39th Annual Macromarketing Conference

39^thAnnual Macromarketing Conference

July 2 – July 5, 2014

Doctoral Colloquium, July 1, 2014

School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London

Macromarketing and the Crisis of the Social Imagination

Call for Papers

This age of crisis and austerity is not just an economic crisis, but also a crisis of the social imagination. During an era of neoliberalism that stands on the verge of engulfing universities and other walks of life, we are approaching a hegemony of thought in which the knowledge that counts is knowledge that serves capital, often to a brutal cost-benefit calculus. For macromarketers, the study of how markets and society intersect and produce one another forms the basis of the subject. In this conference we look at Macromarketing during crisis and wonder how the subject might engage with theoretical and practical insights that arise from such conceptual areas as neo-liberalism, globalization, financialization, precarity, semiocaptalism and beyond.

This is a conference that seeks to develop dialogue and rich exchange of knowledge and, in particular, seeks an analysis that connects us to the actions that we see on the ground, be they in in the austerity measures that cut through the world, revolts and giant-scale protests—at the time of writing in Brazil to Turkey—to consumer technology interfaces used for espionage purposes on an epic scale.

In 2014 we bring Macromarketing to Royal Holloway, a college of the University of London. The college itself is a beautiful 19th century Victorian building located in the outer reaches of the city, close to Heathrow Airport and the Great Park. The conference promises to offer a community-based intense setting for discussing issues of wider importance.

Please see the Macromarketing Society's website (http://www.macromarketing.org) for forthcoming updates on track chairs and registration details. Further information on the doctoral colloquium will also be posted.

Doctoral Colloquium (July 1, 2014)

On July 1, a one-day doctoral workshop will be conducted at the same site as the proposed conference. We hope that a significant number of participants in the doctoral workshop will also attend the conference (a special rate for doctoral students will be made available).

Conference chairs

For further information please contact conference chairs Alan Bradshaw (alan.bradshaw@rhul.ac.uk) and Alex Reppel (alexander.reppel@rhul.ac.uk).

Applicants Wanted for the New MA in Consumption, Culture & Marketing

Are you a perfect applicant for our Masters programmes? We are looking for students who have a 2.1 degree (or national equivalent) in a related subject area which might include business but could include such subject areas as history, philosophy, sociology, culture studies, classics, music, geography, English literature, etc. Most of all, we want students who are fascinated in the topic, who will accept the challenge of trying to engage with difficult-to-read texts, who are willing to stay up all night long with class mates discussing new ideas.

In addition, the following type of person is especially welcome:

"decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie: vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème"

also,"pushy femmes, radical fairies, fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldagers, divas, Snap! Queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes, lesbian identified men or lesbians who sleep with men", 

also "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan- sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war" 

also "the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars"

also "nihilists converted to Marxism and Marxists converted to shit, every kind of chip on the shoulder: sexual, political, economic, psychological, social, cultural, sporting and electronic; practising Zen Buddhists, Catholics, witches, voodoists, Islamists, santeria animists, a Mormon and two Jews, a pitcher from the Industriales team who pitches and bats with either hand; fans of Pablo Milanes and enemies of Silvio Rodriguez, expert oracles who know who will be the next Nobel Prize for Literature as well as Gorbachev's secret intentions, the last pretty boy adopted as nephew by the Famous Person in the Higher Echelons, or the price of a pound of coffee in Baracoa; seekers after temporary or permanent visas, dreamers, femmes and hommes, hyper-realists, abstract artists and socialist realists who'd reneged on their aesthetic past; a Latinist; the repatriated and the patriotic; people expelled from everywhere one can be expelled from; a blind man who saw, disillusioned and deceivers, opportunists and philosophers, feminists and optimists, followers of Lezama, disciples of Virilio, Carpentier, Marti and one adept of Anton Arrufat; Cubans and foreigners; singers of boleros; breeders of fighting dogs, alcoholics, rheumatics, dogmatists and head-cases; smokers and non-smokers; and one macho-Stalinst heterosexual"

also "Born Again Losers and the Lavender Boozers and some crack team from Washington Heights, the boys from Avenue B and the girls from Avenue D, a Tinkerbell in tights"

also "Postgraduates who never finished their studies, who broke themselves against the texts of Heidegger and Derrida and Delueze... Undergraduate geniuses, brighter than a thousand suns, who never received funding for postgraduate study... thinkers who were kept outside the university, obscure Judes who lived their entire lives in employment precarity; thinkers of unimaginable integrity, unimaginable will, reading Leibniz in their lunchbreaks, reading Canguilhem on the commuter train... thinkers too mad to think, institutionalised thinkers; alcoholic thinkers lying ruined on park benches, who were never given a chance."

