Dr. Neil Hair

One of the most useful conferences I try to attend each year – the International Colloquium on Relationship Marketing – is being held in Henley on Thames next year in sunny England (dont worry – in September, when it should still be sunny!). Vargo and Lusch aka Drs Service Dominant Logic will be in attendance as well as the usual RM crowd including David Ballantyne, Roger Palmer, Moira Clark and most likely my good friend from over the boarder Lyle Wetsch. As I have blogged before now, the conference is a single track affair which means should you get a paper accepted for presentation you get to run the gauntlet of excellent feedback (which proved really helpful for my PhD back in the day). I cant recommend it enough. Accordingly, as a heads up, we are proud to host the 2011 ICRM conference at the E Philip Saunders college of business. I look forward to seeing the worlds relationship marketers converge on our shores to discuss progress in the field.

Over the summer one of my other projects was the design of a new course on commercializing virtual worlds. Despite some of the press signaling the end to virtual worlds, usage by the dedicated has continued to grow. Its a bit like saying just because Oprah has got fed up of tweeting that the era of micro blogging has waned. Utter twiddle. Accordingly Saunders has, what I believe to be, the worlds first class that looks exclusively at commercializing new student run enterprises inside a virtual environment. For this purpose we are using Second Life. Second Life retains its popular interest, virtual entrepreneurs are continuing to make real money, and we get to use the RIT Second Life island facilities (which now sports a spangling new business park facility that my students are using). The core aim of the class is to show students how you can apply marketing towards establishing a viable virtual business thus becoming a cadre of virtual terraformers. The deliverables are (expectedly) many. A business plan and presentation aimed at venture capitalists; a personal branding strategy that strategizes the best use of virtual media for putting students in their best light; an e-portfolio charting learning experience and key findings from their travels and of course the intangibles of developing supporting media that can be used in-world (such as youtube videos and the like). Whether Second Life is here to stay is not the question. What will remain however is expertise in researching, planning for and executing a market enabled business plan that graduates will be able to continue to use in any virtual world environment. Yet another course to add to the experiential learning list of a Saunders’ student resume.