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It’s the last day of class for the 2008 Consumer Behaviour subjects.  This year, in consumer behaviour, I’ve discussed the following topics

• roles of the family, including the role of presumptions of gender in determining “male” and “female” roles
• white-race privilege,
• male privilege
• the flexibility of the gender construct (it’s somewhere between 5 and 9 categories on a scale of Cisgender Male to Cisgender Female with an Intergender() as the mid point for categorical statistical purposes)
• feminism, including several rants about the portrayal of male roles in advertising, and the portrayal of female roles
• race stereotypes, race stereotyping, and the dangers of using demographics as a segmentation variable.

In fact, as part of consumer behaviour, we cover women’s rights, gender, feminist philosophy, social welfare, community and community structure, the role of religion including cultural conflict between mainstream society, conservative and progressive religions and commercial enterprise; racism, class and employment.

Apparently, I managed to fly under the Young Liberal’s radar because I discussed these concepts in a commercial marketing subject.

Well kids, as a former member of the Young Liberals, and as a believer in Liberalism, I have this to say

If you’ve got a blacklist (and you do), then I want to be on it.

Thursdays seem to be my specialty at the moment (I majored in Friday with a minor in Saturday evenings)

It started with an e-mail from the editor of a book where I’d contributed a chapter (albeit two months later than deadline) who had the reviews back, and gave me 16 days (total) to make the changes.  The reviews were a touch inconsistent – one reject outright, one minor improvements and much praise.   The editor went with the minor improvements option.  So my fourth book chapter for the year is going ahead after I shipped back the requested changes today.

I followed up that shipment by sending my Journal of Business Research paper on the new definition of social marketing back to the editor with the minor formatting and editorial patchwork complete.  That

This was followed by confirmation that my coauthored paper with Andrew “Political Marketing” Hughes has been accepted and queued up for publication in Marketing Theory.  We knew unofficially, so the official word was much welcomed given that paper started life in July 2005, and will probably appear somewhere in 2010.

Backing up from that news was confirmation from my lecturer (see, I am a student) that my article on using services marketing theory for RHD supervision for Quality Assurance in Education had come out this morning. Literally this morning.  Never rains but pours they say.

That brings the 2008 running total of five journal publications (MBR, SMQ, AMJ, MT, JBR) accepted for publication or published, one revision awaiting a final decision, and three more papers under various stages of review around the place.

Plus, there’s the three ANZMAC papers left to present, (on top of the four papers already presented) before we get into the subject of four book chapters (multiauthor projects) and that ever present textbook I’m writing.

Not bad progress at the 5/6th of a year mark.

I have a signed copy of the Kotler and Lee (2008) Social Marketing text, and I was lucky (and bold) enough to be photographed with Kotler, and have my photo taken with Nancy Lee (my social marketing icon).

Lee, N and Dann, S (2008) Social Marketing World Championship Dinner, Brighton

The Downright Astonishing

I was named as one of the 18 senior social marketing figures.  The conference held a lunch time breakout session to have “Lunch with senior social marketeers”.  The list of names of the Social Marketing “Team of the Century” (as I’ve taken to calling it)

• Clarence Room – Philip Kotler & Nancy Lee
• Sandringham Room – Bill Smith & Seynabou Mbengue
• Osborne – Rob Donovan & Tane Cassidy
• Lancaster Room – Gerard Hastings & Alan Andreasen
• Edinburgh Room – Francois Lagarde & Jeff French
• Ambassador Room – Sue Peattie & Doug McKenzie Mohr
• Library – Craig Lefebvre & Katherine Lyon Daniel
• Surrey Room – Stephen Dann & Ray Lowry
• Gloucester Room – Sameer Deshpande & Juan Manuel Urrutia

I am honoured and humbled to be in the same line up as these icons of the business.  I was affectionately referring to the conference as the World Championships of Social Marketing, and I think I can comfortably say I walked out of the event with a title belt and a baggy green cap as part of the World Championship squad.

The Future

This conference involved me staking a major bet on the production of a new definition of social marketing which paid serious dividends.  The full paper based on the conference presentation has provisionally been accepted into the Journal of Business Research with no changes.  There’s interest in the methodology used in the paper from another journal.  People were literally screencapping the definition with digital cameras. This was the biggest event of my career, and one of the most amazing days of my life to stand before peers, icons and idols, and put a legitimate claim on defining the meaning of social marketing.

There’s much more to recap and write up from the event for the next few days. For now, I’ll just settle with being extremely honoured and humbled to be part of an amazing event.

The first half of the semester is over, and it’s two weeks of non class time to recapture lost momentum in the research pool, bolster the ranks of the productivity inducing schemes, and generally spent 14 days without standing in front of a class.  As much as I love teaching, there’s some quality time to be spent with my keyboard.

The Cons of Teaching

There are downsides to teaching, and the way I teach.  MKTG2032/7037 (bless its little noodly socks) is a chaos engine, spinning up more problems than solutions – which, y’know, as an e-marketing subject, it probably is making a decent case study on the internet.  Things broke, labs were poorly equipped, the Firefox still doesn’t run flash, and the IE browsers are ill tempered brutes stuck in IE6 timewarps. It’s harder yards this year than previous years, and, by my own hand, I’ve drafted myself into a 11-5pm teaching schedule when I’m really only supposed to teach 11 to 2.

Teaching is quite physically demanding – on Thursdays, I perform a 1 hour show, followed by a three hour seminar.  I need to switch minds, present, perfom, and then come down from the performance high and be functional to prepare for the six hour shift on Friday.

Teaching is mentally demanding, and it’s some times difficult to switch back from EXPERT to EXPLAINER.  Monologues get interrupted before you’re ready, and dialogues turn into the sound of one hand clapping.  It’s a chess match played on a scrabble board with Calvinball rules.

The Pros

The moment when you’re sitting around, either talking to the students or listening to them talk, and you can just hear it click into place. They get it.  Last two weeks have seen so many points where people in my classes have said something, asked something, or, (and it was so cool today) felt something about the course materials.  Listening to my students who first encountered blogs with a lolcattern DO NOT WANT! talk excitedly about blogging, technique, and how they were addicted to their analytics was awesome.

Reading new ideas, seeing new ideas, and learning from explaining. I’ve published several papers that began life as examples in class, notes on a whiteboard, or two slides in powerpoint, and turned into something bigger.

Putting new ideas and new spins on ideas into practice because your students have beginners minds, and give you the option to explore from a new approach.

Performing.  There’s no other gig on the planet I can get that pays this well, offers six hours on stage a week GUARANTEED, and, where I can write my own script, or improv as I see fit.  It’s a glorious life for the stage performer at heart.

The Wrap Up: AAAA++ Would definitely take this career again.

I’m using a new method of notetaking where I keep my files organised in Excel/OpenOffice Calc so that I can do quick searches when I need a reference for a concept as I’m writing my papers. At the end of the project, I’m combining the notes files with the reference lists so that I can start building up a bit of a database of papers+notes+referencing for further projects.

The first of the file sets is a sports marketing reference + notes set shared through GoogleDocs. Obviously, I can’t share the original files (there’s a slight case of copyright to be respected), but with the reference information, and the notes, if you’re interested in the original, it shouldn’t be that hard to track down and find.

Here’s a sample from the Sports Marketing Reference set

If you want to collaborate on the development of these notes databases, drop me a line with your G-mail account, and I’ll add you as a collaborator.