Writing a Dissertation is About Making Mistakes Early On! by Hafez Rafirasme

Last year I was exactly where you are now; the poor, desperate MA Marketing student who’s been banging his head against the wall for three months to get his dissertation completed in time.

I am going to keep the intro short and give you some valuable tips that will help you dramatically in finishing that dissertation.

Make mistakes. YES you heard me, make mistakes. Let me tell you what exactly I mean. Most probably this is your first Masters degree, but guess what; your supervisors have been dealing with student like yourself year after year. They already KNOW for a fact that no one gets it right the first time and that is absolutely fine. So stop wasting time by trying to get every detail right before you show your supervisor your draft.

Start early and make mistakes early. Once you see your supervisor really LISTEN to their critical feed back. They don’t hate you (usually) they’re trying to help so if you don’t get what they’re saying then it’s really that you are not understanding them yet. But that’s fine because once you really GET IT, all their feedback starts making so much more sense and you could finish a decent dissertation within 3 weeks!

 

After your first meeting you might think to yourself ‘ Ha! I got it I am all-good and I will get it done this time. WRONG, the chances are you may partially improve or maybe even completely misunderstand the feedback you’ve received and will make similar mistakes.

The point here is that you should change your frame of mind and in fact WELCOME MAKING MISTAKES EARLY ON, how else would you learn and improve? No one gets it the first time. Think about it as like learning a new skill.

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It’s not an essay, it’s a literature review- after writing about 100 essays during the term, you might think a literature review is the same as writing an essay. WRONG.

The lit review is the most important part of your dissertation so I say start early. Here are some tips that will help you with your lit review:

When you’re reading a journal article focus more on how the researcher did their research and not their literature review. You must note:

1) What was the finding of their research?

2) How did HE/SHE find it?

3) What were the research limitations?

Once you’ve got yourself a decent lit review then you can start working on your research methods and findings. Your introduction and conclusion should come last.

Ever seen the Oscars? You know how the presenter comes on and tells you what is about to happen? Well, he can do that because he ALREADY KNOWS what’s about to happen. Once you know what your lit review and your research is all about, you can introduce it in your introduction. There’s obviously more to writing an introduction than my limited description but I hope you get the point.

Lastly comes your conclusion and your final tuning. Leave a week for that. Trust me you don’t want to have silly mistakes in there and it takes time to make your work presentable.

I hope this helps and good luck to you all! 

Do You Follow The Beer, er Bear? The Grocer-isation of Alcohol Branding in the UK

The Hofmeister Bear was an advertising icon, created in the mid-1980s by John Webster of London ad agency BMP DDB. Webster had noticed that a monster character on the Andy Williams show seemed to be very popular with adults as well as children. He copied it to create the Honey Monster, a character that featured heavily in advertising for children's breakfast cereal Sugar Puffs, and still does. Webster then applied his advertising genius to a creative leap that had seismic implications for drinking in the UK. He took his actor-in-a-bearsuit gag and used it to sell Hofmeister's tasteless lager beer. He got away with it, the Advertising Standards Authority didn't seem to notice the overt appeal to children in the ad, and alcohol began to be marketed like any other branded grocery product. Webster was also the creative brain behind the Cadbury's Smash Martians, another legendary UK TV advertising campaign which popularised a frankly disgusting instant mashed potato mix. He saw that beer, regardless of quality, could be branded on a similar scale. Today, the implications of this move into the grocery branding of alcohol and the accompanying shift away from pub on-sales to retail off-sales, what I call the grocer-isation of alcohol, are clear: the mean age profile of people with acute alcohol-related disease has fallen dramatically. The numbers of young people under 30 presenting in liver specialist wards with advanced liver disease has boomed. How significant is the grocer-isation of alcohol in the UK's alcohol problem? http://www.chris-hackley.com/                

Royal Holloway Entrepreneurs

Royal Holloway Entrepreneur Society are promoting an event that may be of interest to marketing students. See their message and promo video below: 

From the 8000 students, 16 will be selected and will be put through 3 specially designed and most challenging business tasks. Each task will be graded by judges panel - successful UK entrepreneurs. After 2 weeks from the start all teams will meet at the final where all the evaluations will be counted and teams will go for the last trial. The team who scores the most points by the end of the challenge final evening will be crowned the winners of 'Royal Holloway Apprentice 2012', receiving the main prize and a golden ticket to London Apprentice final where they will have a chance to compete against the best teams in London from universities like LSE and Kings College!

