BUS 362: Multicultural Marketing

BUS 362: Multicultural Marketing
Case/Article Outline
Fill out the following matrix with thoughtful, intelligent statements.
Bullet format
Preparation for discussion in class

|Student Name Hyder M. Alikhan |
|Case/Article Name The Cosmopolitan Corporation |
|Date November 8, 2012 |
|Situation in the Case
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| |
|Articles: What are the most important points of the article in your own words?
|
|Global success requires that companies appreciate diversity and distance rather than seek to eliminate them. |
|Unbalanced growth, pockmarked by financial distress. The threat of protectionism brought on by persistently high unemployment, particularly in developed |
|countries. |
|Tensions, in wealthy nations as well as poor ones, around ethnic, religious, and linguistic divides, and talk of a new age of secession or tribalism. |
|These are some of the developments that contradict the story we had just gotten used to—the one about how markets were becoming perfectly integrated across |
|borders, technology was obliterating distance, and national governments were now irrelevant.
|
|Primary problems in the case: Prioritize |
|The aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 reminds us of the many ways in which differences still matter. |
|Ninety percent of the world’s people, it is estimated, will never leave the country where they were born. Two percent of all telephone calling minutes are |
|international. |
|People get 95% of their news from domestic sources, and those sources focus most of their coverage on domestic news. |
|Only 21% of U.S. news coverage is international, and of that, half deals with U.S. foreign affairs. |
|In European countries about 38% of news is international, but almost half relates to stories involving other countries in Europe. |
|Only 5% to 10% of private charitable giving crosses national borders, and rich countries’ governmental aid to the foreign poor, per person, has been calculated|
|to be one thirty-thousandth the size. |
|Global firms and managers must adopt a cosmopolitan approach of understanding and working with differences rather than against them. |
|Solutions that match the problems |
|Participation in intercultural activities and networks (which corporations can easily facilitate through international projects) tends to soften ethnocentrism.|
| |
|Businesses have certain advantages over business schools. They can |
|provide stronger incentives promoting particular behaviors that cultivate cosmopolitanism |
|have the opportunity to work with key executives over a longer time horizon |
|and can bind together diverse groups by promoting shared values, culture, and processes |
|have more scope to leverage online collaboration, translation, and social-networking tools, which very few companies (or business schools) fully exploit. |
|Scholars have created a variety of assessment tools to reinforce programs aimed at improving international skills. |
|In the AACSB report, Pankaj proposes that every MBA graduate and presumably, every global manager have a minimum body of globalization-related knowledge, |
|including: |
|A handle on levels of and changes in cross-border integration of markets of various types. |
|An understanding of how differences between countries can influence cross-border interactions and how to look at them at the industry level. |
|Awareness of the benefits of additional cross- border integration, and some perspective on the problems it’s alleged to produce. |
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