Why Defend Education?

  

I will be addressing a Students' Union debate on the topic of Why Defend Education? on Thursday 29th September from 7:00 to 9:00. The event will take place in Rialto, in the main Students' Union Building. I will be speaking alongside Daniel Cooper (Students' Union Royal Holloway, University of London), Sean Rillo-Raczka (University of London Union) and Vicki Baars (National Union of Students Lesbian Gay Bisexual & Transgender). The discussion will address the context of cuts being made to third level education. Come along and participate in wider questions of the university and society.

Social Media and Netnograhpy, by Andrew Whalley

Hello, my name is Andrew Whalley, I teach Marketing Metrics, Digital Marketing and Sports Marketing on the MA Marketing at Royal Holloway. I’m going to present a few thoughts on the changing face of social media and its impact on marketing, and in particular in an area of growing significance for businesses, using the internet as a source of competitive advantage through netnography.

 

A revolution in both marketing thought and practice is at hand; the new social world is online.

Internet penetration rates continue to rise, whilst the 'net isn't ubiquitous yet, within industrially developed and developing nations it is almost so. Reasonably, we can say that well over a billion people now participate in various forms of social media. Indeed  to the point that even non-capitalist societies are embracing its power; the Communist Party of China now offer training in social media to its members so strong has been the growth of social media within China.

It is no exaggeration to say that we are in the midst of a technology-led communal revolution. The need to understand this, to apply a PESTLE approach to marketing per se, continues to grow.  The implications for marketers, marketing researchers, and managers of all stripes are vast. Consumers are sharing all sorts of emotions and information with each other about an incredible panoply of products, retailers, and brands. Consumers are not just being 'positioned' by our marketing they are co-producing value in terms of the brands and their values; Burberry and its problems with 'Chavs' is a case in point.

The online environment offers us nearly unlimited access to consumer-to-consumer communications that are:

• relevant and detailed
• from a naturally-occurring context
• unelicited
• obtained in an unobtrusive way, and
• obtainable in a timely, effective, and efficient manner

This data is raw, authentic, spontaneous, indigenous, unforced, unadorned, unfiltered, powerful, highly involved and often spectacularly creative. It has the potential to be a Marketer's dream source; valid, reliable, accessible and cheap!

Marketers are beginning to build social media into their marketing plans, their advertising and promotional campaigns. But in terms of consumer insight, marketing is dominated by the same old methods; Focus groups, Surveys, Data models. Whilst these are tried and trusted, reliance on them when we have also have social media sources is myopic, to paraphrase Ted Levitt.

The move to build rich understanding with the cornucopia of online consumer data is just beginning; it provides us with a range of overlapping opportunities. Applied to business and marketing needs, netnography builds deep consumer insights that provide:

• All-embracing descriptions of the marketplace—segments, product groupings, attribute sets
• Realistic comprehension of online communication—categories, trends, symbols, images
• Social understandings of consumer choice—influencers, adopters, WOM properties
• Natural views of brand meaning—decoding authentic consumer language and terms, as well as visual
• and audiovisual analysis
• Embedded discoveries of consumer innovation—based in lead user, inno-tribe, and prosumer creativity

Compare netnography to the focus group or survey data dominating the world of consumer insight research.

• Focus groups offer detailed and relevant data. But they are elicited, obtrusive and completely artificial.
• The one-time group dynamics are synthetic and strange.
• Surveys are artificial, obtrusive, and elicited. We often have no way of knowing if our survey questions are relevant to the consumers’ world.
• Both focus groups and surveys can be expensive. Consider that a national set of focus groups can easily run in the hundreds of thousands.

Recognizing the implications of the development of the internet as a socialising media, Lusch and Vargo (2006) argue that cocreation will increasingly induce firms to collaborate with customers to cocreate the entire marketing programme, indeed many are now running 'fan' sites for their products and brands. Such developments are also consistent with open-source innovation and 'crowd-sourcing' (Etgar 2008; Von Hippel 2005) and with emerging corporate practices that tap into brand communities. Good examples of this are LEGO, which explicitly sought and harnessed consumer innovation to refine the successful LEGO robotic kit Mindstorms (Koerner 2006), and skinnyCorp’s Threadless, which manufacturers consumer-designed and critiqued T-shirts.

