Talk about a favourite class you like
My favourite class that I took was a class I took about five years ago. The class was on International Trade and Marketing for an International Market. I was a second-year student at university and I was eager to begin to specialize in my field. You see at that time I had all these ideas about how I could get rich by selling Chinese-made products to the west. You know, I think there are a lot of people who have the same dream that I did. My thinking was that what I could sell wasn"t available in the west, so international marketing would just be about telling the world about it, and then waiting for the money to come in.
In this course we had a professor who was not only knowledgeable from a theoretical standpoint, he also had a lot of practical knowledge, since he used to work for a Chinese company who sold products in America. He lived in America and supervised the efforts of the marketing department, so he had a rich knowledge of the kinds of things that can go wrong when you"re trying to market to people from a different market. He told us how some Chinese executives would choose certain clients over others only because they were willing to make advance payments, but that in fact the clients who wanted better .credit terms were actually more profitable clients. He said it was natural for executives to favor clients who paid early in China, but that in the west where credit was the norm most clients thought it quite normal to pay over long periods of time. He said that some clients took advantage of this mindset to try and squeeze lower prices out of his company.
The style was completely anecdotal. By that I mean he just told stories. He tried to organise these stories as they related to the theory, and they tended to make sense from a practical way of looking at the issues. He also gave us a lot of humorous examples of cultural differences along the way. But he also told us that people are people wherever they come from, and he even told us how he exported products to places like Rwanda and how similar they were to us in many respects.
It was my favourite because it taught me what issues to think about before setting up any international trade. More than just knowledge it also helped me to understand the issue of culture better, and this was very relevant to me since I am planning to go overseas soon.
