Visitor To Advise On Business Course

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30769, 5 June 1965, Page 22

Visitor To Advise On Business Course

Dr. Reavis Cox, professor of marketing in the famous Wharton School of Finance and Commerce in the University of Pennsylvania. arrived in Christchurch last evening on an Erskine fellowship to advise the University of Canterbury on marketing aspects of its proposed post-graduate diploma in business administration.

Dr. Cox said this diploma would be of undoubted appeal and value, but it might be difficult to get New Zealanders to accept the United States practice of taking business courses after graduating n the liberal arts science, or engineering. However, this was a common American pattern which had been thoroughly tested. Dr. Cox said the field was so wide that he would confine himself in the interview to marketing. What constituted “marketing" was still one of the major controversies in business in the United States. In the narrow definition it covered selling, advertising, and other aspects of retailing. In the broader sense it embraced product planning, control of manufacture and physical distribution through all outlets, marketing research. some aspects of financing, and much more. “In my own teaching." said Dr. Cox, “I like to emphasise the over-all performance of adapting goods to the market and getting them to the consumer on one hand, and persuading the consumer by many means to accept the goods on the other. “And make no mistake: the final decision is still with the consumer whatever skills we may employ,” said Dr. Cox. Cost Control This brought in such aspects as cost control (practised much more aggressively in the United States than elsewhere), packaging, and a host of other influences. Education in marketing was carried out at three levels in the United States: —

Undergraduate: In the colleges which young people entered after high school at the age of about 17 but which often did not have full university status. Here elementary business was taught and the pupil product, after four years, might go into selling, retailing, advertising, distribution, and inventory. Graduate: This was work at university for a master's degree, usually after four years in a liberal arts college. The training was more sophisticated and this was where the

popularity of business training was seen most. Its products were the potential executive material of American business. Doctoral: Post-graduate degree work in the more specialised fields of economics, business, and possibly accountancy. These men were more likely to go into teaching and research. Field Expanding Dr. Cox said the demand for masters degrees in business administration, marketing, and related fields was expanding very rapidly. It was significant that business generally now appreciated the man with broad undergraduate training topped off with specialist business training. From what he knew of the New Zealand tradition, it might take a little time for the community to accept the idea that say an engineer, a scientist, or a graduate in liberal arts could, with postgraduate training in business, become a “captain of commerce.” “It is our experience that business can be taken effectively after almost any other kind of undergraduate training,” said Dr. Cox. In about 10 weeks in Christchurch, Dr. Cox will discuss how the university might adapt American experience to its plans for new business courses. He will give at least one public lecture and also seminars arranged by the university department of extension studies, supported by the New Zealand Institute of Management.