NEWSLETTER FOR THE MEMBERS
OF THE GLOBAL MARKETING
SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP
Global Interests
Volume 11, Issue 2
Editor: Kate Gillespie, University of Texas at Austin
MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR
May 2008
INTERVIEW FROM THE EDGE
Global Marketing
Special Interest Group
INTERVIEW WITH AVEDIS SEFERIAN,
As plans for the 2008 Summer Educators’
Conference solidify, I’d like to use this time to recall
the excellent comments from the speaker featured
by the Global Marketing SIG at the Winter
Educators’ Conference event in Austin. Even though
several months have passed since the presentation,
many of these thoughts were formulated on the
plane leaving Austin, so they were reasonably fresh.
This was also an alternative to grading papers.
Reflecting on the Conference was an easy choice.
The Global Marketing SIG’s distinguished guest, Mr.
Jeff Kimbell, had recently left a position as marketing
manager of EAME (Europe, Africa, and Middle
Eastern) Operations for Dell Computer. That
experience led him to highlight four areas that stood
out during his assignment: Globalization,
Consumerism, the Internet, and the Environment.
While Jeff kept his comments to the agreed upon 20
minutes, he managed to highlight topics global
marketing educators’ need to turn greater attention
to.
Globalization: Jeff’s experiences in EAME included
the full range of country cultures and economic
development structures. This variation within one
Dell geographic region brings to mind the
remarkable diversity global marketers must work
with. Variety is the spice of life, but when meaning
comes from drilling down, looking for commonalities,
it can get in the way of good science. On the positive
side, one thing global marketers have plenty of is
(continued on Page 3, column 1)
IN THIS ISSUE
1
Chair’s Message
2
Interview from the Edge
3
The Global Marketing Classroom
4
Call for Nominations for Global SIG Awards
5
JIM Call for Conceptual Articles
6
Global Nuggets
Director of Compliance Administration,
Worldwide Responsible Apparel
Production (WRAP)
What motivated the American Apparel
Manufacturers Association (now the American
Apparel and Footwear Association) to help
create WRAP, and how does WRAP differ from
other NGOs in this field?
It all began with allegations of wrongdoing by Nike,
Reebok, Liz Claiborne, PVH, Kathy Lee and others
back in the mid-1990s. These allegations included
underpayment of wages and benefits, poor working
conditions for health and safety, poor dormitory
conditions for migrant workers, sexual harassment
and physical abuse and the use of child labor. It
was a wake-up call for the industry. Some brands
and retailers responded by creating their own
codes of conduct. Steve Jesseph, currently our
President and CEO, chaired a taskforce to develop
an industry-wide code. This taskforce—which
included industry representatives, NGOs,
academics and consultants—developed 12 key
Principles, which today is the WRAP Program.
These Principles cover the prohibition of child labor,
forced labor, harassment and abuse, and are
based on generally accepted international
workplace standards. They also include compliance
with local laws and workplace regulations and
covers human resources management, health and
safety, environment, freedom of association and
collective bargaining, customs compliance and
security. The end result of this task force’s work
was that, in 2000, WRAP was incorporated as an
independent, international non-profit organization.
Today we have three types of organizations that
subscribe to the WRAP Principles—brands (such
as Jockey), retailers (such as Costco) and
brand/retailers (such as Chico’s). These companies
Global Interests 1
(continued on page 4, column 1)
THE GLOBAL MARKETING CLASSROOM
Country Market Reports
Kate Gillespie
Associate Professor
The McCombs School
The University of Texas
kate.gillespie@mccombs.utexas.edu
Many of you may already assign country market
reports to students in your global marketing classes.
Others may be considering doing so. By country
market report, I mean a written evaluation of the pros
and cons of a introducing a certain product or
service to a certain national market and,
subsequently, a presentation of a proposed
marketing strategy. Internet sources—both free
online and available through most university
libraries—make possible this once daunting
research, analytical, and creative task.
Prior to each semester, I select enough projects to
accommodate 4-person groups. I try to find countries
where a business has yet to enter—or a country
where a business once entered and later withdrew.
Otherwise, students have a bias towards
recommending what the company did as opposed to
independently evaluating market strategy decisions.
I check country participation by going to the
company website and then looking for any news
stories linking country and company on a
comprehensive news search engine such as Factiva.
