Hi there!

This is me: Tony Jolley and my ‘chorus line‘:

Katy and FeeBee, the best looking pair of  blonde-bombshell, backing singers  in the business!

[Sadly both passed away recently – one at 12 and the other 15]

  And this is the  Introduction to your M1 unit in:

Intercultural Marketing: Principles, Practices & Performance

Preamble.

The unit is delivered by two teachers: myself (Tony Jolley – call me ‘Tony‘) and my colleague: Apolline Kalt.  We have split our responsibilities into two: Apolline will be doing the ‘principles‘ (main underpinning theories) first and then I will be running a ‘realistic work environment’ project with you: the ‘practices‘ (in which you will apply the theory you have learned in a challenging professional context).

We have a 50/50 split in teaching terms which amounts to 20 hours each of classroom time with you.  We also have a 50/50 split when it comes to your overall unit mark.

Your Tonyversity Base Page

Please note: Apolline will no doubt be using her own means of communicating with you: her materials will not be found on Tonyversity.

This is, in other words, my ‘base page’ for my part the unit which will give you an idea of the course content and the assignments relating to this programme.  When you hover your cursor over the ‘Micai Intercultural Marketing PPP‘ item under the main FSESJ  tab on my www.tonyversity.com/students  website, you will also find that there is a green ‘spring out menu‘ that appears automatically.  Do familiarise yourself with the site (bookmark it!) – I will also be using it as a base for materials for the Intro to Research Unit (early in S1) and the ‘Candidature’ Unit (middle of S2) for which I am also responsible.  There is neither login nor password to remember.

This is where you will find such things as:

• materials I may put up for you in the form of ‘Thinkpieces’,  mini-lectures or other resources
• tasks and assignments that I will want you to address with specific instructions and deadlines.
• general feedback upon the work you are doing / have done.

Some other important things:

1. the website address is www.tonyversity.com/students    Don’t forget the ‘/students’ bit!  Bookmark it on your university browser profile and it should appear every time you log on and open the browser.  Saves time and memory.  There is no login and no password for the site for your ease of access.  I am a ‘vacataire/contractuel’ so I don’t use the various different systems for web publishing offered by the faculties of UHA or elsewhere.  This is for two reasons.  Firstly it would take me far too long to juggle 3 or four website creation tools: Moodle…Blackboard etc; and secondly I want to retain my own intellectual property – that is to say that there could be some doubt about the ownership of the content were it on a University site  or server, but on my own site, on a paid-for server, under my own domain name, the content is unarguably mine.    This is a point you might well think about in relation to your career: how do you stop people ripping you off… how do you protect your own material – your own ‘intellectual property’ as it is termed…?
2. to contact me, use  tjolley@gmail.com  (don’t use some of the email addresses that UHA’s ‘annuaire’ gives you for me: mostly they don’t work – and if they do (I think anthony-ian.jolley@uha.fr does), they all default to my gmail address anyway!).

Rentrée 2023.

I’m sure we all hope Rentrée 2023 will not be like 2021 & 2022 and that we can continue safely and healthily in the attendance mode, but if we can’t and we have to move to a distance-based model, we have Tonyversity and lots of experience to draw upon as both teachers and students.

Just for the record, and IN CASE we have to retreat to the distanciel mode in the face of any CoVid resurgeance, here is a video of what I said to the 2020 cohort (Fr. promo) about how we would proceed on a distance-learning basis if we have to.  Let’s all hope we don’t need it!

Video intro to the spirit and scope of this unit.

It will not be a basic ‘Marketing’ unit: it starts with the assumption that you have considerable familiarity with the subject.  If you haven’t really got to grips with Marketing before, I strongly suggest that you invest in a basic Marketing handbook and also read it.  Apolline’s ‘principles‘ course will take it from there. You will also find lots of marketing primers available online: you may have to ‘bootstrap‘ yourself somewhat….

Use this link if the video doesn’t run: https://youtu.be/i6BELhIiwIE

Learning principles, and some helpful material for you.

I have written about this under several headings on my site – see the links and 10 x videos which I would like you to watch on This Page:

I know it says 2020 in the link line above – but the principles are still valid in 2023 even if we are back in the classroom … I barely had time to cover these in the first Intro to Research Unit that preceeded this course, so I would strongly suggest that, if you didn’t get to view these, you should do so at the start of this unit: they are there to make sure that we understand each other.

The link above takes you to a page which has videos (of 8 – 25 minutes’ duration) on a number of topics.  [Where I have put ‘E‘ after the title, then it is Essential for you, rather than optional – the ones in red are (if it were possible) doubly essential! … but you can read these during the week.  It will take a few hours, but it should represent a good investment for you as many of the things I will be saying will apply equally to other MICAI units whether I teach them or not and they are designed specifically to help you work more efficiently and generate marks more effectively.

