Rule Number 1 in Marketing: know your consumers. Remember, without the consumer there is no product.
The Business and Economics faculty at University is usually perceived as dull and mind-numbingly boring. Well, with subjects like taxation law and advanced accounting who could argue differently? Even our future lawyers and accountants are often found asleep in lectures (that’s if they even bothered showing up at all). Yet the business faculty has always held an ‘ace up its sleeve’…
Marketing.
Ah, Marketing. The BusEco diamond in the rough. Or so we young, play-doh like high-school graduates were led to believe. Marketing fulfils a need, and being another sheep in society’s education process I thought Monash Marketing would fulfil my need for an interesting and worthwhile degree. Yet after my first semester I soon discovered the Marketing Department had lost sight of its own teachers.
In lectures we are constantly being told that marketing in the real world is ‘constantly evolving’. If you don’t keep up with change; you fall over, fall behind and get trampled by a stampede of competitors. This advice is always well received, especially when all the lecture slides have 1996 printed in the bottom left-hand corner.
If any department’s teaching staff should know how to make their subject material interesting and appealing it should be Marketing. The Quintessence of Marketing is to ‘Satisfy the Consumer’. Yet when the student is trying harder to understand the Lecturer/Tutor’s heavily accented ‘English’ rather than the content material, let’s just say the odds aren’t looking good. * Sidenote- ‘just because you know something doesn’t mean you have the ability to teach it’.
Lecture theatres are equipped with state of the art projectors, blue-ray DVD players and crystal clear surround sound systems. The ingredients are there for an amazing learning experience every week. But when a lecturer comes in with a 1980’s VHS and takes 15 minutes to figure out how to turn the sound on, the will to live let alone learn is almost gone. Imagine if Gordon Ramsay were an academic and not a chef. He could have hit TV shows like ‘Lecture Nightmares’ or ‘Hells Lectures’. He’d F-bomb the fuck out of the teaching staff to get some initiative.
A University students’ consumer lifestyle profile in a nutshell looks a little like this:
- Like to drink lots of alcohol
- Like to stay up/out late
- Usually party on Thursday night
- Like to gamble
So naturally the Marketing Department concludes upon this:
- 8:30am lectures on Fridays
- A brand management exam that starts at the same time as the nation’s public holiday Melbourne Cup Race. (this is despite petitions against for the past 100 years)
My mother tells me I should suck it up and ‘grow a pair’. That it’s not the University’s prerogative to ‘make me happy’.
Being the good ‘Gen Y’ son I am.
I disagree.
University is not just a one way street. Monash University has an investment in the students as much as they have an investment in the University.
Monash Marketing’s reputation, scratch that; brand equity, is tied up in their graduates. They ignore their harsh reality of slumping performance because the internet has picked up a lot of the slack. I honestly believe you could go your entire Marketing studies at Monash without buying or borrowing a prescribed text-book (which is the same text as 5 years ago it just now says 7th edition). The internet is the mother of all silver spoons. It has everything you need to know about marketing hidden in its digital bosom.
Yet what should Monash be afraid of. Are they giving an inferior product than say RMIT or Deakin? Who knows? Few students are brand switchers when it comes to their University. So they’re not losing many current students to other brands. And you can rest assured that come Open Days Monash Marketing will finally make some effort. They’ll have a slightly altered song and dance performed by one of the few good lecturers they do have. So they guarantee new students. So what has Monash Marketing actually lost? They’re numbers are probably better than ever.
They’ve lost integrity.
They’ve lost Credibility.
They’ve lost the interest of their students.
Let’s Just Say That:
Monash Marketing is in need of a little re-branding.
good post first up Dan.
ReplyDeleteThe issue there is that its not just the marketing department that are so far behind the times, its the entire uni.
It only took about 5 years for the subject e-marketing to change from "the internet exists. Now lets learn about Internet Explorer and what all the buttons mean" to what Peter Wagstaff turned it into, which is actually something relevent and learning how the internet can be used as a marketing tool through social media and web 2.0.
Looking forward to hearing you rant some more about the uni like I've done in the past!
+ 1 for Dan winning in his first blog post.
ReplyDeleteLet's see if/how Monash officially responds, and that doesn't include anything from Peter Wagstaff.
Hey mate, is this a uni requirement?
ReplyDeleteAll of Victoria's (let alone Australia's) universities are struggling with problems of their own.
Melbourne are alienating students, staff and faculties by the week as they wreck the fabric of the institution with Glynn Davis' Melbourne Model.
The VCA is fighting to practically stay alive, and RMIT's staff this week went on strike because the uni wants to drop their pay to the fifth-lowest in the country.
It's hard to trace where the roots of these problems lie. Is it the fault of governments unwilling to step in, get their hands dirty and lift the sagging standards in tertiary education?
Is it the fault of universities that are now purely concerned with profits?
Presumably it's a combination of these elements and the fact that the people at the top are ignorant cretins, more interested in money and 'prestige' than what's good for their students and the Australian public.
Basically they're all a bunch of fucken wankers.
I agree Simon,
ReplyDeleteAlso i realise that there is some teaching talent in the Business department. Wagstaff definately makes the grade (along with a few others).