FACS: Marketing a Child Care Service (Mktg)

Summary

Students will explore the concepts of marketing (product, promotion, price, place) through the process of promoting themselves as child care providers.

Background for Teachers

Instructional Procedures

This lesson is designed to demonstrate how a person might market a service, i.e. child care. Use the instruction and resources for creating the actual puppet from the lesson plan Puppet Factory.

1. PRODUCT: (1 day) Students need to market their services as child care providers. In order to do market research (determining how to sell themselves), the students will need to interview potential customers to find out what they desire in a babysitter. They could ask certain questions like:
   • What qualities do you look for in a good babysitter?
   • What would you like your babysitter to do for your children?
   • Where would you like the service to take place (i.e. your home, care giver's home, park, school, etc.)
   • What wouldn't you want your babysitter to do while he/she is in your home?
   • How much do you feel is a reasonable pay for a child care giver?
   • How would you feel about your babysitter bringing puppets for your children to play with and what kind of puppet would they like? ETC.
2. PROMOTION: (1day) Discuss with the students how they should promote themselves by discussing the following issues:
   • What qualities did your customers look for in a good care giver?
   • What skills do you need to develop to be a better care giver?
   • What personal traits should you display while babysitting so your reputation will spread to other potential customers?
   • What things could you say to your customers to market yourself?
   Have students develop a promotional item (i.e. busines card, flyer, sales pitch, etc.) to sell their services, utilizing information from their survey and from past customer references.
3. PRICE: (4 days) Have students create puppets (use information from the lesson Puppet Factory) to use when giving child care. Determine what it costs to create the puppet, including time, labor and materials, and how much babysitting it would take to cover the expenses or what they would charge to provide their service of babysitting. You may want to create a worksheet for students to determine this information.
4. PLACE: (1 day) Discuss with the students how they should dress, what they should say, how they should conduct themselves, etc. to best display themselves and their service. Talk about the appropriateness of these qualities and how to change their approach. Also, a determination should be made about the best place to offer the service by using the survey question in activity #1 .(i.e. customer's home, care provider's home, park, etc.) Refer to the Marketing Definitions (under teacher background) for ideas of how students can role play selling themselves.