and if at all possible "Thinkers who hate other thinkers. Thinkers who'd broken with old friends over intellectual matters. Over political matters. Thinkers at war, for whom philosophical enmity had become personal enmity, had become name-calling, and hair-pulling. Thinkers who'd shot away half their faces in despair, W. says. Thinkers with deep scars across their wrists. Thinkers who wept as they spoke. Thinkers whose pauses were longer than their talks. Thinkers in breakdown, their lives careening. Thinkers who spoke frankly about the misery of their existence.  Thinkers who told of why they couldn't think, why thought was impossible, why the end had come: their end and the end of the world. Wild thinkers. Drunk thinkers. High thinkers, nostrils flared, pupils tiny, staying up for whole weeks at a time. Thinkers with missing teeth. With missing eyes. Thinkers with missing fingers, and with great clumps of their hair torn out. Thinkers with terrible rashes around their mouths. Sick thinkers, walking with two sticks, W. says. Coughing thinkers, who could hardly get out a word. Thinkers who spoke too quietly to be heard. Thinkers who spoke too loudly, half-deafening the front row. Think-declaimers, thinker-prophets who might as well have set themselves on fire in the seminar room. Exiled thinkers, forced out of their home countries for crimes of thought. Lost thinkers, left over from vanished intellectual movements. Bereaved thinkers, in mourning for dead thinker-partners. Betrayed thinkers, who spoke of backstabbing and purgings, of auto-critiques and revolutionary punishment. Thinkers with neck-kerchiefs, W. says. Thinkers with cravats. Thinkers with Hawaiian shirts. Thinkers in plus-fours. Thin thinkers, in roll-neck sweaters, with sharp cheekbones and shaved heads. Tubby thinkers, epicureans full of joy, with great, jolly faces and think folds of fat at the back of their necks and spadelike hands, who'd laboured alongside others in the fields and the mines. Serene thinkers, half godly, looking into eternity with widely-spaced eyes. Laughing thinkers, who laughed because could think, because they were free to think. Thinkers who'd escaped from imprisonment and war. Saintly thinkers, of unimaginable integrity, of absolute purity. Nomadic thinkers, who, like swifts, never touched down, moving only from conference to conference as invited speakers. Traveller thinkers, who had forsaken the lecture circuit for private voyages through jungles and deserts. Ascetic thinkers, who spoke of great solitudes, great retreats. Thinkers who had seen things, lived things that were greater than they were. Thinkers who knew what it meant to live. Thinkers who served life. Thinkers who thought in order to live, to be alive. Thinkers who spoke of the ecstasy of thinking after their talks, in the student bar. Thinkers who spoke of the beatitude of thought, tears glittering in their eyes. Thinkers who said, the only thing that mattered was to think. Bearded thinkers, with great bushy beards like Marx's, or tidy, trim beards like Lenin's, or goatees like Trotsky's, or - very rare - neckbeards like William Empsom's. Nonagenarian thinkers. Centenarian thinkers! And thinker-youths, no more than 20 years old, mere pups, with minds like steep traps. Thinkers who'd been imprisoned for thinking, W. says. Thinkers who'd been half-crucified for blasphemies of thought. Thinkers whose tongues had been ripped from their throats. Mute thinkers, whose papers were read for them. Thinkers whose voices were hoarse from screaming. Thinkers who refused to think, out of shame, and refused to read their own paper, out of modesty. Humanist thinkers, dripping with pathos, W. says. Anti-humanist thinkers, siding with viruses, siding with plagues, waiting for the demise of 'man'. Thinker-fanatics, full of hatreds and ecstasies. 'Your kind', W. says."

