¶ … Integrated Marketing Communication Critical Assessment and Reflection

Group IMC Presentation Discussion

Our organ donation presentation team members are: Dadan, Aman, and I. I think we really connected as a team and we were really successful at understanding each other's way of thinking. Although we all came from different cultures like China, India and Saudi Arabia, we managed to easily reach consensus every time we worked together. I can evaluate our team experience as a very pleasant and fully enjoyable one. Although every member of our group has their strong and weak points we tried to take advantage of this matter in a positive way and we tried to use everyone's strong point in the exact part of the presentation that required it. For instance, Dadan was really good at finding articles and information that we could use in our presentation, while Aman was very good at creating graphics that could explain our point-of-view. As for me, it seems I was good at making sure that everything was in the right order and at organising all ideas in an appropriate way.

Communication within our team mainly took place on Facebook and by email and texting. We have also organised three meetings, all of them held at Griffith University. Preparations for the presentation played an important part in developing our language skills, and also improved the skill of working with other people, socialising, accepting others' opinions and respecting them.

An important part of our work was represented by the feedback we received. Although all team members considered our presentation was complete and organized efficiently, it seems several aspects should have been emphasized more during the planning step. The perspective offered by our colleagues and professor was very useful in making us understand the limitations of the presentation.

The positive feedback we received from our peers has acknowledged our hard work with the presentation and increased confidence in our skills. This was extremely important on individual, but also on group level. I think all team members were assessed individually, which gave us a lot to think about our performance, and also as a group. The evaluation we received on our presentation also refers to our abilities of working as a group. I think this was a very useful experience for us in helping us understand what being part of a team means.

The utility of this experience will be most obvious when we will be hired by companies and will have to work as part of different teams. Being a valuable team member is not an innate ability, but something that is achieved through practice. And this is exactly what we did for this presentation. We all took our roles within the team very seriously, and I think this was expressed by the smooth flow of our presentation.

Overall, I think our presentation went on very smoothly and according to plan. I am especially proud of having been able to correctly assess every team member's strong points and limitations and to assign each task accordingly. I think the most important factor that determined the success of our presentation is represented by the good communication we had within the team.

2. IMC Course Learning Discussion

2.1. Board Discussion

The discussion board was one of my favourite experiences regarding this Integrated Marketing Communication course. I think the task was very beneficial for our future in the business field because it helped us understand that marketing is both science and art. The discussion board is a great platform that enables student interaction and allows learning from each other's experience. It's a great way of making use of technology in order to get new ideas about learning or work.

The most important thing about the discussion board is that it allows free exchange of information between people of different cultural backgrounds. I think this is an important progress driver. One of the things I learned in the IMC course is that in order to understand your customer and to efficiently communicate with him or her, it is important to view the situation from his or her point-of-view. In other words, we should see things from clients' perspective. The discussion board ensured access to numerous different perspectives that helped me benefit from many useful ideas. It was also a great opportunity for me to express my own ideas and marketing knowledge.

I think discussion boards are also a good way in learning how to mitigate conflicts. Communication between people of different cultures also has its disadvantages. Differences...

This deteriorates communication between people and determines conflicts. It is difficult to avoid conflicts at all times, so I think everyone should be able to mitigate them when they emerge. Again, I think this is a skill that is developed through practice and this is another utility of our discussion board.
Colleagues on the discussion board shared their knowledge and opinions with our team regarding the presentation we offered. I value their feedback and learned a lot from it. I am sure I will use all their advice at some point in being able to deliver even better presentations than the one we did for the IMC course. I am sure that in my job I will be required to deliver presentations and they will probably be received more critically than the one we did for this course. Communication on the discussion board helped me identify areas where I need to work on improving my presentation skills. These areas refer to better structuring the presentation, to assessing the appropriate length of the presentation so that viewers are neither bored, nor left wanting more information, and to identifying the terms that need explanations for the public.

2.2. Articles Discussion

One of the assignments I had to perform for our presentation was to find articles on organ donation. I found two interesting articles that helped me inform the team about the topic and that also helped us decide on how to approach the issue. One of these articles was written by Dick Teresi, was published in the Wall Street Journal and is titled "What you lose when you sign that donor card." The information I found in the article was very important to me as a student, and even more important to me as a possible donor. The article provides information on how organs are harvested, on the possibility of donors feeling pain when their organs are harvested, and on different studies revealing the faults of medical procedures declaring patients brain-dead.

I think this is important information that everyone should know. If communicated properly, it could be an important point of focus. I think donors' situation during harvesting is an area that is given little importance by the media. Therefore, communication efforts into sending such information should be intensified. What I've learned in the IMC course can also lead me to the conclusion that players in the organ donation business do not want this information reaching the public. This makes such a communication project even more challenging.

Another interesting article I found was posted on Mayo Clinic's website, was written by its staff, and refers to the myths people associate with organ donation. The article was not necessarily interesting because of the information it presented, but because of the point-of-view it was written from. According to the article, the most important myths on organ donation refer to patients' worries that doctors will not be as interested in their situation if they decide to donate their organs, on how donors are declared brain-dead, on religion issues, on the age of the donor, and others. I think the article does not present scientific evidence to really back debunking these myths. The language and style are easy to understand, but I think a more official and formal style would be more appropriate. In addition to this, reading this article I thought that the writer really wanted to debunk these myths and persuade people to donate their organs instead of providing scientific data that could help people make an informed decision about this. I think this article is important in helping us understand how large players in this industry work on persuading people to donate, how they communicate with the public, and what communication methods they use.

2.3. Personal Key Learning Summary

I think the Integrated Marketing Communication course was one of the most interesting and complex courses I have yet attended. The most important thing about this course is that it seemed to really put together all the information I got from other marketing courses. I also think this was a very practical course that helped me develop my marketing skills.

The presentation we had to develop and sustain on organ donation was very important on different levels. On one level it allowed us the possibility to put into practice the knowledge we gained from this course and to efficiently communicate our point-of-view on the topic. On another level it showed us what it is like to work on a team. We had to be supervisors and team members at the same time, which…