You are feeling creative, specialist in your field or having an ability to manage team? Feeling like going up for a fight or taking up a challenge? Fill your application now, invite friends and get into one of the biggest entrepreneurial event of the year!

Sixteen individuals, Four teams, Two weeks, One winner to go further to London Apprentice Finals!'


For further details see the facebook page here.


In case you don't know what the Apprentice is - see Charlie Brooker's review here.

Professor Chris Hackley on Channel 4 News

Professor Chris Hackley appeared on Channel 4 news this evening to discuss the new government recommendations for alcohol consumption.

See the appearance here.

Marketing Melancholia

Misery lit is well-known as a book marketing phenomenon that plays on readers’ prurience, voyeurism and, perhaps, shadenfraude (if that’s how you spell shadenfraude). Frank McCourt, for example, recounts his wretched Irish childhood (wretched even for an Irish childhood) in Angela’s Ashes, a classic of the genre, while more recently Cormac McCarthy (a pattern emerging here) cornered the market in post-apocalyptic depravity. McCarthy’s themes of infanticide, necrophilia and cannibalism might not strike you as promising marketing material. Nonetheless, consumers lap them up with the same enthusiasm as McCourt’s starving hero who, in a memorable scene, ecstatically licked the salt from a fish and chip wrapper discarded by his mother's beastly lover. Perhaps that simile doesn’t quite work grammatically, but why would anyone want to sojourn in the seventh circle of hell, linger in a labyrinth of lachrymosity, dwell in a dungeon of depravity? What is so marvellous about melancholia? What is the perk in paying money to be pissed off? Leaving aside, for a moment, the titillation of alliteration, could it be that misery lit, and the consumption of misery in little chunks as risk, thrill, fear, or drunken, drug-fuelled excess, tells us something deeper about the darker recesses of consumer psychology? Read on... http://www.chris-hackley.com/      

Marketing and Sustainability

Marketing and Sustainability

11 January, 2-5 

Royal Holloway

Windsor Building 1-05

all welcome

Speakers: 

Pierre McDonagh, Dublin City University 

Ray Benton, Loyola University Chicago

Gretchen Larsen, King's College 

Alan Bradshaw, Royal Holloway

This one day mini-conference marks the visit of MBA students from Loyola University Chicago and addresses a wide range of issues relating to marketing and sustainability. The topics shall be as follows:

Keynote Address - Pierre McDonagh
The Context for Sustainable Communication in 2012
This presentation will explore McDonagh’s work on Sustainable Communication as part of understanding organizations from an ecological point of view following what Giddens (1991) called the ‘prevailing order’ or what Kilbourne McDonagh and Prothero (1997) framed as Milbrath's Dominant Social Paradigm. Recently, there has been a notable business engagement with sustainability and it has been referred to in the Harvard Business Review as the current megatrend in business (Lubin and Esty 2010). At the same time much has been made of a business case in favour of sustainable consumption & production. This research seminar will reflect on the research synergies such a swing presents for the next ten years and outlines structural, training and recruitment challenges for organizations and how we think about them.

Ray Benton
On Myths, Models and Metaphors
Although most schools of business do not behave as though it were so, they are actually engaged in training the managers of tomorrow and not the managers of today.  To make things worse, most schools of business in fact educate for yesterday, not even for today.  This is, in part, because the discussions are filled with the issues on which leading schools of thought differ but take place in an intellectual atmosphere determined by the views on which they agree.  Given that it is generally acknowledged that our economic train has become derailed, it is not time to put the train back on the racks and to stoke up the engine, but to consider if we really want (or even wanted) to go where the train was taking us.  Since it is easier to change direction when momentum has flagged, it is now time to reconsider where it is that we want the train to take us.  To do that we need to expose and open for serious discussion and debate the unthinkingly accepted views that determine the intellectual atmosphere in which all other discussions take place. 