In short, this MA is "for those who have a sense for poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those who can tell a story to four year old children and hold their attention For those who have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream"

(Above links bring you to the original sources from Marx, Sedgewick, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Padura, Reed, Iyer and Herzog)

Hello Kitty ! How to grow brands with human characteristics

Ever since my French exchange partner (Jean-Francois) managed to pull a garden rotivator up his leg on day two of my Easter ski trip I have been a bit of an Asterix fiend.  To this day I am pretty good at reading French, even if my accent is 'un petit peu franglais', because this accident meant I got to read three or four Asterix Bande Dessinee each day for the remainder of my stay.  BD, to those in the know, cartoon books if you were still wondering, are very popular even amongst adults in France, many homes will have a collection of these. Oddly, Tin Tin (who is Belgium and a good answer to the 'name three famous Belgians' question) never quite did it for me.  I have collected Asterix stuff over the years, and even visited Parc Asterix, near Paris, as a grown up to taste the theme park branded experience.

The Japanese Manga craze came to late for me, even though my boys are Pokemon mad. I was therefore intrigued when my marketing colleague Sameer mentioned he had just been published a peer reviewed journal paper about Hello Kitty, the cat like character that is a global marketing phenomenon.  A cooler, younger, Asian cartoon character that, without much of a back story seems to have grown to become a global player.  Extremely feminine, cutesy, pink, fluffy and kitch, my oldest son begged me not to buy Hello Kitty branded (and scent impregnated) tissues.  I care not what I wipe my nose with and given that both my sons were encouraged to hang out with girls at dance classes in their early years, I really didn't see pink tissues as an issue.  Joel, however, was insistent.  "They are for girls ! If you get those I won't use them."  They were £1/box on special offer, cheaper than the alternatives.  Decision made.

Must buy Hello Kitty Pomegranate Branded Iced Tea

Hosany et al, (2013) in the Journal of Marketing looked at the theory and strategies of anthropomorphic brand characters from Peter Rabbit, Mickey Mouse, and Ronald McDonald, to Hello Kitty, a topic the marketing literature has not yet considered much.  It draws on Aaker theory, that is close to my heart, on brand extensions and line extensions and seeks to explain how Hello Kitty has achieved the venerable status of being the third most counterfeited global brand.  It considers the use of nostalgia and contemporary resonance to ensure that Kitty fans continue to find the brand proposition relevant even in adulthood.  A good thing ?   With its diamante sparkle and fluffiness I am surprised the anti-everything gang hasn't dubbed the brand "Hello Kitchy". 

VW lashes:  Are you making eyes at me ?

Not everyone is into the cutsie humanisation concept, of course.  VW camper van and Beetle owners are renowned for naming their vehicles and treating them as though they were part of the family.  One of my metrosexual dad chums refused to put eye lashes made from windscreen wiper rubber on his middle aged crisis sports car.  Not even for a day !  I taunted him over email with this picture (left).  He stood firm.

I know it might not be perceived as cool by others, (I transcend notions of coolness) but take this recent example of personalisation that I captured on the side of what otherwise would be seen as yet another dull, functional, delivery vehicle.  White van man was a bit of a negative cultural stereotype in the UK for a while, synonymous for a type of bad mannered driver who lacked common courtesy, but didnt' care. 

Surf chic on this White VW van ?

I love the sense of fun, the celebration of an iconic brand in a spray of blue hibiscus flowers.  The owners sense of fun, pride in his alloy wheeled van, that includes the tropical flower silhouette, so evocative of the beach surf scene.

It's almost as though you would expect to see a couple of surf boards nestling in the back of the van with a sand encrusted wet suit.

I haven't tried this before, but why not share below your own stories for cartoon characters ? What name would you give this white van ?

Special Issue of Ephemera: Politics of Consumption

I am proud to announce that a special issue of Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, that I guest edited along with Stephen Dunne and Norah Campbell, is published. As always, Ephemera is open access publishing so you can freely access content here.

