Creating a personal brand is a difficult yet indispensable exercise to be competitive on nowadays’ ruthless job market. Social media have intensified exposure and visibility of our personal and professional lives, and accentuated the need for us to stand out.
As part of the events organised by the Career Services at the University of Glasgow, the students of the Adam Smith Business School were invited to a Career night, exposing them to key advice from successful professionals. On this occasion, MaRVL invited Adrien Kirschfink from Accenture, who shared his tips on how to achieve a successful international career, and build a personal brand.
Create and nurture your personal brand. Know who you are and what you stand for. This is adjustable over time and contexts, but keep consistency in the way your behave and communicate, both in real life and online. Like Coca-Cola, you can have different flavours to adjust to local preferences and markets, but you need to maintain a strong and recognisable core brand.
Ensure that your employer’s valuesmatch your own. Enriching and satisfactory work experiences are highly dependent on the employee/employer match.
Network within and outside your company. Don’t be closed to new connections, and keep in touch with people that made an impact in your life. Be genuine in your relationships, and favor quality over quantity.
Adrien summarises his vision with the “3 As”
Strive for Authentic growth. Trying to behave in a way that does not reflect how you truly are can only last so long.
Allow yourself to take a risk every day. It is by taking risks that we evolve and surpass ourselves.
Amaze yourself every day. Never forget the (little) things in life that put a smile on your face and make you strong.
Adrien is a Strategy Senior Manager at Accenture New York. He graduated from HEC-ULg in Belgium and has since then developed his personal brand of successful consultant.
Animal welfare is an important ethical issue in relation to modern food production and consumption and awareness of the negative consequence of current production practices is growing. Public outrage is instant and vociferous when pictures of maltreated animals are shown on TV. Inevitably, this results in calls for malpractices to stop and for changes to be made.
Politicians and authorities, who used to be in charge, increasingly look to ‘the market’ to drive improvements in animal welfare, as there seems to be a consensus that regulation alone cannot secure the desirable level of animal welfare. This market is usually taken for granted and assumed to work via anonymous market mechanisms such as Adam Smith’s famous invisible hand. However, in recent years there has been a realisation that markets do not simply exist, but are enacted on an ongoing basis through the concrete everyday activities of different actors.
Together with my colleagues Kathrine Nørgaard Hansen and Maja Pedersen, I have explored how the conditions for animal welfare are shaped by the practices of various actors in the pork industry and how these practices can reshape the market with a view to improving marketing activities and increasing sales of pork produced to better welfare standards than mandated by regulators. As viewers of Borgen will know, animal welfare can be a highly contentious issue in Denmark. The overall purpose of our project was to analyse if we can expect markets to play a role in promoting animal welfare in the Danish pork sector.
The Danish pork sector is interesting in this regard because it is very export-oriented (more than 90% of production is exported). Furthermore, the Danish pork sector is under pressure to keep costs down, as labour costs are higher in Denmark compared to competitors in order countries. There are therefore widespread concerns about the ability to recoup extra costs if animal welfare standards are improved unilaterally in Denmark.
Data was collected with actors along the entire value chain in Denmark and customers on five export markets (Australia, China/Hong Kong, Great Britain, Sweden and the US) and relevant export managers from Danish firms.
The study uncovered particularly interesting market practices:
Practices differ significantly between countries, both in terms of the importance assigned to animal welfare and how animal welfare issues are enacted in day-do-day operations of various actors in the food chains. However, in all six countries, actors are trying to improve animal welfare. They sometimes have different ideals and goals and to some extent actors can therefore see each other as obstructing the good they are trying to accomplish.
Although most actors agree that animal welfare can be improved, animal welfare improvements are highly contested. Different and to some extent conflicting considerations have to be reconciled in order to successfully improve animal welfare. How should pigs and sows be treated? This can be contentious in itself, but what is ideal from an animal welfare perspective is also up against economic considerations as primary producers, slaughterhouses, etc. are concerned about whether they will be able to recoup extra costs they will incur if they improve animal welfare or if they will we loose competitiveness on international markets.
Marketing considerations need to be taken into account, can animal welfare be used to position and differentiate from competitors?
