I was fortunate to attend the Australia New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference 2011 in late November in Perth; bonus that it was sponsored by my very own Edith Cowan University. The papers I contributed about Authenticity and Quintessence were received well.

Authenticity is an emerging area of interest to academic marketing researchers. How to measure this subjective experience, and then how to use it in a way which is ethical and effective are all big questions. I am hoping to use some of the contacts at the conference to further this research agenda. Stay tuned!

I recently attended ANZMAC, the academic marketing conference for Australia and New Zealand. It was great to be in rooms full of marketers talking about deep and meaningful marketing stuff while imbibing lots of champagne. I gave two papers there. One was on Service Dominant Logic and the Infinite Game and the other was on my main area of research, Customer Evangelists.

Some great people and scholars I met there: Elizabeth Dunlop (CSU), Professor Mark Uncles (UNSW), Professor Mark Laswon (U of Otago), Dr Chris Dubelaar (Bond), Associate Professor Francis Farrelly (Monash), Sabrina Mohd Rashid, John Turnbull, Kelly Choong and Trent Hennessey amongst others.

I recently presented a paper Smells like University Spirit and two posters at a Teaching and learning Conference at Edith Cowan University. The poster pictured was about how a student in one of my postgraduate Marketing Classes wrote a paper that we then partnered on to publish at a conference that year. The paper was titled Luxury purchases by working class males in regional Western Australia (Download Paper) and focused on males who purchase choppers just like the one he is sitting on in the photo.

Brad was one of my best students, but the technique of partnering with students and how to do it came from Prof Jamie Murphy who was my lecturer and is now my supervisor.