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E-Mail Marketing and Coproduction at Elementary School Discussed at GAMES Seminar

What information should be contained in an e-mail advertising message so that a customer noticed it and the product sales increased? How do parents’ extra-curricular activities influence the academic performance of children at elementary school? The participants of the GAMES seminar tried to answer these questions.

Ksenia Baydina, 4th year student of Management educational programme, presented her paper “Carrying out Targeted E-mailing at Opera and Ballet Theatre”. Ksenia is interested in factors that influence the opening of an advertising e-mail and methods which help to attract consumer’s attention.

The paper was discussed prior to an experiment on sending advertising e-mails dedicated to “The Dyagilev Seasons” festival. The experiment is carried out by the Group for Applied Markets and Enterprises Studies together with Opera and ballet theatre. The project is supervised by Dmitriy Potapov, Associate Professor of the School of Economics and Finance, head of the Group.

At first, different impacts were considered which can increase the response to the theatre e-mails. Besides, the attention was paid to behavioural characteristics that can influence the response. Also the issues of the experiment organization and determining experimental groups were considered.

It was noted that the title of an e-mail is directly influenced by the purpose which is determined in the contents. Before starting to write a text, one should decide what is the final goal to be reached: passing to the site, buying a ticket or something else. It is also important to find out what is valuable for a consumer – maybe, a bonus program of a festival or favourite seats in the stalls.

As soon as you understand what is the consumer value – you may vary it. You can “switch on” this value for one customer and “switch off” for another, and then you can measure the effect from e-mailing.

Dmitriy Potapov
Deputy director of HSE-Perm,
Associate professor of the School of economics and finance

The authors of the experiment have at their disposal such data as the sales of tickets for previous and current season, the number of seats in the auditorium, average, minimal and maximal price of tickets, number of days from the last purchase of a consumer, number of plays attended by this or that spectator, concentration factor (the most preferable area in the auditorium).

In this experiment the authors are going to test how different segments of consumers will react on an e-mail, for example, depending on sex, education, average price, preferences for this or that area in the auditorium. At the seminar it was discussed which minimal sampling ratio is necessary for getting significant results. Also noted was the necessity of a full-value hypothesis which can be validated by the authors during the experiment.

Aleksandra Lykova, student of Economics educational programme, delivered her paper “Does Coproduction Influence the Results of School Education?”

Coproduction means some interaction of a consumer and a manufacturer; moreover, it supposes the activity of a consumer during the process of production of a product and increasing its quality. It was decided to study the education because in social spheres consumers are interested in receiving the service in the most efficient way.

According to the paper, education is always coproduction, to some extent, because a person cannot be taught if he or she does not want it, from the one hand; and on the other hand, if a teacher is not interested in sharing the knowledge, the process will not be efficient either. This interaction is especially important in elementary school. 

In her research Aleksandra determined coproduction as active participation of a consumer in education. The research question was the following: how does coproduction affect the academic performance of schoolchildren in elementary school? Here a child is the consumer, and parents are coproducers.

At the beginning of her study, Aleksandra used qualitative methods: she carried out interviews in secondary schools of Perm region and studied the activities of non-profit organizations. It was found out that urban schools are characterized by material coproduction (parents are ready to help the educational process with money), while in rural areas non-material forms of coproduction prevail (parents help schools with some actions).

At the second stage Aleksandra moved to quantitative estimation of coproduction effect and structured the data. The analysis was carried out using information base of TIMSS-2011 monitoring research (international research including surveys of households, teachers and students, and also testing that evaluated the academic performance and the quality of knowledge). The work was done under supervision of Marina Sheina, Senior Lecturer of the School of Economics and Finance.

The main result of the study was finding a positive correlation between coproduction of parents and academic performance, as well as the quality of students’ knowledge. Further prospects of Aleksandra’s study were discussed at the seminar.