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Dubai's GEMS partners with local brands in bid to make education 'cost neutral' for parents

Ever since cash-strapped schools began engaging in commercial partnerships to fund vital educational programmes the link between brands and education has been a controversial topic in the United States.

Sports companies have put their logos on school football stadiums and team jerseys, stationary firms have put coupons on pupil supply lists and pharmaceutical companies have advertised their flu shot vaccines in newsletters to parents.

Dubai-based education provider GEMS Education this month took a step closer to developing commercial partnerships with big brands in the Middle East by launching a loyalty scheme targeted at its network of around 100,000 parents, students and teachers.

While American schools were motivated by a lack of funding, GEMS said their scheme aspires to make education ‘cost neutral’ for parents. The company said the loyalty scheme was introduced to try and ease the burden of school fees for expatriate residents. GEMS tuition fees range from 7000 dirhams ($1,905) to 120,000 dirhams per year.

“Our goal is to give back through cash-savings and invaluable customised experiences to our parents, children and their families as an expression of our gratitude to them,” Dino Varkey, managing director of GEMS Education said in a press statement in early January. “We will do this by building and leveraging associations with companies that share our values and goals.”

Manav Fernandez, senior vice president of customer loyalty at GEMS Education, said the loyalty scheme will offer users savings and discounts on a variety of brands in the banking, retail, food, travel and hospitality sectors and will be launched at the start of the new school term in September.

While similar loyalty programmes have been offered to students in universities around the world, Fernandez claimed this was the first time it would be offered by a primary or secondary level education provider.

“There isn’t anything we can benchmark against,” he told Zawya in an interview last week. “There are a lot of companies who have already started speaking to us to partner… We are quite lucky as GEMS is a big name and has been around for a long time so we are going after blue chip brands to underpin the programme, and then will start extending it.”

Global roll out

GEMS operates 88 schools in 13 countries, with offices in the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore, India, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Kenya and Switzerland.

The programme would be launched in Dubai emirate, where GEMS has 32 schools. Should the loyalty scheme prove to be successful, Fernandez said the company would consider rolling it out across its global network.

“We want to start with the roll out here and prototype and test it before we do a wider roll out. There are already conversations about rolling it out to the wider network.”

While brands have been keen to get involved, Fernandez said he was developing guidelines to determine which ones would be part of the scheme: “What we are going to do is have a very strong filtration process so that the benefit to the parent or colleagues is significantly high enough to make it worthwhile,” he said.

However, he said the scheme was not part of wider plan to offer brands direct access to pupils and parents and no hard sell marketing would take place.

“In one word, the answer is no,” he said when asked if the company would be open to allowing American-style direct advertising at its schools.

© Zawya 2017

https://www.zawya.com/mena/en/story/Dubais_GEMS_partners_with_local_brands_to_make_education_cost_neutral-ZAWYA20170110065937/