What is so horribly wrong but terrifyingly right about White Hat Jr. marketing?
Not too long ago, White Hat Jr. a live online coding platform for kids scripted a dream exit for itself. Byju’s, which is the poster boy of India’s edtech startups acquired White Hat Jr. in an all-cash deal of $300 million.
The edtech space in India hit a hockey stick curve in the pandemic both in terms of users and funding, as Vedantu, another online live tutoring platform, raised a massive $100mn funding as the industry started to realize that often considered ahead of its time online learning edtech startups now have their demonetization moment in the form of a global pandemic.
We were only done digesting this news, that another edtech platform, known for providing online competitive test preparation, Unacademy, became the official sponsor for India’s super bowl and “national festival” Indian Premier League.
Goes without saying that education is and always have been a serious business in India.
Be it the advantage that our education system gives to rote learning or the fact that it is so unidimensional that we fail to think anything beyond doctor, engineers or chartered accountants, it would be stating the obvious that our education system needs a major overhaul.
The parental ambition that seeps inside children and makes them dream about IIT from as early as class 9 which is 3 years before they will actually give the exam, has fuelled a 5000 crore coaching industry in a small Rajasthan town called Kota and that contributes just 10% of the overall applications that competitive exams for engineering and medical receive from across the country for a handful of seats.
Naturally, this pressure, importance and glorification of competitive exams will have it’s alarming side effects. As per the latest data compiled by NCB, 28 students in India are succumbing to pressures of education system every day and taking their lives which is no short of an epidemic.
Given the above cultural context, we expect new-age brands and startups to be a bit more responsible, progressive and forward when it comes to their communication.
But here is what White Hat Jr. chose to communicate
The ad shows parents proudly overlooking a chaotic scene of investors fighting to invest in Chintu’s app, coding for which he learned on White Hat Jr.
In a day and age, where the emphasis has to be placed on the joy of learning, letting children be children and not be crowded with worldly ambitions of earning money prematurely, we are shown parents already dreaming of their child to get funding for an app that he will possibly develop because of White Hat Jr. Instead of encouraging them to make the world a better place by finding solutions that solve problems, enjoying the process of learning, just how you would enjoy a sport, we are putting both parents and kids in a race to see who will become a coder with the highest pay package.
This ad is so tone-deaf that it could possibly be considered as the “Fair and Lovely” equivalent of our times saying almost the same message that you can earn that job or succeed in life once you have that glow of fairness on your face.
The problem does not stop at the above communication. The company targets the below ads to parents with examples of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerburg, Sundar Pichai, Bill Gates, without their explicit consent to drive home the point that they all started coding early and see how they are all running multi-billion dollar companies, which is a problematic expectation setting at so many levels.
I am not saying that we shouldn’t be making kids learn how to code. It’s a skill, it has it’s benefits, it can have positive side effects in developing other skills early on. I am also very sure that White Hat Jr. is an exceptional product for the same to have achieved so much in less than 2 years.
If you ask coders, they will agree that they consider coding to be an art, but coding = money and hence children should learn to code is not setting the right precedent if we want it to be an important part of the curriculum like art, sports or physical education is.
This need to equate everything to potential money-spinners need to go away.
This is the part where White Hat Jr.’s advertising is terrifyingly right
Just how the business of fairness creams will continue to be sold on making people “fair” until a systemic change happens in our belief system that you don’t need to be fair to get a job, gain confidence or get married, similarly until we start looking at pursuit of education as an investment opportunity this type of communication will continue to resonate and perform for the target audience it is intended for.
I can only hope that at least parents are not convincing their children to take a class of White Hat Jr. so that they can become “XYZ of earning lot of money”
For White Hat Jr., I feel they can take a page out of Byju’s and Vedantu’s advertising who have always pressed on for making learning easier and fun for students and not promising 99% in their board exams.