Animal welfare is systemic – one actor cannot improve animal welfare in its own. It requires coordination and collaboration of numerous actors: farmers, slaughterhouses, meat processors, retailers, consumers, authorities, animal welfare organisations, third party auditors and more
Drawing on new approaches to thinking about care as complex, other and self-regarding behaviours, which is partially socially constructed, this research project explores the interrelationships between sustainability, health and quality of life. Care about and for ourselves as individuals, and for our wider communities embodies issues of sustainability, health and quality of life. The research investigates these issues by actively engaging with groups involved in promoting local food production and consumption in Glasgow. The project is funded by the University of Glasgow’s Knowledge Exchange Fund and is concerned with developing new resources about local food projects in partnership with existing local groups.
The term ‘urban agriculture’ (UA) is one we might not associate with an old industrial city like Glasgow but like other old industrial cities in the UK, a discourse of UA is finding its way into local government policy initiatives. For example, during the first week of our research we attended a conference organised by Glasgow City Council (GCC) in partnership with the Soil Association Scotland entitled ‘Glasgow, Sustainable Food City’. This involved a series of talks and discussions geared towards implementing a sustainable food strategy for Glasgow. The event elicited a range of ideas: “more school gardens”, “a much better map of available and potential growing land”, “a vibrant street food culture” and much more.
While the event noted above marks an important juncture in the City Council’s approach to UA, of crucial concern to our research is an already existing network of grassroots community food initiatives in the city. In the same week as the GCC event, we attended a meeting held by the Glasgow Local Food Network (GLFN). The GLFN is an informal network of community organisations and individuals from across the city “that are passionate about local food and strive to produce more of what we eat and eat more of what we produce” (http://glasgowlocalfood.blogspot.co.uk/). The passion and commitment of local growers across much of Europe, like the GLFN, has helped push UA up the policy agenda. Similarly, for a sustainable food strategy policy to be effective, it must value and utilize the wealth of knowledge being cultivated at the ground level.
Community gardens: an alternative to global food production and consumption
The value of grassroots community food initiatives and UA more generally is quantifiable. For example, we can measure: a decrease in food miles that comes with local food production and consumption; the acreage of unproductive urban space revitalized through a variety urban agricultural practices, and the volume of materials recycled in such practices (e.g. timber for raised beds; food waste for compost; water capture and storage). Other potential values of UA are less easily quantified but no less important for people committed to creating sustainable communities of care in our city. These relate to, amongst other things, awareness of environmental and human health, community cohesion and resilience and the co-production and sharing of knowledge and skills. It should also be noted that modern urban agricultural practices are, for some, deeply embedded in issues of political struggle. Many UA practitioners understand their work as part of an ongoing struggle to de-commodify urban spaces and secure an urban commons for future generations.
Our project began in earnest three weeks ago and in that short time we have encountered all of the issues raised above and more. With a clear methodology beginning to develop, the next five months should be an exciting time for all involved.
John is a researcher at the University of Glasgow in the Adam Smith Business School working with Professors Deirdre Shaw, Andy Cumbers and Robert McMaster on the Caring City project.
To find more about local food communities in Glasgow, visit:
I am absolutely delighted to present this research on Thursday 20th March 2014 at 9.30am in the Department of Marketing, University of Glasgow and as a preface to the seminar I hope a little back story might be interesting, hence this blog post.
Let’s start from a pedagogical experience, the kernel of this research came from undergraduate student work in the Department of Marketing, University of Otago, New Zealand. The film that is part of this published research was developed from an earlier version that was submitted as a visual media presentation of a consumption experience analysis for a 300 level Consumer Culture paper. We started encouraging students to work in visual media (most commonly videography) as a mean of representing knowledge and creating insight.
