Day 12

Today was the last full day with our Cheong Kong students so we needed to be productive. We met at 10 AM to head out and complete the rest of our 70 surveys (we had 30 completed over the weekend). Everything here seems to move a lot more slowly than we’re used to – people just don’t have the same sense of urgency as us Americans. It can be frustrating, but there’s little we can do. So we met at 10, but didn’t actually start any surveys until after 1:00 PM! We split into 2 groups and managed to do 35 surveys all day – a bit lower than our goal of 70. We’ve given up though – too difficult.

To do the surveys we visited an IT or Digital Mall. An interesting concept – there are just tons of little shops each selling 1 or 2 brands exclusively where you can bargain and get things for roughly 20% less than a normal electronics retailer. The one we visited had 3 or 4 floors of shops crowded with people and a food court – a great place for surveys. Unfortunately the management didn’t agree. After about 10 surveys, we started to attract their attention. Before we knew it there were 4 of them surrounding us with walkie talkies asking us to leave. They even said something “not very friendly” according to our Cheong Kong student. Unfortunately, she wasn’t willing to elaborate – we have a feeling it was something bad about the Americans!

The rest of the day was spent doing secondary research. Things are coming together nicely – we’re all feeling a little better about having something together for Thursday’s presentation to the Polaroid executives. It was a long day though – class discussion started at 9 and I’m just now (10 PM) getting back to my room!