This means marketing needs an edge - a tool to help understand how and what is being said in what context about brands, products, etc - that's where netnography comes in; as a Marketer’s secret weapon to customer understanding. This is also why this topic is highly relevant to those studying for business degrees – the internet is an immersive media where customers to talk to each other and to businesses, understanding this and building it into the marketing planning and strategy of businesses is fast becoming a core competence of the contemporary marketer.

Try Brazil, Try! by Rodrigo Ferreira

A piece by MA Marketing student, Rodrigo Ferreira, to mark the Rugby World Cup. 

Brazil is the real football nation. Ok, football was invented in England, but no other country has developed it into a so high level of results and entertainment. Five World Cup titles represent exactly the love Brazilians have for the game. As an evolving society, the attention given to football suppresses all other sport investments. All Brazil's top athletes have to count on their own talent and money to progress and make history, like Ayrton Senna on F1, Gustavo Kuerten on Tennis, Diego Hypóilito on Gymnastics and also the world swimming record holder César Cielo.  

Now, with Brazil on the sports spotlight having received the Olympic Games and the Football World Cup in 5 years from now, things are about to change. Some brands are facing the opportunity of becoming part of potential markets, expecting growth to bring a huge new wave of passionate fans. One of the leading sports on this race to growth is football's brother: rugby, a sport with massive support in almost all traditional football countries. Topper, a Brazilian sportswear and sports material brand, is now the official sponsor of the Brazilian Rugby Confederation, and as a campaign concept they decided to use exactly this evolution theme, but in a very ironic, funny and alternative way to attract an audience and make them friendly to this “new” sport. Check it out: 

Argentina Facts

- Nothing can stop our Rugby. In 2003, we were in the 5th place on the Southamerican Championshipe. While Argentina was the first.
- This year, we were 4th. And Argentina? First.
- This shows the spetacular progress of brazilian rugby. While Argentina remains … stuck.
- Do you want more? The sign of zodiac of the Brazilian left winger is the same of the best Irish player. Coincidence? Hmmm. No.
“Rugby. One day this will be great in Brazil”
“Topper. Official sponsor of Brazilian Rugby”

 Chile Facts

- Brazil walks firmly to the elite of world rugby. Compare the last two Southamerican championships. In 2009, we lost against Chile by 79-3. In 2010, we lost by 31-8.
- That’s it. Brazil has humbled Chile with a performance 70% better.
- Furthermore? Brazil has never lost against France or New Zealand. In a Southamerican Championship.
“Rugby. One day this will be great in Brazil”
“Topper. Official sponsor of Brazilian Rugby”

 Uruguay Facts

- Brazilian Rugby haunts the world. On 2009 Southamerican Championship, Brazil lost against Uruguay, 3-71. On the same Championship in 2010, Brazil 10, Uruguay only 26.
- If the result trends remains the same, in 2011 the score will show: Brazil 17, Uruguay -19.
- And more, guess where the best rugby player in the world was born… Hmm It doesn’t matter.
“Rugby. One day this will be great in Brazil”
“Topper. Official sponsor of Brazilian Rugby”

 Press

- Let’s begin the press conference. First question, please.
- I would like to know. Now, once your team has qualified to the next step of Brazilian Rugby Championship, will you change anything?
- No. The team players who quallified are the same until the end of the championship.
- Next Question….. You, please.
“Rugby. One day this will be great in Brazil”
“Topper. Official sponsor of Brazilian Rugby”

 Autograph

- Sir. Aren’t you that famous brazilian rugby player?
- Yes, that’s me.
- Oh, God. Can you give me your autograph?
- For sure.
- Thank you.
- You’re welcome.
- - -
- Thank you, love.
“Rugby. One day this will be great in Brazil”
“Topper. Official sponsor of Brazilian Rugby”

Postmodernism Style & Subversion 1970-1990

This is the title of a new exhibition opening on 24th September at the V&A (see details here) which sounds exciting and very relevant for your Contemporary Issues module. I'm really looking forward to seeing it and hope some of you will go along too!

