For the third consecutive year, students from the MSc Marketing, MSc International Marketing and MSc Tourism Marketing Management programmes spent a week in Dubai in March, attending a Sector Studies – Marketing in a Digital and Cross-cultural World elective.
Besides lecture input on the Dubai campus, the class also included several hands-on elements. The 14 students visited GMASCO, one of Dubai's largest integrated agencies, to learn how leading brands such as Toyota use a variety of online and offline channels to address the market. In small teams, they conducted a structured observation of how culture is manifested in the marketplace at the Dubai Mall, and had to research the multicultural environment of the UAE in order to provide recommendations to leading brands, as well as developing social media recommendations to address specific marketing aims. Students also took part in shortlisting the ten boldest marketing ideas for the global 2014 Pioneering Spirit Awards, in a session facilitated by Graeme Atha, director of The Marketing Society.
Mingming Li, one of the participating students, said, "I liked the setting of this cross-cultural and digital class. It is a new and innovative class to me. The class as well as the guest speaker (for example, the visiting of the advertising company) impressed me a lot. Mostly, I gained a lot of practical thinking. Since marketing is a practical action rather than only the academic content, all of us obtained very useful knowledge and experiences from the course. Also, as international students, we had many chances to do group work and presentations together, which is another way to learn through cross-cultural collaboration."