Sign up

Have some pie!

David O’Grady, CEO, Marketing English in Ireland

Marketing English in Ireland represents schools who bring in 90% of the country’s English language students. CEO David O’Grady spoke with The PIE about marketing beyond the EU, a good 2012 and coping with Ireland’s own economic downturn.

The PIE: What will the next year look like for MEI (Marketing English in Ireland)?

"We would never sell Ireland as an employment destination"

DO: Part of our brief is marketing but we also do a lot of lobbying and we are now embarking on a more pronounced focus on teacher training and ongoing professional training. Our plans include plenty more of that.

The PIE: Where will you focus your marketing plans?

DO: Our main markets currently and historically are the EU – Spain, Italy, France and Germany. But to be honest there’s very little that we can tell agents in Italy and Spain that they don’t know about Ireland. It doesn’t mean that we’re neglecting them, it just means that we encourage all the schools to go visit their agents and find new ones.

But to stay within the EU is defeatist because there are no long-term prospects there. All the future is in developing markets so there has to be joined up enlightened thinking about the whole area of international education and visas and that’s how we’re lobbying. For the limited resources we have we’re going to continue our efforts from last year in Turkey, China and Russia.

“To stay within the EU is defeatist because there are no long-term prospects there”

We had an MEI workshop in Moscow last year with 17 schools and on the day, 44 agents turned up. That was really encouraging so we’re doing the same again. And our Turkey scheme aimed at university students brought in 119 students last year. This year it has been expanded to include anyone with a student profile and a visa for 24 weeks, not 12 like last year. And on the strength of that we are going to have an MEI event in Istanbul in April.

The PIE: The China pre-approved agent scheme you launched in 2012 had problems getting off the ground. Will you reassess it for 2013?

DO: It was a very shaky start. We had a small number of students come out of it and the quota was 400. It was a source of great annoyance and frustration. We’ve reviewed everything and they’re going to re-launch it. It’s going to be the same as it was but copper-fastened. If that goes ahead we will revisit China sometime in the second half of March.

The PIE: As a relatively small English speaking country, how do developing nations react to Irish recruitment efforts?

DO: Most of them don’t know that we exist, where we are or that we speak English. It’s a long-term project to move into emerging markets. Two years ago we went to Turkey and at the time Ireland had a very bad reputation there for rejecting visas; agents didn’t want to touch Ireland so we started with training days. There are no historical or cultural links between Turkey and Ireland either but there are daily flights from Istanbul to Dublin. That was a good start because there’s access if you can convince the students that Ireland’s just a plane flight away.

“Most of them [emerging markets] don’t know that we exist, where we are or that we speak English”

The PIE: How much does MEI benefit from the work Enterprise Ireland does?

DO: Education Ireland, which is owned by Enterprise Ireland, focuses on promoting Ireland as an education destination. But the majority of students who study in Ireland are American or Canadian and speak English anyway so a huge amount of Enterprise Ireland resources and time are spent, successfully, in North America. We don’t feature in a lot of it. Government administration regards our business as part of the department of tourism so we work closely with tourism offices.

 The PIE: What are your predictions for the Irish market in 2013?

DO: It’s difficult because the predictions we had for 2012 were quite grim and 2012 ended up to be a great year. Our two main markets, Spain and Italy are in an economic meltdown so we thought we wouldn’t get any business from there. But numbers rose from both in terms of students and student weeks.

The PIE: Why is that? [more>]

Related articles

Still looking? Find by category:

Add your comment

2 Responses to David O’Grady, CEO, Marketing English in Ireland

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Disclaimer: All user contributions posted on this site are those of the user ONLY and NOT those of The PIE Ltd or its associated trademarks, websites and services. The PIE Ltd does not necessarily endorse, support, sanction, encourage, verify or agree with any comments, opinions or statements or other content provided by users.
PIENEWS

To receive The PIE Weekly with our top stories and insights, and other updates from us, please

SIGN UP HERE