ارائه دهندگان آموزشی در بازار: پاسخ های بازاریابی مدارس در شیلی Educational providers in the marketplace: Schools’ marketing responses in Chile

1. Introduction Education market policies have dramatically changed the management processes of schools, and how schools engage with their nearby external environment (Gewirtz, Ball, & Bowen, 1995; Jabbar, 2015; van Zanten, 2009; Woods, Bagley, & Glatter, 1998). However, research that addresses how schools respond to the incentives provided by the market remains scare, particularly in terms of the strategies that schools use to position themselves within the education market (Waslander, Pater, & van der Weide, 2010). In this context, marketing strategies are becoming an ever more important way to attract students. Nonetheless, the field of educational marketing in primary and secondary education remains under-analysed. Although the emergence of charter schools in the USA has increased interest in the marketing strategies developed by this typology of schools, schools’ marketing has been little analysed and un-theorized in the context of research into pro-market educational reforms research (Oplatka & Hemsley-Brown, 2004; Olson Beal, Stewart, & Lubienski, 2016), particularly in comparison with other dimensions of these reforms, such as their impact in terms of effectiveness and equity or families’ school choice strategies. For several reasons, the Chilean education system is particularly appropriate for analysing the strategies developed by schools in order to communicate with their external environment. First, the Chilean education system is one of the most marketized in the world (Bellei & Vanni, 2015). The introduction of a universal voucher system, as well as a high level of freedom of school choice, have fostered school competition to attract students. Secondly, the strong knowledge of both the demand and supply sides of the education market rules, after more than 35 years of a market-oriented education system, enables an in-depth analysis of the behaviour and rationalities of the different actors that are part of the system, in both the offer and the demand sides.