The special issue follows from a conference that we organised last year in Dublin addressing the theme of the Politics of Consumption. We had an excellent conference with keynote addresses provided by Ben Fine and Kate Soper, we had an excellent panel discussion about the consumption of law by Gerry Hanlon and Stefano Harney and a panel discussion reflecting on how to think of the relationship of consumption with austerity Ireland that included the Marxist sociologist Kieran Allen. In addition, we had many excellent papers all presented in the Irish Royal Antiquarian Society in the heart of Georgian Dublin.

The special issue includes several of those papers and also a set of commentaries prompted by Stevphen Shukaitis concerning whether objects and commodities can be comrades. In this section you will find some very interesting and often counter-intuitive pieces about fascist rice, the re-radicalisation of the image of Che Guevara, the artist David Mabb discusses his radical encounters of the artwork of Popova with Morris and Olga Kravets gives an outstanding overview of how objects were consumed during the Soviet era. There is much more inside the issue as well - not least an article by leading brand theorist Adam Arvidsson and a consequent exchange between he and Detlev Zwick.

At a time when academics increasingly wonder why our labour becomes privatised by commercial publishers, Ephemera remains open-access. Please click through the links and enjoy!

The Body, Consumption & Marketing

The Body, Consumption & Marketing

11 Bedford Square on Thursday, May 23^rd at 2:00

Marketing and consumer behaviour models typically frame the consumer as a decision-maker who evaluates options. At its most alienated conception, marketers are accused of imagining the person to be akin to a computer; an information processing machine that arrives at both rational and irrational outcomes. In moving away from rational model-making, experiences become privileged sites of understanding consumption but, again, analysis takes place at the level of the mind with research often taking the form of interpreting oral testimony. What happens when the body is brought to bear more strongly within our analytical frames?

There are numerous ways of thinking about the consumer body; as the central site in which consumer desire becomes stimulated, as the actuality of behaviour itself, as an externalised technology that needs to be governed through fitness regimes and bodily ideals, as the object that fails governmentality injunctions because we are always too fat, too skinny, too short, too tall, etc., as the principle site through which gender norms are experienced and performed.

This seminar seeks to consider the role of the body within consumption and marketing. Norah Campbell of Trinity College, Dublin explores futuristic conceptions of the body within science fiction depictions of the post-human whilst Liz Parsons and Emma Surman of Keele University explore the embodied experiences of marketing workers.   A panel discussion will follow in which we will be joined by the philosopher, William Large of University of Gloucestershire.

The event will take place at 11 Bedford Square on Thursday, May 23^rd at 2:00.

To reserve a place, please email alan.bradshaw@rhul.ac.uk

Marketing and 'Content' in the Convergence Economy

 

 

 

Jaguar's new viral movie, supporting the launch of the F Type (above), follows a tradition of 'content' marketing in the prestige car business begun by BMW a decade ago. The twelve minute film called ‘Desire’, made by Ridley Scott Associates (story in Advertising Age ) stars Homeland actor Damian Lewis, and features a specially commissioned song by Lana Del Ray. The plot unwinds as a car chase across a Chilean desert, with Lewis acting the Good Samaritan (with advanced driving skills) to a woman escaping her criminal husband. There's a neat twist at the end, but no promotion, as such. The car speaks for itself. Its an expensive piece of product placement, without the need to haggle over creative control. Desire airs through video sharing on social media, principally via YouTube. BMW set the tone for this kind of car-caper content with their 2001 movie The Hire, starring Clive Owen and Madonna, with Guy Ritchie directing (see it here ). The Hire was initially sent out on DVDs and had to be put on social media by keen fans, while Desire is a purely social media phenomenon. Both efforts epitomise the focus on content that is the new frontier for marketing in the convergence economy.

'Content' is a catch-all term for entertainment or news that features a brand. If this seems a nebulous definition, that's because content can cover many things. The connecting thread of all marketing content is that it doesn't look like traditional advertising, because there's no sales pitch. There is, though, a promotional motive. It is by no means confined to car brands. Coca Cola, for example, made their content marketing strategy into content by putting a video of it on to YouTube (see it here ). The aim is to strengthen the brand's cultural presence by activating and engaging the audience. 

