FFF’s student dilemma: “What should I do about my (outdated) marketing professors without offending them …?”

MarketingRx for Jan 23-08
By Dr Ned Roberto with Ardy Roberto


We continue to answer the questions and try to allay the fears of student we’ve named FFF (Frustrated and Fearful of the Future).

To recap, here’s part of his letter (for the benefit of those who missed this three weeks ago.)

Dear MarketingRx:

Graduation is fast approaching and I canʼt help but feel insecure of my knowledge and skills. Although I study in a reputable university, I am unfortunate to have outdated teachers whom despite having doctorate degrees stick strictly by the books. They lack in 1st hand experience which I think is highly instructive and crucial for their students.

Our typical classroom discussions range from reading out loud the latest copy of Kotler to embarrassing situations like when they are bombarded with questions they cannot answer convincingly. Another thing I find ironic is that they cannot relate what they teach to a Philippine setting. If not for your column, I would never have heard of marketing gurus such as Kumar or the concepts of customer insighting, communitization nor debunking the age-old belief that customer loyalty is the best business model.

Coming across marketing alumni, they have all expressed the same frustration: what we learn in school does not coincide with what is expected by the employers. This discrepancy highly alarms a lot of the marketing students. We have long expressed our observation that our curriculum needs to be streamlined with what is actually happening out there but it seems that these sentiments fall on deaf ears.

My grades are quite good and they have earned me a spot to be part of a team our department sends to compete in such competitions such as PANAʼs IMC and PMAʼs STRATMark. During these times, my team mates and I take it upon ourselves to learn the whole process and figure everything out on our own since our professors are not very helpful. We try to make the best of what is available but we still feel that it is inadequate. In fact as much as possible I try to attend seminars with key speakers and read up on marketing articles and books, but having no one to direct my questions to, I often get confused. I am now scared that in the future when I am employed I will find myself in situations where I am clueless.
In closing here are some of my questions:
what am I to do about my situation without offending my professors?
could you please give me an idea of how it is to be a professional marketer and what the industry is like?
what reading materials could you suggest to a newbie like me which could be very helpful?
what else should I do that could supplement my education and make my resume more attractive?

~ FFF (Frustrated and Fearful of the Future)


A:

Last week, the junior MRx-er answered questions #3-4, now here’s your answer to question #1.

As your senior MRx-er, and having been a marketing professor for the past 30 years, I have witnessed and continue to see the kind of professors you reasonably find unacceptable. So I start by saying that it’s easy for me to empathize with your situation. Even after three decades in marketing education, I still find myself infuriated by the presence of these professors among us. But over the years, my regard for them has changed and there’s a difference in the way I regard them now. Today, I try to look at things also from their end.

That perspective came out of my co-authoring the 1989 social marketing book. Here’s what I learned from that project and they are lessons directly related to how I will answer your question.

Take the next step after complaining
First, if you look at marketing as a study of market and customer behavior, it’s easy to go from that step into saying that marketing is all about changing “undesirable” public behavior on the part of your target market or customer segment. That’s one way of looking at your situation. Ultimately, you want to change your marketing professors’ undesirable behavior, a behavior you find unbecoming of a responsible committed teacher. When we say “you,” we mean you the student as taking on the role of the change agent. At some point, you have to put a stop to complaining. For the period you’ve complained, that has served its purpose. It was good to complain because it let off the justifiable steam of unfairness inside you. But you know that the solution to your problem cannot be found in complaining. Continuing it can only add to your sense frustration and to no avail.

Launch a change campaign
So ending your frustration is in your hands. Instead, do something. Develop and launch a behavioral change campaign.

And your marketing professors are going to be your target market segment. But who’s going to be the primary target market (PTM) segment? Say, you have five guilty marketing professors who you can rank according to predisposition to behavior change like so:
1 = very resistant to change
2 = more resistant than predisposed
3 = neither resistant nor predisposed
4 = more predisposed than resistant
5 = very predisposed

So who should you target first? You can choose according to two opposing logics. One line of thinking says: “Choose the segment with the most need for change.” That would naturally be the one that’s “very resistant to change.” The other line of thinking says: “Choose the segment that’s most ready and therefore the easiest and probably the quickest to change.” That segment would be the “very predisposed.”

The most resistant will take time, maybe a very long time to change. It’s a segment that will therefore require the most investment in time and attention. On the other hand, the most predisposed will be quick to change and you can therefore use its conversion for leveraging on persuading the other segments to change as well. In your situation as a graduating student, this is the primary segment to go after. It’s a primary target market segment of one professor.

