Leaflets through the car window

Every September, the main road in Minya is taken over by a language centre. Banners across the junction, boys pushing leaflets through car windows at the lights, a van with a loudspeaker on Fridays. Everyone in town knows the name.

That is promotion, and it works in the narrow sense that it gets noticed. Being noticed is not the same as being wanted.

A few streets away there is a smaller centre with no banner at all. Its teacher spends the first week asking each student what the language is for: an interview in Cairo, a cousin abroad, a scholarship form with a deadline. The lessons bend towards that. By winter, students are turning up with their sisters and their neighbours' sons.

That second thing is marketing. It is the slower work of making something that helps a person get where they are trying to go, and setting it up so that the story of it moves on its own, from someone who got there to someone who would like to.

Promotion can help that story travel further. It can also stand in for it entirely, a loud announcement of something nobody asked to hear about.

A rough test is how the word gets out. If it depends on stopping people who did not ask, dressing the offer up as something it is not, or making it awkward to say no, then the balance has tipped. There is plenty of noise, and very little anyone would bother to repeat.