Content doesn't have to be a movie. It could be a journalist writing pieces for a brand blog, a game designer making free-to-download 'advergames' for a brand, or a digital ad agency creating memes to leverage social media sharing from topical news events, as Oreos did successfully during the Superbowl power outage a few weeks ago. It could even extend to forms of sponsorship or product placement that spin off into PR coverage or consumer-generated memes. If a product placement in a TV show happens to be on a clip that gets viewed by millions, that's content.

There are two things I particularly like about content as an idea that articulates consumer marketing practice in the convergent economy. One is that it gets beyond the spurious categorical precision that is so common in marketing, and offers a unified notion of brand presence in promotional culture. The other is that it represents the best things about marketing: great writing and visual creativity, and in so doing it moves away from the dull cognitivism and behaviourism that, still, dominate static marketing thinking.          

The notion of content is sweeping marketing from all directions. A great deal of advertising is looking more like entertainment in its narrative forms, while much entertainment looks like an advertisement so packed is it with prominent brands. Even news coverage is increasingly tinged with marketing influence, because of the need for news media to position themselves as brands in a shrinking news market. Note the UK's most profitable news media brand of all, the MailOnline, which earns its 100 million readers per month not from a commitment to information, nor, arguably, to political posturing, but to the sensational story arc. This is news as marketing, positioned not against other print newspapers but against popular showbiz and news sites like MSN. Other news media are so strapped for cash flow they are over-reliant on PR releases and news agency material to fill their space, allowing marketing spin to seep through into editorial on a huge scale.       

Media convergence refers to the development of hardware and software that can show all media content on the same device. Leading ad agencies now employ digital planners to show them how creative ideas might be adapted across media channels. At the moment, it is creatively and technologically difficult to make a short video for TV that also works on mobile and internet, and translates to static forms like print or banners. Promotional logic is not longer static, with a defined audience targeted by an announcement from one, identifiable, source. The logic is dynamic, with branded content driving activation through different media channels and generating new iterations of creative ideas from audience participation. For example, Heineken's brand placement in Skyfall was said to have cost scores of $millions because of the extended activation through linked TV ads and digital content built around the exposure. In the future, the technical issues may be solved and we will access all media on a single device, making content marketing even more accessible.                

There is a recognition in the notion of content marketing that the most powerful way to sell brands is not to sell them at all, but to normalise them as a taken-for-granted part of our cultural experience, while, at the same time, infusing them with value through the narrative forms and visual drama of media technology. The idea of 'content' marketing mashes media genres into a seamless branded experience of  media consumption.

Naturally, this blogpiece is also a piece of branded content, since a nice book has just been published by Routledge dealing with exactly this topic. Called Promotional Culture and Convergence, and edited by Helen Powell at the University of East London, the book takes an academic purview of the implications for marketing of convergence culture. Another book on the re-shaping of marketing in the convergence era will appear later this year. This one is from Palgrave MacMillan and will be called Marketing In Context. It'll be a more practitioner-focused perspective, taking in the scope of marketing but addressing the much under-played role of communication in promotional logic. The viral movie of the book is still under development.  

www.chris-hackley.com 

 

 

 

      

 

A Student Describes His Dissertation - Igor Korovenkov

Ever since I enrolled on MA Marketing course at Royal Holloway, the outlook of having to write a dissertation weighed heavily on me, as I were expected to produce something, if not unique and original, then definitely deep, thought- provoking and coherent. The best advice I was given when preparing for writing was to choose something close to my sphere of interests, not academic, but life ones.

When I looked inside of me and grasped the thoughts that were swarming in my head, all I could think of was luxury. Yeah, what can I say? Guilty. Colour me shallow if you want, but as a person, who hadn’t experienced much of it in the past, I was naturally attracted to everything that was deemed luxurious and hedonist. Private jets, exclusive locations, expensive cars, branded clothes – who does NOT think about them from time to time? So I decided to go with the idea and examine closely the reasons that make people want luxury.

The revelation came when I started doing research and drafting my piece. It turned out that interests, whatever they might be, occupy a special spot in individual’s mind and make it accumulate information that goes far beyond the narrow part that I could call an active interest. In my case, I discovered that although I acknowledged the idea of a luxurious and hedonist life, I had much to say on adjacent topics of the ethics of luxury, the reasons of consumption of luxury or the choice of luxury brands. I involuntarily distilled and absorbed information from talk shows, paper articles, books, so the only task was to simply access and use it. In this vein, my advice to any readers is to remain true to oneself, not be afraid to look inside of oneself, to research something that lies within one’s scope of interests and get rid of the thought that someone might judge him or her on the basis of those interests. Only the beginning will be rocky and uncomfortable, the rest, though, will be a breeze!

