One of the elements that everyone remembers from their childhood – and that they tend to compare once they reach adulthood with other adults from the same ‘area of influence’ looking for similarities – are school excursions. In each place, there are a series of museums that seem almost obligatory and through which all children of each generation passed, but the truth is that schoolchildren not only visit museums, old ships, school farms, natural spaces or Roman ruins, as well. They go to business centers and factories where they show them how things are done or how they work in that factory. One only has to ask the immediate surroundings which factories or companies he went on a school field trip to as a child to see it Germany Mobile Database. Taking the test leaves a wide list of places, from the sliced bread factory in the area to the canning or cetarea that is receiving schoolchildren at that time, passing through the reference shopping center (there are those who admit that they went with the school to see the guts of the Alcampo in your area, but there are also those who did it with El Corte Inglés, although you only remember the invitation to chocolate with churros in the cafeteria) or by the chocolate factory, which always has a special attraction for children.
In my school years, the usual thing was to go to the Panrico factory and then the excursion appeared – photo through – in the local newspaper. The list of multinationals that allow the scholarea to enter their factories, prior reservation, is very wide. A quick Google search shows that there are examples in almost every corner and possibly in every industry. You can see how wooden pencils are made in Faber and Castell, yoghurts are made in the Danone factories or beer is made in the Damm factories. All these excursions, as can be seen on the websites of the respective companies (and removing the case of Faber and Castell from the list) are free. Schools do not have to pay for their schoolchildren to enter the bowels of their factories, guided by, to discover the secret behind the products they consume every day.
But what do brands gain from these school trips? What is the purpose of allowing a horde of schoolchildren to enter the corridors of the company? The school field trip as a marketing product School excursions create direct contact between companies and children, who are already influencers of consumption within their own homes (the weight of children in parents’ purchasing decisions is increasing) and who will be in the future consumers by own weight. These school excursions create a certain emotional bond between the children who visited it and the brands that offered them the visit, since they will be part of those golden childhood memories. So are field trips simply a way to attract consumers? Some consider it that way: some experts see school field trips in factories and company headquarters as only a marketing device with little educational value that helps to create a more fluid relationship with those who are or will be consumers.
As explained from CGT, one of the unions in the education sector and one of the critical voices with these excursions, Brother Cell Phone List, “there is a purely business interest and to win consumers.” The companies often do not have educational value, they point out, and can even be questionable at times (such as taking children to factories of alcoholic beverages). The visits also do not serve to stimulate debate, about the working conditions of the employees of these companies, for example, and show only one side of the coin. Not everyone agrees with this view. There are those who do see educational value in these visits to factories and companies, since they allow us to know first-hand how that world works and thus provide empirical and practical content to subjects related to that field. The road to lovemarks Whether it is sought or not, the truth is that these types of elements help companies to position themselves among consumers.
Field trips have many benefits for the companies that star in them, as they allow them to fit into many of the elements that consumers now need and seek. The fact of joining childhood memories gives the firm, as we mentioned, a certain emotional bond with the consumer and helps it in the race to become what every firm wants to be, a lovemark. The consumer of the future will remember in a much more positive way the brand with which they lived in childhood. But it is not the only positive point. School trips reinforce the idea of transparency, that you have nothing to hide, and this is one of the values that consumers value most today. In a world where shoppers want companies to talk to them, to tell them their stuff, inviting your kids to look behind the scenes seems like a great idea.
