning. The identity of the LTO is also consisted of the creator’s profile, his qualifications and qualities. So, the logo was created based mainly on the educational character of the LTO and that is why we used an owl, the bird of wisdom, but in a modern visualisation in blue and gold colours to present the feeling of responsibility and seriousness under the umbrella of the roof of a building, thus the roof with the golden flag on top, representing the roof of a school. There is also the caption under the simple logo “Linguarum gratia”, meaning in Latin “For the sake of languages”, since the teaching of foreign languages is what we do and plurilingualism is what we support.

Since social media play a primordial role in our society, we decided to create profiles for our LTO in all the most frequently used media by the locals, that is: Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok.

Although due to time limitations our presence is not frequent, nevertheless, we used the theory of Chaffey and Smith [9], for social media and online advertising to reach potential customers. Furthermore, every time we create a post, we try to create valuable content, education-oriented so as to establish our expertise, according to the work of Pulizzi and Barrett [10]. Firstly, we created a Facebook page that has, at the moment, 404 likes and 409 followers. Secondly, we uploaded the LTO’s Instagram profile which has 203 followers and Tik Tok with 60 followers although we have no posts so far, since adding material to the newsfeed is time-consuming. Thirdly, during the first lockdown we created a closed Facebook group only for our students and their parents where we asked them to react with a comment on the different activities, articles, quotes, movies, or other material we posted there, so that they practice the language they learn and for the parents to see that continuous learning takes place, as well, outside the classroom, conventional or virtual it might be.

As the LTO widens its horizons, we could invest on digital Marketing as well. Emphasizing on the educational value of our LTO, we created marketing material presenting our offered services such as small groups of students—no more than four—private tutoring, guiding future university students—choice, registration, and tutoring –, deblocking adults who could not learn a foreign language when they were younger. We communicate a variety of extracurricular activities we organise, always focusing on their educational aspect, like Christmas or Halloween parties with board games and extra copies with ludicrous activities (crosswords, etc.), movie afternoons with popcorn and lots of material ready for the students to work before, while and after they have watched the movie (e.g. worksheets—fill in the gap—with easy recipes the students can prepare before the movie and enjoy while watching), outings in archaeological sites like Paliachora with an on-site tour in English and a picnic with homemade burritos and other delicacies from the different cultures’ languages we teach. The cultural insight is more than important in language education, as Barski & Barker [11] prove in their study on intercultural competence development.

Furthermore, expanding the geographic range of the LTO’s works and developing an online presence by creating my LTO’s web page (nspllab.com) [12] which is to go online by the end of this year offering introductory courses to anyone who has an internet connection and has been enrolled.

Every business venture or every research have their limitations. When it comes to Management theory, since everything is governed by one person, we have chosen for the integrative managerial model described by White [7]. This has offered us the opportunity to let the different models interact or be changed when we feel it is necessary, complimenting each other and get the best of all of them in tangible results.

Nevertheless, having in mind that an LTO cannot rely purely on the personal value, a great deal of hard work is being delivered in order to achieve the necessary outcomes in the form of the students to be successful in the exams [13]. Therefore, as the LTO grows, the manager should let go some of their responsibilities and adopt a less centralistic profile mainly due to lack of time or lack of expertise in certain domains.

Unfortunately, there were also certain challenges faced during the initial stages of the establishment of NSPLlab that we should consider and avoid on the way. The most important is the lack of capitals so that we ameliorate and get the premises of our future school ready according to the specifications of the Greek Ministry of Education. Finally, as a new teacher and school owner we have to face the competition of all the existed private language schools, owned by people who base their clientele and their good reputation mainly on the support of their relatives and friends, since we are talking about a small community.

As a matter of fact, if we want to see our venture to flourish in the future, we need, as soon as it is possible, to hire more qualified staff, to communicate to them our principles and the ideas that they need to become as good teachers as possible according to our style of teaching and our educational values and beliefs. Moreover, another challenge we had to overcome was the administrative process which comprised the necessary paperwork for the legal foundation of our LTO. Apart from the license one needs from the Greek Ministry of Education, as a self-employed, we also had to register at the Tax Office, the Single-Payer Social Security Fund (ΕΦΚΑ) and the Chamber of Commerce. Close to our SWOT Analysis, the salient opportunity or objective of this LTO is to expand, by changing its legal form from private tutoring to a private language school. This would help expand the educational offer in other fields that we have been trained for but now time doesn’t allow us to offer. This will give our students the opportunity to attend to a series of speeches delivered in-house by exquisite university professors or other specialists.

6 Conclusion

Overall, language education is evolving frenetically, according to the needs and demands of the modern societies. Language schools should also evolve and keep things up to date. Despite any challenges or limitations along the way of creating an LTO from scratch, the procedure is revitalising and challenging in a constructive way. Apparently, in the nowadays market, LTOs, as business ventures, should take into serious consideration not only the Marketing strategies of commercialisation and cover the financial needs of its clientele but also Strategic Marketing, which caters for the future needs of their clients, revolutionising the education methodologies and use strategies to bring in tangible results both financially speaking and in the building of a sustainable reputation (branding). It is our firm belief that all LTO stakeholders should implement the aforementioned strategies and principles taken from reviewing the existing literature so that their future ventures flourish. Online communities can be created as is the case with other products and services for sharing ideas among people with similar interests [14,15,16,17,18]. The positioning of NSPLlab in the market is to be considered as a successful venture since its functioning for five consecutive years cannot be proved wrong. Its unique selling propositions along with the good personal reputation the teaching effective possesses render it as a good example for other LTOs.