Positioning
After segmenting and after targeting comes the most pivotal step of “positioning.” Here, what does positioning mean? Positioning means persuading your primary target professor that it is to his personal and professorial advantage to leave his “bad” teaching behavior and replace it with the “good.” What’s in it for him to change behavior when he’s obviously satisfying some personal “needs” with what he’s doing now. Are the benefits from the behavior change going to be superior to what he’s enjoying now?

That in essence is the positioning diagnosis you have to undertake if you are to succeed in this behavior change mission that you have committed to pursue. Let’s see if we can help you push forward on this commitment.

The very first thing to do at this point is to understand why your target professor is teaching the way he does. Consumer behavior research says that a consumer, that is, your professor, does things because he’s satisfying some personal need or needs with his current teaching behavior. In other words, he won’t be doing what he’s doing if he’s not getting something out of it. So you should find out this. After finding out, your persuasion task becomes this. Convince him that the benefits from the new and changed behavior stand above and are superior to the benefits he’s getting from his current teaching behavior.

Consumer psychologists also tell us that people do things by “modeling” or according to the “social proof principle.” Since all other marketing professors are behaving this way, then everyone comes to view the behavior as correct or at least as not wrong. So search for the model that can reverse the social proof process.

There’s a third avenue of understanding. This is what consumer behaviorists call “perceived social normative pressure to change behavior.” In other words, if your target professor’s superiors, peers, student association, student alumni and other school stakeholders take a concerted effort to raise the bar of teaching performance, then there’s more likelihood of a behavior change. Of course, we have noted in your letter that you’ve already explored this avenue and you mentioned that it did not trigger that “social normative pressure to change behavior.” But it’s still worth reviewing that effort to see how it can stand fine tuning and sharpening.

“Teaching the teachers”
A fourth behavior change tactic worth mentioning is “empowerment.” In the situation you’re in, that translates to no less than teaching your target professor how to change behavior. The assumption that may seem unreasonable at first glance is that your target professor wants to change but just doesn’t know how to change. There’s no issue here about motivation to change behavior. The question is much more mundane and practical. It’s a matter of knowing the technique, the skill for changing behavior. We’re saying that our target professor wants to change but he just does not have the step-by-step knowhow to effect the change in behavior. Many of us would immediately say: “How can that be true with professors? These are intelligent professors with Ph.Ds after their names.” If you just stop and reflect for a moment, you may come to realize that teachers learn the content, the “what” of their disciplines. Practicing the what, that is, the “how” is often not encompasses in that training and even when it is, whatever learning happens is still all up in the air. Most teachers especially those who are young find it hard to practice what they preach.

Question: Which of these behavior change strategies do you adopt for your target professor?

A social marketer would say try all that’s good in each of them. Be eclectic. I’m conscious that my own “purist” behavioral science colleagues and friends would be ready to pounce of that prescription and call it “opportunistic” because being eclectic is to them the euphemism for being opportunistically Machiavellian. But my own experience with eclecticism over the years has been responsible for consequentially raising the likelihood of success and minimizing the risk of failure of almost all my consulting projects. It is in that spirit of sharing this experience that I write the prescription.


A final word. In my seminars, I am often asked by some well-meaning young marketing managers what they should do with their own bosses who behave just like FFF’s marketing professors. They find their bosses outdated in their command of marketing. If they have become just like FFF’s marketing professors, then our diagnosis and prescription should in their basic content and structure apply.

We’ll end with this advice from a reader named Carlo to be “patient.”

“Over the years, the basics of marketing haven't changed much. That's
what you need to learn in school. The Theory. What you need to learn
from your professors is how they were able to cope with the problems
of their times. Your professors may not be able to cope with current
marketing situations now if they have not updated themselves,
especially if they are not IT savvy and have not considered the new
forms marketing that are evolving such as targeted online marketing,
the social networks and other digital marketing phenomenon.

Nevertheless, you are expected to use your professor's experience and
draw an analogy on how to use this to your era. That's where your
creativity comes in handy as a marketing professional. Don't rush.
You'll get there. Unfortunately, they can not teach 'experience' in
school. Carlo - COBOL.RADIUS@GMAIL.COM

More advice and replies to FFF (Frustrated and Fearful of the Future) continue to come in. We’ll close this series next week with advice from MarketingRx and other readers on FFF’s question on Working in the Marketing Industry and Expectations.

Keep your questions and commentscoming. Send them to us at MarketingRx@pldtDSL.net or post them on www.marketingrx.org or text us at 0919-314-5412. God bless!