The idea of Postmodern Marketing (read Stephen Brown's seminal book on the topic!) permeates all the topic areas on this module so its important for you to understand. The postmodern era signalled a major change in Western thinking and philosophising and has influenced all disciplines but particularly the humanities and social sciences. As a cultural movement it overturns many of the key assumptions that have underpinned traditional thinking for several centuries. So postmodern marketing challenges many of our ideas about traditional marketing. However, there are now big debates as to whether postmodernism is dead (the exhibition seems to signal this!) - if so, what is replacing it and what does this mean for marketing? For more on these debates read this article.

Stephen Brown's seminal book Postmodern Marketing

The nature of this exhibition emphasises how cultural perspectives are relevant, not only for your Contemporary Issues module but also for the MA Marketing more generally. Remember too that philosophy is like plumbing (according to Mary Midgely, a famous English moral philosopher): it underpins the way we think and act in our daily lives but largely goes unnoticed!

Welcome to New MA Marketing Students

Welcome to all of the new MA Marketing students. For the benefit of those who missed yesterday's induction speech, I made three challenges for students.

First, be active students not passive consumers - despite the popular discourse, we reject the idea of students as consumers and prefer students as students. A consumer consumes the commodity of their choosing. However we do not want you to consume knowledge but rather to be part of our academy for a year and produce your learning outcomes. We do not wish to engage in the commodification of knowledge and reduce it to a series of easy-to-understand, easily digestible little sweet cakes for you to take home and enjoy later; we want you to get your hands dirty in the messy and difficult world of raw knowledge. Your learning outcomes will not be something that we give, but rather something that you must generate over the course of the programme. Being active entails reading constantly, participating and leading class discussion, taking extensive notes during lectures and working voluntarily with your comrades.

Two, do not think like a business leader, think like a philosopher - business thinking has a bottom-line focus on profitability however knowledge, in its broader sense, has a much wider remit and must also consider aspects relating to justice, freedom and beyond. We must never simplify knowledge in order to satisfy a short-term problem solving need, but rather constantly consider complex implications and broader consequences across political, ethical, economic, social, historical, cultural, technological domains. Therefore we want you to temporarily bracket the knowledge demands for your career aspirations and instead spend this year thinking about marketing philosophically. This entails not wanting to know how to do marketing, but rather seeking to understand life in the context of marketing. We are confident that your career aspirations will not be damaged but rather will be enhanced and that you will graduate as a more intellectually rounded person.

Three, be inspired - the best performing students are not those who are naturally the most intelligent but rather are those who are the most curious about the topic. We have a library full of books, a city full of culture - we want you to explore and identify an intellectual point of interest that you will carry through the year and will keep you motivated and fascinated. We want you to find something marketing theory related and use it to drive you along throughout the programme. This means that you need to be engaged in self-directed reading  and constantly be looking to identify points of intersection and relevancy between your area of interest and modular content. This area of interest can later form the basis of your dissertation.

Click here to see Cornel West talking about why reading and thinking

 philosophically is courageous, inspirational and electrifying.

Finally some practical suggestions:

• If you do not speak English as a first language then embed yourself in English. You must be spending the majority of your day living and learning through English in order to keep up. 
• Bracket several hours a day, and at least one day a week, for the purpose of reading. Read physical books - do not scan material on computers screens - and go to beautiful libraries to read (such as Senate House Library, the British Library or the Founders Building Library). Do not take a laptop or phone but instead focus on your book and read it cover to cover. If you find the text difficult to understand do not give up. Remember the more you read the more familiar the ideas become and the easier reading becomes. Also remember, it is not supposed to be easy. 
• Form reading groups with colleagues. Divide books into several chapters and every meeting a different person leads the discussion. This is a good way of meeting friends and also generating positive and productive peer pressure that will keep you focused. The more social you make your reading activities, the more likely you will both enjoy and sustain the task.