When I was struggling with my topic, what caught my attention was the sequence of thoughts, internal monologues and feelings that individuals have when buying something very expensive in comparison to their income. Think of it: when we buy a pack of candies we think and feel differently from when we are getting ready to spend a pretty penny on a branded bag or a piece of clothing. Buying a luxurious item is similar to dying: our life runs by before our eyes, we think of our friends, family, and then we face our torturer – our conscience. If we stay strong, survive and buy the item, we usually end up in paradise, filled with glee and positive emotions. The promise of this paradise encourages people to pass the mental hell of doubt and fear and to consume luxury again and again. I found it genuinely curious to study what people feel when consuming luxury. What I feel... And why...

Remarkably, I had not discovered much coherent knowledge on the process of consumption and consumption emotions, so I had to research several sub-topics in my work. The topic of my dissertation, supervised by Dr Sameer Hosany, sounded as “Emotionality of consumption and the concept of consumption emotions in marketing theory: A critical review”. I regarded the whole dissertation as a “Lego” kit, with which I built a composition, although it was an unusual construction kit, as I had to carve out single pieces by myself.

I figured that for my topic I should research relevant theories that would be then joined together in one construct.Consumption theory became the axis of my work, as it was all about consumption. The self- concept in marketing, another part of the work, was dedicated to examining how consumers were affected by how they saw themselves in the eyes of others. Indeed, although to some extent we can say that we buy for ourselves, this part proved that we mainly consume for others and derive pleasure from meeting society’s expectations of us. In this capacity, the self-concept served as a link to connect consumption and emotions, which constituted the core of the dissertation.

To protect the work at least from some academic criticism and ensure better validity, I also had to review the hedonist consumption, which I saw lying in opposition to the self- concept, as hedonism implies consumption for own pleasure, and the consumption of counterfeit goods, a polar opposition to hedonism, where items are consumed conspicuously and without the regard for “the self”. These poles balanced out the whole dissertation, allowing a glimpse into how well the topic fit with the “extreme” cases of consumption.

Once I carved out and connected all the pieces together, I was very surprised to see what foundation my dissertation provided for criticizing the ways marketing knowledge is built and handled nowadays. Do not get me wrong: I anticipated the results, but when they came, I was still surprised.

Joining consumption, the self- concept, emotions and hedonism allowed me to demonstrate that employed marketing concepts are far too limited to convincingly explain some real life phenomena; that consumption itself is too complex a concept to throw around in marketing, describing all the range of activities that imply the use of a product. Consumption practices can be very different in terms of how products are consumed and to what avail, therefore we need to define them before we proceed to research.

Finally, consumption emotions are far more complex than they are portrayed in the marketing literature. We need finer measurement tools that Likert scales, as emotions are multidimensional: buying a luxury item, we can experience both anxiety and anticipation of pleasure; guilt for buying and determination to do so.

All in all, the dissertation proved to be, and you will not believe that, a cool and exciting experience that for me personally crossed the line of being only a formal assignment. I lived it, I breathed it and I dreamt it.

So this is my advice to you: do not take it as a burden – enjoy it by picking a topic that you could relate to. Use all three months to write it properly, instead of doing in hastily the last month before submission (you simply cannot party or sleep day and night – use free time to do some reading and writing up). Start writing something as soon as possible, preferably the next day you are given a green light for the dissertation. I does not even matter what you write, as long as it is relevant for your work, just do it: write a plan or some thoughts that you could expand on later. The focal point here is to begin, which is more a psychological matter than any other. Talk to and consult with your supervisor as often as you need it and do not treat him or her as only a tutor. Cross this line and treat it as a person who is there to help – a respectful, easy and constructive relationship will get you far.

Last, but not least: the dissertation is your exit out of Royal Holloway – make it spectacular for everyone to remember and not blasé to forget.