A tale of two exams

There are two leading examinations in 'business English' that non-native speakers may choose to take: BULATS (the Business Language Testing Service) and BEC (the Business English Certificates).  Both are administered in China by Cambridge ESOL Exams, a not-for-profit offshoot of the University of Cambridge which develops English language testing for non-native speakers, and for which I used to do a bit of work occasionally (I don't work there any more!).   I think BEC is the more recently developed of the two, and certainly only a fairly recent introduction into China; therefore BULATS has something of a head start on it.  Whilst there are a number of significant differences in the attributes and the format of the two exams, it is not readily apparent how a foreign student of English (or a company looking to assess the English abilities of its employees or its prospective hires) would be expected to choose between the two.    When you have two similar products directed towards essentially the same clientele, you need a differentiated marketing strategy.   Is there one for these two exams?  Not as far as I have ever been able to discover from Cambridge ESOL in Beijing.   Now, this may be the fault of the headquarters back in the UK.  I get the impression that a lot of time and effort and expertise is devoted to developing and administering the various exams, but much less to their marketing (academics all too often tend to disdain the 'commercial' aspects of such an operation).  Although its English for Speakers of Other Languages exams are world-leaders, Cambridge ESOL comes across as distinctly amateurish in much of what it does (much of the material they have provided to me to present in promotions and seminars, for example, has been abysmally poorly put together).   However, I fear there are special problems with Cambridge ESOL's operations here in China.  They seem to employ an exclusively Chinese staff - some of whom are indeed very bright and pleasant people.... but very naive about business.  Most of them wouldn't know a marketing plan if you slapped them around the face with it.  It is entirely possible that there is a joint marketing plan for these two exams (and accompanying promotional materials and presenter's briefing notes), but that the staff here are unaware of it.... or have forgotten about its existence.... or just fail to appreciate its importance.   One of the main reasons I've just broken off my working relationship with these people - after nearly three years - is that I had finally got fed up of continually being asked to go out and deliver "promotional" presentations.... without ever being told what exactly it was I supposed to be promoting, or how, or why.   At one of the very last events I did for them, I asked one of their more senior staff about this BEC/BULATS conundrum, and she simply did not understand the point of the question.  At first, she just gawped at me.  Then she unthinkingly rattled off the list of different features between the two exams.  "Yes, but how does that help us to choose which one we want to take?  What kind of people take BEC, and what kind of people prefer BULATS?"  More boggling.  Then she offered the relevant but not massively useful tidbit of information that BEC was mostly being taken by students still in college; the problem with this was that it was entirely circular reasoning - this is happening because the China office has chosen to market the exam primarily to students, but there's still no rationale as to why this is appropriate.  When I continued to press her for some compelling reason why this exam was better suited to college students, she offered - in all apparent seriousness - that it was not time-limited.   I was flabbergasted.  I was amazed to discover that that was the case.  But even if it is, it is not appropriate - it is not ethical - to market the exam on that basis.    Most ESOL exams are time-limited, I suppose, because principal stakeholders demand it.  With IELTS (the International English Language Testing System - the main English exam used to support applications for higher education study in English-speaking countries other than the USA), for example, the main 'consumers' of the test results are colleges and universities who know full well that such assessments of English level can become unreliable after just a few months (students may get much better or, more often, much worse) and are pretty well irrelevant after 2 or 3 years, at most.  The business community is perhaps less astute about this limitation of English language testing, and has - thus far - failed to insist on a time limit for the validity of the BEC test.  But anyone with half a brain - anyone, certainly, who knows anything about language education - must realise that an English test result is worth nothing after a couple of years.   But not the people who work for Cambridge ESOL in China.  I don't know whether it's ignorance, obtuseness, naivety, or slovenliness - but they seem not to have a clue about either business or education.  And, worse, they seem not to care.