It is very easy to fall into a trap of feeling lonely, becoming stressed by the programme demands and frustrated with programme content. These challenges and pieces of advice are designed to help you enjoy the programme and perform well in your studies. We want you to enjoy your studies. Remember we are not here to serve you, but we are here to support you as you take leadership over your own learning outcomes.  

JG Ballard's Consumer Culture

Six miles from Royal Holloway amongst London’s many suburban satellites lies Shepperton, where JG Ballard allowed his imagination to run wild. In his 1979 novel, The Unlimited Dream Company, the suburb undergoes messianic transformation as its residents learn to fly and transcend the limits of their humanity. Just a few short miles away in Heathrow Airport, Ballard imagined a gang of symphorophiliiasts -or car-crash sexual fetishists - wrecking havoc on the motorways whilst the nearby Kingston Shopping Centre inspired Ballard to imagine the mall dominating local live and organising a fascistic and violent consumer society. Across his scores of novels and short stories, JG Ballard created a psycho-geography of Royal Holloway’s vicinity and provides a unique critique of consumer culture.

JG Ballard who died in 2009 is best remembered for his novel Crash (adapted for cinema by David Kronenberg) and Empire of the Sun which became a Steven Spielberg epic movie and introduced Ballard to a mainstream international audience. Empire of the Sun was inspired by Ballard’s own childhood in a complacently opulent ex-pat community in China that was suddenly thrown into upheaval by the outbreak of the Second World War and resulting in his internment at a war camp in Lunghua, outside Shanghai. Ballard’s was a childhood transformed from a privileged upbringing surrounded by the poverty of Shanghai into a total breakdown of adult authority, a severe scarcity of food and a precarious world in which beatings regularly took place and a man was strangled to death before his very eyes. The insight – deeply woven into his psyche – that order and civilisation can suffer sudden severe ruptures and collapse into dystopia at any time fuelled his imagination and formed the basis of much of his literary output. Working close to the genre of science fiction, Ballard came to imagine a civilisation ravaged by dessert like conditions brought about by severe global warming (Hello America),a tropical world devastated by global flooding (Drowned World) and jungles that suddenly begin to crystalise (The Crystal World). Throughout Ballard remained fascinated by new forms of psychopathologies generated by modernity as the car crash became a site for sexual arousal (Atrocity Exhibition, Crash), claustrophobic conditions of urban living takes it mental toll (High Rise) whilst the total conditions of technologically equipped modern parenting causes children to murder their parents (Running Wild). In Millenium People, the squeezed middle classes of Chelsea Marina become so fed up of their living conditions that they seek revolution against themselves whilst in Supercannes high executive business leaders turn to episodic psychopathic beatings of immigrants in order to maintain their work focus and productivity.

Consumer culture held a particular fascination for Ballard, as his biographer, Baxter, recounted he had “the voice of a born advertiser, paradoxically preaching a jihad against commerce: the contradiction at the heart of Jim’s life”. Indeed Ballard remained amazed at how marketing sought to constantly juvenalise consumers and was fascinated with the consequent psychoses. Kingdom Come remains Ballard’s most explicit exploration of a psycho-politics of consumer culture and advertising mediated living yet the concern forms a thread that runs all the way through his oeuvre. For me, Ballard’s work forms a counter-part to critical theory – in contrast to despairing laments for a world of lost rationality, revolutionary call-for-arms and eschatological accounts of excessive accumulation, environmental destruction and marketing overload, Ballard also provides a nihilistic anticipation for disruptions to come. Speaking in the South Bank Show he imagined himself  standing on the side of the Motorway with a sign that says “danger ahead, slow down. But other times I see myself warning “danger ahead, speed up”.