• my website : background – optional, but you may be interested if you didn’t really get to grips with it during the Intro to Research Unit.
• how I like to work (two vids on principles) E
• the concept of ‘Blocks and Bridges’  E
• understanding and answering the question.  E
• using academic sources E
• citation and attribution E
• plagiarism 1 & 2  E
• Artificial Intelligence.  E  [Please Note: this is NOT on my list of videos – it is an article I have written on my NEWS page on Tonyversity.  It really is VITAL that you read it and comply.]
• deadlines  E

At Master’s level, I hope most [if not all] of this goes without saying, but you really must read and take this on board nevertheless!  [Please don’t ignore the stuff on plagiarism and AI – we have had experience of some MICAI students who have found themselves in, shall we say, ‘considerable difficulty’ over the issue...  Please don’t let that be you!].

I guess what I am aiming for in our working relationship is what I would best term: ‘Professional Informality’ (between you all and me, and between you too):  a way of working which is respectful, motivated, dedicated and having more to do with the working world than the classroom but which dispenses, for the mostpart, with the need for suits and ‘they way it must always be done‘.  For example, I don’t have to be standing immobile on a podium, dressed up ‘to the nines‘ (do you recognise that expression?) to be able to relate to you  with a classic Powerpoint support… I could be in jeans and open-necked shirt perching upon the edge of a desk in my office speaking to you all via the internet rather than in full-on, presentation mode…BUT…that doesn’t mean for a minute that I will be being any less professional at all: we’ll just dispense with some traditions to be more relaxed and comfortable, which I believe to be more in keeping with the sort of work environment into which you are likely to be going. 

You are also being prepared for a world and a career (especially the English-speaking world) where deadlines are deadlines: putting back a performance/event date on a whim with little or no notice is simply NOT a possibility.  You have to get used to this NOW.  The same goes for your work.  If I set a deadline, unless you have a medical certificate or a reason admissible under Course Regulations and approved by your Course Director then you will find penalties applied you your work. Depending upon the circumstances it may receive 0/20 (but you will get feedback) or the bare passmark of 10/20 even if the content might have been worth more had it been submitted on time.  This is only fair to your colleagues who hit the deadline as I am sure you will appreciate.

I won’t go on, but you get the picture I am sure…..

In our Realistic Work Environment Project together, I will be operating in role myself as your boss (except when I need to occasionally revert to Tony-the-Tutor mode) and you will have roles as my Consultancy Team: so you will understand why I am talking about you adopting the spirit / attitude of ‘professional informality’ with each other and with me.

 The Unit Descriptor

…Is presented here for your pleasure… and it also offers links to free online books on the subject which both Apolline and I consider to be appropriate and at a good level.  Don’t worry about the dates not being 2020+ (there are plenty of very recent books out there but they cost!) – mostly the principles and many of the practices remain the same.

I strongly suggest you familiarise yourself with them and ‘dig into them’ especially when it comes to the theoretical background to your main group assignment:

• Philip Cateora, John Graham, Mary Gilly (2016): International Marketing, 17th. ed., McGraw-Hill. 15th Edition also available as a free online book from various sources incl :  https://www.pdfdrive.net/international-marketing-e19383135.html
• Sak Onkvisit, John Shaw (2004): International Marketing, Routledge. Free online.

       https://mebranding.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/international-marketing-strategy-and-theory-4th-edition.pdf

Q. Looking Forward: where do we go from here?

A. To the Realistic Work Environment Consultancy Project!

Last Word … Some Strong Recommendations to adopt in written work in my unit (or anyone else’s!).

• DO NOT, under any circumstances, use a translation tool like Google, Linguee, DeepL, Babelfish etc.  First it is cheating – it isn’t your work, so why should I give you a mark for it?  Secondly there is no possibility of you actually learning anything.  Thirdly, the style of language such tools produce is almost always incorrect and totally evident to the tutor.  Don’t be tempted, then!  You have been warned.
• DO NOT, under any circumstances, use Artificial Intelligence (Open AI, Dall-E, Chat GPT and all its updates, Bard etc for all the reasons discussed here.)
• DO use the following (especially the first two) – if you don’t you will simply be throwing away marks needlessly:
  • download a little piece of software called ‘Grammarly‘ .  It is free.  If you set it up in English for the purposes of this unit it will ‘look’ at everything you write in English whether it is using Word, PDF, Powerspoint, an email and it will offfer you corrections to your spelling and grammar. It also explains WHY, so you can actually learn from its suggested corrections.  It is like looking up a combined dictionary and grammar book and it is acceptable and is NOT cheating.  Please DO this – it can help your marks and your learning.
  • use a decent dictionary like WordReference, not only does it act as a dictionary, it gives you examples of the contexts in which certain words and phrases are used, it helps avoid faux-amis and it offers synonyms to help you avoid repetitions. This is considered acceptable and not to be cheating. Again, like Grammarly, if you take the time, it can help you learn and develop your vocabulary.
  • change the language in Word/Open Office etc to English…. then you get a spell-check correction facility which can help you.  Effectively it acts as a dictionary – this is acceptable and is NOT cheating.
• Do read your written work OUT LOUD (à haute voix) – I know it sounds crazy, but it will help you. You hear the mistakes ‘bounce’ off the walls, you will ‘fall over’ errors and realise there is a problem somewhere. You will also begin to realise where your punctuation errors are creeping in as you will not have the proper ‘cues’ with which to read the work.   I am also going to ask you to read some of your work out in class to check on pronunciation etc, so doing some reading out loud beforehand might well help you…

RIGHT!  Let’s get started!

Tony