Chinese Marketing

Even though Chinese New Year, and thus a weeks holiday, is right round the corner, classes have got off to a rocketing start. I am obligated through my GLOBE programme to take Chinese Business, Chinese Marketing, Financial Management and Issues in Asian Business, the later of which will be conducted as a study trip to Singapore in May. I have also enrolled in Introductory Econometrics, which will be useful for my Bachelors Thesis, and of course Putonghua. Each course has three 45-minute classes every week, most of which are consecutive; which means I often only have each course once a week.

Today was Chinese Marketing. With a bright blue sky and 20 degrees outside, it was not an optimal motivation to be sitting inside between 10:30 and 13:15. The topic was "Understanding Chinese Consumers", and for the class we had read 25 pages of articles about Chinese consumer-patterns, including McKinseys annual report on China for 2010. It seemed an interesting, very relevant, and culturally enlightening subject, and being prepared, I was in a cheery mood.

It was brutal. We had no reference to the texts, and nobody but the professor talked for the 165 minutes, except in a 15 minute break. Instead, we were dragged through 66 PowerPoint slides about theories on why Americans and Chinese people were different, such as varying lengths of seratone receptors on our 12th chromosome, or the fact that we have references to different philosophies, Chinese and Greek respectively.

Most frustrating was the fact that our pre-class readings and the professors slides are contradicting. While all the articles stress the differences within China and warn about the myopia from marketing products to a single Chinese consumer, the professor kept referring to American and Chinese as fixed consumers. There were also differences in what this professor said and what our China Business professor had said previously.

It is clear that the educational methods of Hong Kong are very different from Denmark. Marketing in Denmark is about discussing, presenting ideas, and thinking for yourself. Here it is more a lecture, with the professor talking. Criticizing or disagreeing with professors is not something that one does, and there is a clear authoritarian division between lecturer and student. Our exam is about a self-chosen case, so that might provide more intellectual freedom, but that has yet to be seen. There is no doubt that my professor is extremely qualified and intelligent (he focusses a lot on human bias and behavioural psychology), but he uses the terms vaguely and extremely generally. So one finds oneself in a constant state of discomfort, on the one hand wanting to raise a hand to clarify or question critically, but on the other trying to remain on positive terms with the professor who grades one's exams.