For incoming students to Royal Holloway, Ballard’s novels provide a fascinating psycho-geography of the locale, accounts of the consumer society that range from the nihilistic to the critical and a sphere of imagination that brings much course content to all-too-terrifying life.

Towards a More Inter-Disciplinary Understanding of Consumption, Ethics and Politics

Yesterday my colleagues Andreas Chatzidakis, Pauline Maclaran and Laura Spence organised an excellent workshop on Inter-disciplinary Perspectives on Consumption, Ethics & Sustainability as part of Royal Holloway’s Centre for Research in Sustainability. I participated in a panel roundtable discussion on the topic "Towards a More Inter-Disciplinary Understanding of Consumption, Ethics and Politics" chaired by Robert Caruana from University of Nottingham and including Rob Harrison from Ethical Consumer Magazine. I here post my comments.

I sought to make four observations about the nature of business scholarly interest on the subject of sustainability borne from interdisciplinary perspectives. This is not to say that the insights are absent from sustainable business discourse (though very often they are), but rather to re-emphasise what I think are four important points.

Firstly, I believe it is important not to bracket capital from discussions. Drawing on David Harvey’s recent book Crises of Capital, it is useful to think of capital as an active and objective agent that is extraordinarily determinate and principally concerned with multiplying itself. As Harvey states, the history of capitalism post-Industrial Revolution demonstrates an almost consistent compound growth rate of 3%. Should this continue, as it almost certainly will, we will have a doubling of global capital within twenty years – meaning that there may well be twice as much consumption and production. There is absolutely nothing sustainable about this and whilst sustainable practices may emerge, the growth and trajectory of capital and its ecological impact is fundamentally non-sustainable.

Second, I detect over-emphasis on nexuses of production and consumption as analysis very often follows process links between consumers and producers that feedback on itself and are often (or at least have the potential to be) mediated by ecological concerns and ethics. However such a focus is to miss what the political economists are telling us: that we live in the age of financialisation which has alternative focal agents. The vast majority of consumer expenditure does not take place in the ordinary realm of exchange which consumer behaviourists observe, but rather on servicing finance – for example rent, mortgages, interest rates, insurance and so on. Typically consumers have almost zero agency and limited awareness over these financial transactions that define the vast majority of our expenditure and the scope for mediating financialisation by ethical or ecological concerns is far less than in production-consumption nexuses. The danger is that financialisation is not submitted to the lens of sustainable business practice and the subject does not engage with the focal point of capital accumulation.

Third, in as much as capital functions hegemonically, it appropriates critical discourse and re-packages and re-directs it according to its own logic and needs (the classic example is the Che Guevara t-shirt widely sold by the Gap and through this mass commodification, the image loses its revolutionary political signification). Business schools are particularly vulnerable to this ideological appropriation. Where and how do we conceptually and strategically draw the line between analysis that is progressive and that which reproduces this ideological trick? How do we apply a reflexivity, critically engage with sustainable scholarship and maintain a necessary distinction between a good and bad politics? Is there a risk that in seeking to expand the subject area, that an anything goes spirit prevails that provides fertile ground for ideological appropriation?

Fourth, to what extent do we suffer from temporal delusion? The prevailing liberal logic maintains that markets, left to their own devices, will eventually act rationally with reference to global warming and that a series of innovations must be experimented before the solution is achieved. However with global warming it is important to note that we do not get this second chance and, as Zizek insists with his penchant for using extreme statements to shock people into realising what is at stake, the logic that would rescue us is not liberal patience but rather authoritarian terror. Alternatively, as Zizek argues in his most recent book Living in the End Of Times, we have already crossed the precipice: the destruction of our ecology is irreversible and we are now in the end game. Assuming eschatological times, Zizek suggests that a lot of the discourse contains disavowed knowledge, erasure and is typically defined by denial and bargaining rather than acceptance of our reality and a belief in the possibility, let alone inevitability, of catastrophe. Leonard Cohen, as per usual, puts it best: "I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin".