Yevgen
Smotrytskyy
IATP - Ukraine's Internet window to the world
Every person has the right for life, freedom and
happiness. One will hardly argue seriously with this Jefferson's
triad. Philosophical disputes on the meaning of life, understanding
of freedom and happiness are as eternal as human being's instinctive
and intuitive striving for self-realization and achievement of a
comfortable spiritual, psychological and material condition.
Different epochs and cultures offer their own variants of answers
and their own possibilities. The European culture added its word as
well: it offered market economy, civil society and democratic
mechanisms of social management. Having overcome all the
difficulties and even growth illnesses, European culture displayed
to the world an example of human greatness. Ukrainian aspiration for
European culture and European community looks therefore quite
natural. We should clearly understand the problems we face; we
should almost feel the European culture and European lifestyle from
within. United States of America render considerable assistance to
Ukraine in this process. I would like to express here some ideas and
impressions after training on Marketing in Internet organized in
Kyiv by Internet Access and Training Program which is funded by the
US government.
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Evgeny Smotritskiy is
making a point during the Internet and Marketing training,
Kyiv
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Reorganization of any social organism is
naturally quite a painful process. Transition period in a society,
as well as transition age in a teenager's life touches spiritual and
material spheres of life, changes system of values, needs and
opportunities, changes state and society functions, changes every
person. It is not so easy to understand and even more difficult is
to refuse the old stereotypes, behavioural habits and the acquired
social roles, especially taking into consideration that a new turn
in the society was very precipitant and unexpected. But there is no
way back. There are no absolute repetitions in human life, neither
in the history of society. There are loops of history, which enable
returning to the main road of progress, which is ambiguous,
inconsistent, not always clear but inevitable.
The way of market reforms and democratic
transformations is declared the strategic direction of our society
development. Any strategy is to be supported by tactics. Concrete
measures, financial and organizational maintenance, legal base is
what we need. And the most important is goodwill, knowledge and
experience. In their absence all objectives will remain just
declarations and all the creative efforts will become destructive
agency instead. Various American programs aimed at support of
Ukrainian market and democratic reforms propose to share knowledge
and experience, to render technical and financial assistance.
The 'Marketing in the Internet' training was
conducted in Kyiv by trainers from Minsk: Elina Sharkova (master's
degree in the field of management teaching, a very experienced
trainer, studied in the USA and France and had been teaching
marketing in higher educational institutions of Minsk for many years)
and Vadim Popov (system engineer, an expert in Internet technologies).
The audience consisted of people belonging to different age groups (from
18 to 42), occupations (students, high school teachers, journalists,
commercial companies managers, NGO representatives etc.) and widely
representing different Ukrainian regions - Dnipropetrovsk, Lviv,
Chernovtsy, Rivne, Sevastopol and, certainly, Kiev.
A little lyrical digression. As a
teacher I was very pleased to see the active, keen, competent youth.
Almost everybody can speak English fluently, a lot of students are
study and work at the same time firms as managers or translators.
They know about business not only by hearsay or from books, but from
their own experience. Taking into account the awful heat, which made
working conditions very difficult (and we had to endure that 6 hours
per day), I am confident to say that these guys will have a good
future. They will do business in any circumstances, will do it in
the competent and energetic manner.
The training enabled its participants to get
acquainted with the basics of the science about goods and services
market promotion management, beginning from studying and analysis of
supply/ demand and ending with the sale strategy. Due to the
professionalism of the trainer Elina Sergeevna Sharkova the boring
and seemingly commonplace trading issues sounded philosophically and
touched deep layers of social and individual psychology. Believe me,
there is no exaggeration in these words at all. For example, the
value of market economy was deeply analyzed during the training.
Value is a special philosophical concept. When a person recognizes
one thing as valuable and significant and doesn't accept another, it
means he or she makes the act of estimation and choice based on his
or her world outlook and personal moral principles. And only after
choosing one way or the other, the person starts performing an
activity as a human being, i.e. in the conscious and responsible way.
The trainer proposed everybody to think it over once again and
formulate all pro et contra concerning the market and the most
important field of market activities - marketing. Having divided the
participants into two groups the trainer offered to prove one of the
two theses: 1) Marketing promotes creation of artificial values and
needs and thus harms both the person and society; 2) Marketing is
the engine of progress, it promotes development of both the person
and society. Both teams treated the question seriously and showed
deep understanding of the problem essence. Arguments for the first
thesis were the following. Market competition and marketing give
rise to the situation when a person's needs are satisfied to the
bigger and bigger extent. Laziness and human whim leading to human
degradation and, speaking literally, to adiposity, thus are more and
more supported. Furthermore, the market and marketing as though "forget"
about the main source of prosperity, about the nature. The society
with operating market mechanisms inevitably enters insoluble
conflict with the nature. The next argument "against": in
competitive struggle a "seller" becomes insincere to a "buyer", the
seller is ready to sell the goods at any cost, " with the pasted
smile ", which is definitely immoral. And one could even add more
arguments against the market. These arguments have been well known
for a long time. But, unfortunately, we have nothing better existing
as for today, mentioned the second group of the participants. Market
enables a person to realize his or her creative abilities, open his
or her potential in competitive struggle and thus to achieve
perfection. Market forms culture of manufacture, business relations,
client service. Market does not forgive wastefulness, irrationality,
and immoral attitude to the consumer, i.e. to the Individual. After
voting it turned out that the majority is FOR market economy, FOR
marketing as a tool of competent and successful work in market
conditions. And it is clear since the planned economy only declared
its advantages and clearly showed its lacks. Poor quality of goods
and services, rudeness, irresponsibility and exhaustion of the
environment became the norm of life everywhere where the planned
economy was applied.
