Chapter 5: Marketing education at UKZN
5.2 Discourses
5.2.2 Relevance
5.2.2.1 Relevance to the everyday world – „everyday to specialised‟
In terms of relevance to their everyday lives, students enjoyed being able to see how what they learned in their Marketing courses was manifest in what was going on around them in the marketplace. They felt that this made it easier to understand and apply Marketing concepts.
Relevance
Everyday world
- the world before specialisation - relevance to everyday
lives, contemporary issues, SA context
University
- the site of specialisation
- relevance in the present classroom interaction between lecturers and
students
Business world
- the world after specialisation - relevance to the future
world of work
Because Marketing…I feel it’s relative to our lives every single day. You can’t– with me personally, I can’t go by a day without seeing an advert because I watch…even if it’s half an hour of TV you see adverts, so it’s easier to write about. And it’s things you grew up watching and hearing and seeing. Even if it’s not watching TV - you go home, you see billboards, so I find it easier to write about that (Amantha)
Because Marketing is practical. It’s something that, you know, that’s happening every day. So…with what you’ve experienced, ja, you can apply it (Lindiwe)
…I’ve noticed that if I’m walking in the shop, okay, I’m paying special attention to…okay, certain products and the way it’s being marketed, advertised and just displayed or whatever (Kiara)
Basically, Marketing has like put a whole turnaround – like ‘cos now when I sit at home, I don’t just look at the adverts…I’m always searching for the fine print, searching for what stands out (Bongani).
Lecturers, too, saw benefits in terms of students‟ interest and interaction in the classroom.
In terms of interacting with students, it’s much more fun, in the way that we communicate, in the way that we pitch our lectures, especially…since everybody is a consumer…it’s very hands on as well (Nisha)
I always encouraged them to use their own personal examples… (Nisha).
But whilst this opportunity to draw on their personal experiences during lectures in order to exemplify Marketing concepts had benefits, it also posed difficulties. Lecturers indicated that some responses in tests and exams tended to be anecdotal and based largely on students‟
personal experiences rather than on substantiated arguments. It appeared that, for some students, basing their essays on “opinions that have no backing or whatever seems fine”
(Kamini). Thus it would seem that the blurring of the boundary between academic and everyday knowledge of Marketing (i.e. vertical and horizontal discourse) during lectures may have had the unintended consequence of making it difficult for some students to clearly differentiate between these two categories of knowledge, and to know when to appropriately use each category in assessment tasks. Doherty suggests that the lecturer has an important role to play in this regard during lectures:
To process the resulting horizontal discourse and build the vertical theoretical discourse, some general point, comment or principle needs to be explicitly extracted. That way the professional knowledge base legitimated will not be a collection of personal anecdotes with implicit links, but rather wisdom produced through explicit synthesis. The risk of student subsidy design and more interactivity in lectures is whether personal stories are allowed to pool in everyday horizontal discourse and „speak for themselves‟. While it could be
argued that the entrepreneurial disposition thrives on such an opportunistic mix of horizontal connections between diverse knowledges and experiences, such claims to knowledge need more intellectual processing in a curriculum if they are to consciously build a rigorous vertical discourse of professional expertise.
(2010, p.256)
Thus, although everyday knowledge is useful in serving as a „portal‟ through which students can access specialised disciplinary knowledge and procedures, they need to be empowered to move beyond these everyday understandings towards thinking in context-independent ways – otherwise they simply leave the classroom with what they already know (Bertram, 2011).84
Lecturers also noted that some students had difficulty in „reversing perspective‟ (Rubin &
Krishnan, 2004), that is, looking at marketing practices not from a personal, consumer perspective, but from a strategic, marketer perspective.
…but in some cases I think students are able to relate more from a consumer perspective, rather than from a marketer perspective……some of them actually get the strategic applications in terms of marketing but with…with your ordinary students, no. A lot of them will be able to identify key concepts to their own…to their personal situation…but not…ja, in terms of marketing – no (Nisha).
This section shows how the discourse around „relevance to everyday life‟ constructs Marketing as a subject that is „everyday‟ rather than „academic‟. This leads students to bring the learning and literacy practices associated with their everyday lives (primary discourses) into their Marketing courses and to draw on these in their assessment tasks in ways that lecturers deem inappropriate to academic (secondary) discourse – with clear implications for epistemological access.
In terms of relevance to contemporary issues, students were expected to keep abreast of current events and trends and to be able to see the possible implications of these for marketing practice, although the lecturers reported that they struggled to do this.
And you need to do a whole lot of reading, ‘cos you need to be up to date with everything that’s happening. Like trends and stuff (Nothando)
…they don’t even know what happens in the news…So that’s a worry…I mean, like the example, um, like the most obvious one - the recession…what would that mean for, um…maybe, new product launches? Okay. And then, think like a marketer. Does it mean then that, um, a company will not actually engage in new product development? Or will
84 These points were raised at a seminar, “Exploring an historical gaze: Bernstein, Dowling and the
recontextualisation of curriculum”, that was presented by Dr Carol Bertram on UKZN‟s Edgewood campus on 21 October 2011.
it mean that they will focus on their maturity phase of their lifecycle and continue to maybe penetrate markets more and that sort of thing? (Kamini)
You set, er, assignment questions…like I did this one year with, er, food…food labeling…and we looked at the…Act and, er, most of them had no idea, they were completely clueless about it. And that was simply…it’s contemporary, ja, it’s in the news all of the time. Very few actually went…or quoted sources, newspaper articles. They just cut and pasted from websites - international websites (Nisha)
I say I want them to read journals, I want them to read the newspaper and I want them to pay attention to, er, good magazines that come out. I want them to do that, but they don’t do it. So what I want them to read, they’ll never touch it (Kamini).
Many students admitted that they indeed did not do any reading beyond the prescribed textbooks, partly because of time pressures and the large volume of reading material, but also because they believed that reading their prescribed textbooks was all that they needed to do in order to pass the courses.
All the recommended things - well, eish! We usually do not find time to actually read such stuff. Even though, you know, maybe it may be helpful……We just study the book and that’s it……I mean, it was prescribed. We assume that, okay, the book is…is…is so huge, and I mean why would the person set something that is…that was recommended while this is prescribed? (Ben)
And the stuff that comes out from the test and exams are from the book (Thuli)
…you know you’re not going to be questioned on that thing [additional reading] (Sihle).
Of note, Bongani indicated that he did not do any additional reading (which the lecturers had said was an important source of applications and examples of Marketing concepts) because he felt that he could get these things simply from seeing what was going on around him in his daily life.
His feeling was that “I‟ll probably find more things around me”, showing that he is drawing on the
„Marketing as everyday‟ discourse.
It is often said that assessment drives learning (Entwistle, 1996, in Knight, 2002). The textbook- based assessment described above is unlikely to drive students to read more widely and to keep up with contemporary developments, because it does not signal that these practices are in fact important to success in these courses. Yet being well-informed about current issues is essentially a particular kind of knower that is valued in the Discourse of Marketing and that is key to how well students will perform in job interview situations and in the workplace. Representatives of major companies involved in graduate recruitment activities at UKZN noted that business students needed to be able to demonstrate during interviews that they were keeping abreast with current
developments and that they could think through the possible implications of those developments for the particular companies they were applying to join (Skinner, 2005). Marketers are expected to
“make sense of and interpret the world outside of the organization” (Catterall et al, 2002, p.186).
Therefore, the evaluation rule is not specialising students into either the knowledge or the type of knower that lecturers espouse in their discourses.
Interestingly, awareness that students were unlikely to take any additional reading seriously unless it was assessed did not result in any change to the assessment practices.
So, as much as it’s…it’s exciting to say, yes, we’re giving them readings and we’re hoping that they’re reading it…whether they’re actually going to use it, is something else. So it’s a case of we going to the effort of finding the articles and posting it up and then we have to physically monitor or police them to actually see whether they are actually reading the articles……Ja, only if you’re making…if you’re going to test it, then, ja, you probably will get a response….but if it’s just there for their info –no, highly unlikely (NIsha).
In terms of relevance to the South African context, some students reported that the prescribing of textbooks of American origin was problematic.
…a lot of the examples [in lectures] are from the textbook, and unfortunately it’s an American textbook. So thank goodness I know because I went there for a year after school, so I know a lot of the products. But I feel really bad for the other people because, sort of, if you don’t know how…how well known they are…in America…then I think you’re a little bit stuck because you sort of read the advert differently (Maxine) I think like it would be better if we just used South African versions ‘cos sometimes they [American textbooks] make examples of things that you don’t even know, like brands that you don’t know, so it ends up not making sense…You don’t even know what the brand is doing. ‘Cos I think they write in a way where they expect you to know anyway about the brand. So I think sometimes using the South African version, where we’re familiar with the brands, makes…it would make it so much better (Nothando).
As noted in Chapter 4, there is indeed a North American bias in the discipline, probably because the USA is where Marketing first emerged as an academic discipline, and where research and teaching activity is still most prevalent (Easton, 2002). Kiel asserts that this bias is something that Marketing “suffers from” and needs to overcome for the future development of the discipline (1998, p.24). As will be further discussed in the next section, this is also something that Michael felt needed to be addressed at UKZN. Baron and Harris suggest that one way this could be done is by moving away from teaching Marketing from an organisational, managerial perspective towards teaching it from a consumer experience perspective because “(c)onsumer experiences,
unlike specific firms or organisations, do not require a privileged, cultural (westernised) upbringing for them to be understood, even though they will differ across cultures” (2006, p.293).