Gretchen Larsen
Small is Beautiful: Degrowth Logic in Contemporary Consumption
In this talk, we will explore degrowth as a radical approach to addressing the issue of sustainability. Expressions of degrowth logic in contemporary consumption practice are discussed, which in turn raise some interesting issues for marketing management.

Alan Bradshaw
Sustainability and Capital
In this presentation I shall explore the paradox of capital sustainability that insists upon compound growth whilst simultaneously expecting production and consumption to achieve sustainability. By exploring various critical frameworks, I wish to argue that the idea of sustainability exists in a state of appropriation, a pseudo-discourse and a lie that capitalism likes to tell itself.

Lucre and the Idea of a University by Edith Hall

Edith Hall is the out-going Professor of Classics and English at Royal Holloway (moving to Kings) and has kindly given permission to re-publish this message from her excellent blog http://edithorial.blogspot.com/.


Over Christmas I have heard the word ‘university’ used repeatedly by daughters, nieces and friends’ daughters between the ages of 12 and 16. They have not been discussing what institution they might attend to acquire advanced education. They have been talking in awed tones about theludicrously expensive products sold by the chain of ‘Jack Wills’ shops, who describe themselves as 'the ‘original University Outfitters, creating quality goods designed to reflect British heritage and style.’

Jack Wills Ltd. is based in the holiday town of the British super-rich, Salcombe in Devon. Salcombe is an exclusive playground for people who can afford extortionate water sports, and where property prices are the second highest in the country after central London.

Despite the clean-cut, wholesome, preppy image it tries to project, Jack Wills Limited has already acquired some unsavoury form. It has been in trouble with the Advertising Standards Authority for using highly sexualised pictures of Hooray Henries tearing clothes off intoxicated girls, images which were banned last April.

The clothes are of course not made in Salcombe. There have been rumours of the use of child labour in the Far East, and the company’s current practices have not allowed it to qualify for full membership of the Ethical Trading Initiative (not that it is exactly difficult to make it to full membership, which has even been acquired by Primark!)

The hoodwinked young teenagers I have been talking to think that £69 is a reasonable price for a flimsy sweatshirt and £14.50 for a single pair of socks, provided that their mother is paying. They ALL assume that Jack Wills Ltd. has some kind of official relationship with a ‘posh’ university (Oxford or Cambridge is suggested) and is very old.

 
Actually, the company was formed in 1999, appropriately enough just after the first tuition fees were introduced at British universities. It has created a brand directed with cynical precision at teenagers, in Britain, the USA and Hong Kong, who are far too young to attend university but who want to buy the dream of hanging around with rich youths, preferably royalty.

These young girls fantasise about wealth and social class with an added suggestion of erotic frisson. The company claims that it is called after one its founders’ ancestors, Jack Williams. Actually, in the minds of teenage girls, the only thing ‘Wills’ means is Prince William.

I am not about to launch a campaign against this particular company, however much I may personally despise it. What interests me is how the marketing people at Jack Wills Ltd. define membership of a notional university, acquired by wearing particular clothes, which promises a lifestyle in a fast social set with huge amounts of inherited money.

This is sinisterly akin to the new British ‘vision’ of the university as a commercial enterprise and a degree as indicating financial resources and social status or aspirations rather than anything to do with the life of the mind. Every single working-class person I have spoken to who got to university in Britain via the old grammar school system, including the poet Tony Harrison, says they would never have gone if the state had not paid their fees.

The word ‘university’ comes from the Latin universitas, which to Cicero was a wonderfully inclusive word embracing the universe or the whole of humankind (On the Nature of the Gods 2.65.164). By 1210 AD the word meant the entire community of scholars working together, on whatever subject-matter, in the city of Paris.

For the teenagers from whose parents Jack Wills Ltd. wants to extract large dollops of cash, however, a university means catching a public schoolboy by wearing a cute slim-fit rugby shirt and taking it off at a yacht club piss-up. Happy New Year!