First, a little lexicon and some review, including a word-cloud of the comments from the class on those first two presentations. (Word clouds are useful and I tried a new cloud-generator, see below). And, a few additional resources that I hope you'll look into for the discussion tomorrow on the Krups case!
Lexicon and Review
For the lexicon, these terms (and a bibliographic suggestion) came up.
• ORKUT (a social networking tool very popular in Brazil and India. . .but why?)
• DIGLOSSIA (in which one language is spoken at home, and another at work & school)
• TASTE & DISTINCTION (These terms are linked in the work of sociologist Bourdieu).
Knowing local tastes is critical; for Bourdieu, taste shows class & individual identity and it
is not just about income.
• RUSS BELK Is an academic in the marketing world who uses Bourdieu's (and other)
ideas.
The presentations were a great first effort, and within the tight time and page limits, quite a good job.
The comments from yoru colleagues were interesting. Here is a wordcloud of the comments (from tagxedo.com a good resource to represent free-listing data).
So, don't be afraid to add a slide or two to each slide section if you can move quickly. Some especially interesting comments were those that were not repeated (outliers are always interesting!): nice to have more time to do this research (so true), nice to not speak from notes (tough to do but often a good idea) were two of those.
It is really difficult to draw clear marketing implications from historical tidbits but you did a good job with that, too. I've used the scores provided by your colleagues to work out a score: and both groups did quite well.
Krups Case Information
Here is an article about recent efforts and problems in marketing to former "Eastern Block" countries—in this case it is Hungary but you'll get the idea. The article is also downloadable in the e-course pack at right (Marx To Trademarks). It will set the Krups experience in a more current context than the 1990s.
But how much do you know about life in so-called Eastern Europe? (By the way, Austria, Slovenia, and E. Germany really are "Central Europe," don't you think?) Here are a couple YouTube links. The first is a long one, from the BBC. Worth a watch.
The second piece is from the economist. Its shorter, and different.
Its interesting to look at the differences between these two representations of life in E. Germany prior to reunification. The BBC piece uses local footage and emphasizes daily life from the E. German POV (point of view). The Economist piece is an outsider, a German journalist, looking in. Can you spot the differences in perspective? Look at how value judgements creep in. Do you think life was uniformly grey in E. Germany? Certainly it was not a place for a lot of open discussion of E. German problems and politics (the spy agency made the NSA look, well, maybe I shouldn't go there just now since the NSA is much bigger and spy-ier than we may have thought but you get my point). Anyhow, look at the contrast.
If you have time to listen to the whole of the BBC documentary, you'll appreciate it. Get some popcorn. It takes an hour to watch (I aim to get through it).
Be ready to think like a Krups marketer. Look at the questions in the syllabus. What should Krups do? What's the main marketing problem, here?
You'll be expected to have seen at least the first 1/3 of the longer documentary: be ready for some quizz time in the coming class meetings!
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