They do need some pushing. ;)
The question is whether they want any pushing. You may have a brilliant methodology, it sure seems to have worked for you, but if you charge what people perceive as "too much" they simply won't buy it, your indignant mother is a case in point. So what's the point of "going to the masses" and spending money on heavy advertising and aggressive promotion? The truth is most people in Russia are not really all that interested in honing their English skills to perfection, they just buy a cheap book that promises fast results with no effort on their part or enroll in some "reasonably priced" course that offers native teachers and trendy textbooks so they can have peace of mind because they're "doing something" about their English. So the way I see it if you want to sell your product to people other than our doomed deputies, their secretaries, oligarchs, presidents and their advisors and the like, i.e. people who've got so much money they've already run out of ideas about what they can possibly do with it, then you don't want to set your price too much above the current market price for this kind of product, after all there's just too much supply in this market and this being Russia, nobody really cares about the quality of what's being offered, when it comes to studying English (and probably to studying in general these days) most people (sad but true) tend to have a pay-and-forgedaboudid mentality. Yet these people are the tens of thousands of potential customers, the masses, you talk about in one of your posts above, otherwise you're limited to the niche markets of the exra-rich and a couple hundred hard-core enthusiasts that will stop at nothing to be able to one day go on a five-day trip to America and pass for a native speaker calling room service in the hotel. On second thought maybe it's not that bad, after all, but that's the impression I get.
