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9132 OU 3 - The New Marketing Course B732
As it soon became clear that the existing (P677) marketing course was inadequate, I eventually put forward a proposal for it to be replaced by a new course. After some considerable discussion, this was eventually agreed. Accordingly I set out to produce a half credit, six month equivalent, course for the Diploma.
This was going to be highly innovative in a number of ways. Not least of these was we were going to produce a full credit of material, so the students could tailor the course to suit their own specialty. In this way, for example, those in the consumer industries could specialise in market research and advertising and ignore selling and production; though they still had to learn something about these. On the other side, those in industrial sales could focus on selling to the exclusion of market research. We were well on the way to producing all this material. Indeed, where everyone had been dubious about whether we could deliver this novel approach, it looked like we were going to be successful. Not only that, but I decided – in conjunction with CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing) - that it was also going to feed directly into the CIM Diploma, so that students could -- if they did the whole full credit -- claim membership of that as well.
To achieve all of this, I worked with a big team - largely picked from the tutors - to put in all the best marketing theories and examples of practice that I could find. As I always did in these circumstances, I also went through every marketing book I could lay my hands on. It is perhaps terrible thing to say, but textbooks are based on the skill of plagiarism. This is not just because it is easier to copy ideas, which aren't a breach of copyright, from others but because otherwise we wouldn't give students the whole range of theory -- most of which has inevitably been produced by others. The net result of this was that course was bulging at the seams with marketing theory. Indeed, this one of best courses I never managed to write.
Regrettably, about 18 months into development, Andrew Thomson got sidetracked by the new initiative to produce practical qualifications. These NVQs were being promoted by the lead body in our area, which was the Management Charter Initiative (MCI). The problem that this posed for me was that their definition of what was required in the Certificate and Diploma was totally contrary to that incorporated in the design of my course. Or at least it was once the results of their literally years of deliberations were finally published; and proved to be the very reverse of the ones they had previously spelled out, and to which we had been working.
Initially they had seen the Certificate as providing a general education and then the Diploma as being more specialised; so my marketing course would have been ideal for that. The problem was that, over time, without telling any of us MCI had changed their mind. This was no problem for other universities and colleges, since in their case the lecturer just walked into the classroom and changed the emphasis in his presentation. In our case, though, we had hundreds of pages of material, all of which had to be totally rewritten.
Even worse, the new proposals were garbage. At that stage the DTI had taken over responsibility and were specifying a curriculum which literally was devoid of marketing. The original initiative for these new courses had come from a series of investigations by Constable & McCormick, in which Andrew Thomson had participated; and hence his enthusiasm for the work. It had found that British management was very poor, certainly worse than in the United States; and accordingly they needed much better education. The problem was that MCI had, under the DTI, commissioned management consultants to do a survey to find out what these (incompetent) managers did -- since the (perverse) intention was to copy these. Remember that previous research said that what management currently did was poor -- so copying it meant inevitably that the result had to be poor teaching. What was worse was that, when the DTI took over direct control, it looked at what it believed was being proposed and then put this through the filter of its own bureaucratic experience. Thus, if anything, the final specification was really designed for the civil service.
At the end of all of this, the so-called dedication to marketing was just one sentence which quite simply said "Understanding Clients and Customers!" For this reason the OBS Certificate level course was called 'Customer and Client Relationships'. Fortunately, I managed to persuade everyone to put a reasonable amount of marketing material into this despite the MCI specification. But thereafter, burdened with the inappropriate course title, we constantly had difficulty persuading other academics that there was any marketing at all in our version of the Certificate.
The farce went on when they started authorising organisations to deliver their education. We had terrible troubles meeting all the standards were required of us. As, of course, we were the best in the field, I wondered why this was; especially when we were constantly told no one else was having the same problems. Then the wife of one of my colleagues, who worked for a consultancy which had never done any training before, applied for accreditation on their behalf. They got it immediately. I asked how this happened, and was told it had simply answered yes to all the questions! I then asked MCI how they were monitoring the suppliers to ensure that the agreements, and standards, were maintained. The simple answer was that it had no problems, since once the box was ticked it was not their business.
The net outcome of this was that I was left with no course, but a mass of marketing material. As a result, I sat down and, over the next year, rewrote this into a marketing textbook; which was my textbook on marketing, This was published by Blackwell, and was to become my most successful book. Over a ten-year period it sold something like 50,000 copies and maybe earned me something like £100,000 -- though, as this came in at a steady rate of £10,000 a year, it wasn't immediately evident.
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