Excerpts and bonus material from Volume 3 No. 7: Schools of Thought Issue (Purchase here)
Building BodyChance : An Alexander Technique Learning Corporation (pages 24-28)
By Jeremy Chance
Excerpt from page 25, the product
There was a big business lesson for me to learn here, and that was about product development. Our product is not the Alexander technique, period. Our product is the thing that costs "Money", is held at a "Location", is taught by "Teachers" and must be done on these "Times". That is the information that trainees base their purchase decisions upon. The idea of the Alexander technique is already sold! It's the "Product" that influences most whether they will go ahead and train with you or not.
However, I did not understand any of this then. As my school shrank, in desperation I tried different approaches that all failed, and I began to despair and wondered what to do. Japan was defeating me. Six years of work all about to fall down…
Jeremy working with student TomokoAt the time I had a student who was in the top executive echelon at Sony Corporation. She had been coming regularly to my lessons, and we had developed a professional friendship and interest in each other’s lives. I thought: “Maybe she knows someone who could save my school?” Almost immediately she came back to me with three names, one of whom was Tomoyuki Ohsawa. Tom saved my school, one step at a time.Consumer and Non-consumer Markets
Tom's first question was the most revealing. He asked me if my market was consumer or non-consumer? I opened and closed my mouth, blinked three times and finally plucked up the courage to ask him what the devil he was talking about?
Alexander technique teachers mostly work in the non-consumer market—did you realize that? I didn’t. Historically, the people who come to our lessons are, on the whole, adventurous, intelligent risk takers who are coming over to the other side to try something once considered close to the rat bag, lunatic fringe. These are non-consumers. Look at it another way—how many of your students would regularly eat at McDonalds, like every week? Or are even willing to admit that they do? Not many I'd wager. Yet McDonalds is the largest dispenser of food on the planet, so someone is definitely going there. That’s a consumer and there are a lot of them––and almost all of them have never heard of the Alexander technique and wouldn’t care much if they did. They don't want to be saved, they just want to have fun.
So at ATA, as we were calling ourselves in those days, we were chasing the non-consumer market. Well, that is a tough nut to crack—it is no wonder Alexander technique teachers globally have a hard time getting a practice going. Non-consumers are discriminating, sceptical, hard to convince and busy—but once you win them over they can be great pupils. Reaching them and convincing them is a long, hard slog, but once they like you and the Alexander technique, and start telling their friends, you'll have a lifelong practice, providing you don't ever move. It suits some people beautifully, but not ATA.
We had a systemic problem: who would be willing to train without some substantial experience of lessons first? So for our teacher-training course to work—we named it the ProCourse—we needed to be attracting a lot more people to ordinary lessons.
Jeremy Chance trained in England in the late 70's and then went on to train again with Marjorie Barstow. His love affair with Japan began with meeting his wife Jaldhara in 1987, and continued after marriage in 1999 with the opening of his training school in Tokyo. After many reinventions and years of perseverance in a vastly different culture to where AT originated, Jeremy has now cracked the formula with his BodyChance training model. BONUSES
Listen to Jeremy Chance describing his experiences in person as he talks to Paul Cook in June of 2009.