Our experience reinforces current research in this area, not only can videographic research be a powerful alternative to the dominant textual form but it effectively records bodily representations and presence in contextual space; emotional, resonant and attention grabbing expressions; more “real” and “authentic” representations and ability to capture context-rich and multi-sensory environments. We also found that our students are more intuitively eloquent in the visual than the textual form. Our experience finds that our undergraduate students are able to express subtlety and tension in consumption experience analysis that often eludes them when seeking to express the same insights in a textual form. The range of topics addressed visually have been ‘eclectic’ from Ken and Barbie discussing gendered stereotypes at play in alcohol advertising to ‘trolleyology’ (a visual exploration of the supermarket environment) to crossing the gender divide (comparing media representation of androgyny with consumers lived experiences) to using self-reflexive video diaries to illustrate consumption practices used to recreate a sense of home for international students.
Ken & Barbie gender stereotypes?
The common element to all of these topics is the insight added through the use of a visual aspect which so often challenges verbal or textual representations. For example in the accompanying film linked to the published article, we ask our male household to consume a meal commonly consumed by the female household and vice versa, the film illustrates clearly the tension, discomfort and distaste that accompanies this experience far more eloquently than the actual words uttered (click link below).
Belk, R. W., & Kozinets, R. V. (2005). Videography in marketing and consumer research. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 8, 128–141.
De Valck, K., Rokka, J., & Hietanen, J. (2009). Videography in consumer research: Visions for a method on the rise. Finanza Marketing e Produzione, 27, 81–100.
Pink, S. (2007). Doing visual ethnography. London: Sage.
Pink, S. (2009). Doing sensory ethnography. London: Sage.
Spanjaard, D., & Freeman, L. (2007). Tread softly: Using videography to capture shopping behaviour. In M. Craig-Lees, T. Davis, & G. Gregory (Eds.), Asia-Pacific Advances in Consumer Research, 7. (pp. 26–29) Sydney: Association for Consumer Research.
Schembri, & Boyle (2013). Visual ethnography: Achieving rigorous and authentic 388 interpretations. Journal of Business Research, 66, 1251–1254.
Turner, K., Ferguson, S., Craig, J., Jeffries, A., & Beaton, S. (2013) Gendered identity negotiations through food consumption. Young Consumers 14(3), 280-288
Why do consumers who say they are concerned about the environment continue to purchase products that are not environmentally-friendly? This is an interesting phenomenon because despite consumers’ growing environmental consciousness and positive attitudes towards the environment, the adoption rate of green products in recent times has been falling. Indeed many consumers continue to buy environmentally hazardous products regardless of their concern for green alternatives. To quote Michal Carrington and colleagues, they do not “walk the talk”.
Dr Lay Pen Tan (from Macquaire University) and I decided to explore this phenomenon in more depth, which involved conducting focus groups as part of a pilot study in New Zealand. Reasons given by participants for not purchasing green products varied. For example:
Green products were perceived to be more expensive than other products. As Tracy stated, “well if you’re struggling to pay the bills you’re not going to worry about it”.
Some consumers queried whether environmentally-friendly products were as effective as other products.
Other consumers did not trust the product’s environmental claims. As Mary informed us, “I don’t trust people who are using the word…everything is organic and green….It’s just a marketing ploy”.
For many consumers, the information provided was often confusing.
An important issue also was the perception that it is too hard to be green. As Kim stated, “I think at the end of the day people are inherently lazy. And if it’s too hard they’re not going to do it.”
As our study highlighted, some consumers have not yet personalised the green issue because they have difficultyidentifying how and why it is necessary to take action. Consequently, short-term gains are valued over long-term benefits. In other words, people would rather experience immediate gratification than wait for larger future gains. This typically holds true for environmental gains because it may be difficult for consumers to comprehend what the long-term effects are, when they are likely to occur, or how their actions can have an impact. As one person said, “they haven’t actually ever proven that anyone’s died from using XYZ [well-known brand]”.
The challenge then for marketers, is trying to make long-term social dilemmas such as the environment, meaningful to consumers. Whilst there is a growing awareness of environmental issues, the majority of consumers today continue to purchase along traditional lines; in other words they seldom, if at all, buy “green” products. If marketers and policy-makers want to encourage more people to become green, they need to focus on this group rather than the elusive “green segment”. The green challenge might be difficult but it is not hopeless. As a twenty year old participant stated, we need to change “the idea in people’s minds that even just doing something is better than doing nothing”.
