Judgement Time

The marketing presentations consumed the morning. The only ones more confused than me must've been the Chinese students trying to keep up with the presentations. Given the time and the language being used it was impossible to satisfy all parties with the presentation. Still, I will never forget the four P's of marketing:
Place, Price, Product, and Promotion
And now I know what SWOT is, strengths and weakness of the product, and Opportunities and Threats in the market.

As much as international marketing is a foreign concept to me, much of it is so similar to just being adaptable. With regards to altering a product for the market, that's not to far from changing your own attitude and habits for a new culture.

Next was our long bus ride to Shenzhen to visit the watch factory. I was forewarned that Shenzhen was an international city, focused on production and development, and the watch factory echoed that warning. Peering over tables of intricate, simple processes done repetitively made me thankful for my own job back home. It wasn't exactly appropriate to pity the workers, since most of watch production cannot be automated, why not provide some jobs? Although there must be some irony to a high emphasis on turn out while making watches, keeping time.

Running late from the factory brought us directly to dinner with the university president who was willing to share a meal with us. Of course respecting power distance meant there was only one Cap student at the table, but the meal was proper none the less.

From there we moved to our last English corner with the students at Huizhou. This one was an open debate on a certain topic, my group was debating whether or not one should watch Hunnan TV. As I learned this particular TV station plays programs similar to our MTV -meaning lightly scripted reality TV. The students were divided into sides and each side had 5 seconds for someone to stand up to speak or they lost for that round. The objective was to come up with as many valid points as possible.

As the five second countdown began you could ensure that someone was going to stand up right at "...2, 1". The students, while a bit shy with their English, they were still very competitive.

We then hopped in the bus and went to KTV, a kareoke place. Kind of ironic really that the students and I had argued that there's better ways to spend time than watching reality TV, but everyone wanted to go to kareoke -which we can assume has more validity that reality TV?

Last little touch of globalization must've been the kareoke music videos of Vancouver in the 80s. When a song didn't have a music video instead we got clips of Vancouver in the 80s, random.