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Vadim Popov, IATP/Belarus,
making a presentation during the training in Kyiv
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A theoretical digression. The moral
penetrates into all spheres of human activity. Therefore both market
and planned economy are supposed to conform to the moral standards.
Yet, they are in some sense neutral about the moral. The moral is
introduced in all fields of activity as if from the outside, from
the sphere of culture. Moral standards, values, relations should
provide stability for a society, "social health". Mechanisms of
culture should provide the effective control over performance of
moral standards. Any field of activity allowing anarchy inevitably
leads to moral degradation. In this sense the Market forces a person
to be moral while the Plan allows anarchy, which equals immorality.
In the market economy the consumer (i.e. everyone) controls the
quality versus the planned economy with its technical control
department (i.e. the factory manager), which actually dictates a
consumer the quality level and assortment of the goods and services.
It means the Market is more effective not only in economic, but also
in moral sense. In societies with market economy there are a lot of
immoral things. It is true. There is violence and larceny, but the
Market is only indirectly guilty of that. It is cultural degradation
to be blamed - as a moral regulator it uses insufficiently effective
mechanisms or only one mechanism - the Market and contractual
relations. It is no longer the Market's problem, but the one of
Culture. Only a person or human society can be either moral or
immoral. There are enough sinful priests, aren't there? But it
doesn't mean the whole religion is immoral.
If the market economy arouses spurn by its "pasted
smile", then our society - by "sincere boorishness". That's why I
propose to make choice towards the "pasted smile".
As a philosopher, I was especially interested how
marketing solves one of its main tasks: segmentation of the market.
Practically it is a new way of organizing social space peculiar to
the market economy. One of the most amazing thinkers of the 20th
century Pavel Florensky said: "…the whole culture can be interpreted
as the space management activity". Being eternal, the problem of
space management is acquiring a special urgency. We have little
space not only on the market, but on the whole Earth as well. The
art and science of space management increase our possibilities and
help to get more place for the most people to live happily. Internet
is further entering our lives. It has a new concept of time and
space management. Naturally, Internet marketing is developing with
fast pace. In more developed countries you can order all goods and
services to your hope with the help of Internet. Of course, you
would need well working e-mail. I think we have a long way to go to
such use of the Internet, but it's necessary to develop Internet
marketing for wholesale and sale of manufactured goods for non-mass
usage. Therefore it was interesting to know how to use Internet with
marketing purposes as Vadim Popov told us. Unfortunately, web sites
of our domestic manufacturers, which were shown to us, set an
example how you should not do, how to discourage the buyer to
purchase even the best goods. Well, experience is not a thing you
could buy, but everybody knows that it's better to learn by somebody
else's mistakes. World practice has plenty of positive examples -
take for instance trade mark Nike (sorry for unintentional
advertising)…
During the training various business games were
extensively used. The audience was getting a concrete problem and in
the course of solving it had to apply the theoretical knowledge it
had received at the training before. This teaching method helps to
actively stir up thinking, focus and memory because it adds to the
learning process an element of play and competition and emotionally
brightens it up.
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the rapturous audience is
giving flowers to the trainer, Elina Sharkova
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'Marketing and Internet' is just one of many
trainings conducted by Internet Access and Training Program in
Ukraine. This project is doing a great and important work by opening
access to new informational technologies for alumni of US sponsored
educational and cultural programs. To be more exact, Ukrainian
scientists who studied in the USA now have a possibility to use all
informational resources of the Internet, get training on Internet
general literacy, specialized search, web design, and other. It's
hard to undervalue the importance of this work. It gives alumni the
opportunity to become full members of the world scientific community,
introduce their achievements on the WWW, receive information about
international science communications (conferences, symposiums,
publications, communities, etc.), thus entering the level of
international scientific contacts. Here is the practical way of
Ukraine's positive image creation. I personally benefited from the
Internet, as well as from financial and organizational support of
the US Embassy in Ukraine, when got invitation to the 5th
International Symposium on the Philosophy of Chemistry in Great
Britain. I wouldn't even dream about it in the old days!
IATP is one of the programs
administered by International Research and Exchanges Board, a
non-profit organization aimed at supporting understanding and
cooperation between United States and countries of Central and
Eastern Europe, Eurasia and North-Eastern Asia. This organization
provides a lot of potential for professional growth of Ukrainian
scientists and journalists. For example, the Contemporary Issues
exchange program supports investigators in the following fields of
studies: market economy, democratisation and law leadership,
political, military, social and security problems, stability of the
civic society, Internet and copyright issues. Program titled
Professional Mass Media known as ProMedia collaborates with
independent newspapers, has a reference library and different
computer databases in Kyiv press center for journalists. IREX also
issues an on-line magazine SAPIENTI for alumni to publish their
articles and research. Within the program Individual Scientific
Research young investigators can actually conduct research,
participate in conferences and consultations. Besides these programs,
IREX administers a testing center where everyone can take TOEFL, GRE,
GMAT and US Medical Licensing Examination. These tests open doors to
American Universities.
To wind up the story, I want to say that the
opportunities provided by American programs are boundless. Getting
tangible results depends on how Ukraine, its scientists, teachers,
journalists, NGO representatives use these resources. In any case we
should thank Americans, their government and all people working on
implementation of these programs in Ukraine. Thank you!
Evgeny Smotritskiy,
Dnipropetrovsk,
26/7/01
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