MARYLOU ANDREW: What is PFL?

CHRIS PRICE: Preparation for Life (PFL) is the world’s largest UK-owned and managed student advisory service. We place about 3,000 students a year into higher education programmes all over the English speaking world. Our job is to help young undergraduates, graduates and mid-career professionals improve their educational opportunity and gain some applied work experience. PFL has been around since 1997, so we have been in business for 15 years; we are very different from other advisory services because we are all ex-university or college academics and that makes us always act in the best interests of our students. For example, I was director of three British university international offices, marketing director for another one and I was also an academic. We are retained by 180 universities to provide our service, so any charges to students are very low.

MLA: Which countries do you have offices in?

CP: In Dubai, Ghana, Kenya, London, Melbourne, Nigeria and Pakistan. We believe that if we have offices in the ‘sending’ countries, such as Pakistan, which send students out, we should also have offices in the receiving countries. We hope to have offices in Canada and the US before too long.

MLA: What does your role as Chief Marketing and Information Officer for PFL involve?

CP: My primary purpose is to control the central marketing function of the company and to develop and implement brands and marketing communications from B2B and B2C because we talk to universities and to students. I also work on event planning and digital marketing. When I started at PFL, they had a rubbishy website and 300 visitors a month. So I have been busy creating a digital footprint for this company and I am pleased to say that our website now gets 25,000 hits a month. We are also doing a lot of user generated film content as that is important for us.

MLA: How important is social media to an organisation like yours which interacts mainly with young people?

CP: What I like about social media is the incredible amount of targeting you can do – I can now interact with people who are between 21-25 years old, have a degree, have travelled overseas and are now expressing an interest in international education. You can’t get that targeting in any other medium; it’s just not physically possible.

Chris Price, Chief Information and Marketing Officer, PFL International was in Pakistan recently. He spoke to Marylou Andrew about how economic and cultural changes are impacting education flows, the changing role of education advisories and the importance of social media in reaching out to students.

MLA: Is it easier to market education now that you have social and digital media at your disposal?

CP: Social media has empowered people beyond their wildest imagination and whilst that is a great advancement for humanity, it has actually made it very difficult for people to make absolute decisions because there actually might be too much information out there. I don’t think it has made education advising any harder or easier but it has changed our role. For example, we get students who come and say, I know all about so and so university but there is still a whole process to get in and this is where we come in, because we will file applications, deal with the university and then help them with their visa which is the real challenge. I think education advising is less about information about universities and more about the process of actually getting into the universities.

MLA: How do you market yourself?

CP: Our marketing strategy is several-fold; because the education market is quite face to face in many ways. We sponsor education-based events, do tours of universities and have country specific and city specific events, such as seminars. We have a very good structure of getting into schools; we have recently signed an MOU with the Roots School System in Islamabad so we are now their advisor in terms of international education. We are also negotiating with universities in Canada, the UK and the US and schools here in Pakistan to set up twinning arrangements so that students can get western accredited qualifications in Pakistan and then transfer there at the last minute, which keeps the cost of education down. But our best marketing strategy is that we have in-house representatives of various universities, either alumni of a particular university who have studied there, or people who have been trained to represent a particular university.

MLA: Where do Pakistani students want to go to study?

CP: It is still the UK and it has been for a long time. What has changed is that there are a lot more graduate students going as opposed to undergrads, and this is because local universities have improved and expanded. Although the UK is popular, its popularity is declining; Canada is hot and Australia is gaining popularity. Pakistanis are much more open to other destinations as well – Malaysia is a popular destination but we don’t represent anyone in Malaysia right now. Education flows reflect changes in economics and society. There has been a change in Pakistanis coming to Britain because they can’t reside and work there now once they finish studying. However your biggest trading partner right now is China and I think Pakistanis might be interested in going to China. The tectonic plates of education are shifting; they shifted 15 years ago when western universities internationalised. It will be interesting to see where they stop for a while. I would not be surprised to see more European universities coming here particularly the Dutch and the Germans.

MLA: What are the most popular study areas?

CP: It has changed over the last few years. People used to be obsessed with IT and business but as an education economy matures, people become more open to the idea of the arts. Parents are prepared to let their daughters go and study fashion design in Toronto, which would never have happened 10 years ago. There is still interest in the professions: architecture, medicine, accounting and law, but because your system of law and accounting and even medicine is very similar to Britain, most students end up going there to study for these degrees. In any country I go to, I always try and focus on the areas of the economy that are growing. Nigeria, for example, has the third largest film industry in the world and it is a cultural producer. So we have been promoting media, film, arts and entertainment education in Lagos. Media education is also becoming popular with Pakistani students and we have been placing students from Pakistan at a couple of universities in America which is still seen as a very big media producing country.

MLA: You are also a digital trainer for educational institutions. Why is that important?

CP: I used to be the Programme Director for the digital marketing training course at the British Council in the UK, now I do exactly the same kind of thing for the European Association for International Education. I get college and university professionals, such as directors of international programmes and I say, you may go to education expos, have a website etc. but let’s get beyond all that. What about film content, blogging, online competitions, social media, Facebook and other social networks in different countries. Next year I will be teaching two courses in Europe: one is on innovations in digital marketing and the other is on film and viral marketing.

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