Some of my not-there-yet choices became of interest
to the real-life company while my students were
doing their research. This only helps to reinforce the
relevancy of the project. For example, Wal-Mart
reported interest in Turkey and Sea World
announced it was going to Dubai. While these big
U.S. names jump to mind, a great company that I
always use is Greenham & Sons, an exporter of
Australian beef. Culture, import regulations, currency
movements of competitor beef-exporting countries,
and B2B marketing make this a challenging but
fruitful exercise.
I kick-off the project by providing general (and
written) advice. This advice has evolved over the
years as I have determined what problems students
face. Here are three examples:
1. This is not an easy assignment. It is not a
scavenger hunt. Your job is more than finding easy
answers to simplistic questions. You should think till
it hurts.
The words “think till it hurts” seem to stick in the
students’ minds. Students need direction on such a
complex and encompassing project. But direction
has its drawbacks. The more you give, the more
students may cease to understand that their own
thought—a lot of it—is necessary. The reference to
a scavenger hunt is appropriate too. My students
have surprisingly little exposure to research before
this assignment. I wish to discourage them from
thinking that questions concerning entering a
foreign market can be answered in a fill-in-theblank format. They are discouraged from
envisaging the project as simply a series of
questions each in search of a single piece of
information which, when found, satisfies the
assignment.
2. Forget Yahoo! Forget Google! Use Factiva!
Actually the common (and free) search engines can
be useful. But your students will use them anyway.
What I continue to find surprising is the resistance
to using the better and more focused search
engines provided by college and university libraries
that they pay for with tuition and fees. Although
they all are introduced to these services in their
freshman year, they claim they can’t remember
how to use them. I have found that nothing short of
asking for a list of articles or reports found via
Factiva will really work.
However, just accessing Factiva isn’t enough.
There is an art to using key words to retrieve
material. This takes patience and practice. I
encourage students to come to office hours where I
will get online with them and help them. I once
pulled up for my Greenham group the wholesale
price in Japan for beef by cut for the current year.
After that, they were sold on the possibilities of
research.
3. Everyone in your group should begin by going to
the U.S. government export site and read the latest
Country Commercial Guide for your country.
These comprehensive country reports are great
places to start, and they often have information that
is difficult to find any where else. Once students
read these reports, they love them. One difficulty
we all face with student groups, however, is their
divide-and-conquer mentality. The group will assign
one member to political/regulatory environment,
another to culture, another to figure out the
implications of exchange rates, etc. So no one
clearly sees the point of reading a whole country
market report. Again, a scavenger hunt mentality
(continued on page 3, column 2)
Global Interests 2
Chair’s Message – continued from page 1, column 1
Global Classroom – continued from page 2, column 2
variation. Finding ways to quantitatively compare
disparate situations is the direction of the future.
Let’s explore those methods.
prevails. I have taken to asking before class each
day for a show of hands: Who has read their
country commercial guide? Repetition has its
place.
Consumerism: Jeff was not referring to the social
movement. He was highlighting the importance of
providing customer value, listening to customers.
Academics trained in global marketing can make
significant contributions to what marketing managers
hear, what they understand, how they respond to
customers. We can help them listen to nuances in
different languages. We can help them listen when
interpretations must be conditioned by cultural
understanding. We can help them listen in shaky
political situations that may be gone in a day or so. I
may be mistaken, but I don’t see much on this topic
in the scholarly literature, how the things we study
affect customer interpretation of value.
Internet: In Jeff’s Dell view, the significance of the
Internet to global development cannot be
underestimated. There is nothing surprising here.
The Internet is the first true global medium, available
worldwide. And even when some governments’ try
to impede access, the ability to circumvent
restrictions is likely to win (I’ve seen this happen in
my son’s Middle School). Yet the speed with which
technology is spreading has not been fully
comprehended. We anticipate, and consider
emerging situations. But what is next? Global
marketers need to contemplate a future of new
technologies, which create new consumer needs, in
different ways across the globe.
Environmentalism: In Jeff’s view, this one is not
going away. It’s also a topic that global marketing
scholars have taken a serious look at, with more to
come. As a worldwide movement, the contribution of
our field to understanding costs and benefits, both as
individuals and populations, will be invaluable to
marketing managers and public officials. This is also
an area where collaboration with academic units we
don’t typically associate with, such as engineering,
life sciences, and arts/design, holds great promise.
This topic offers the possibility of applying our
understanding of globalization, consumerism, and
the Internet across greater knowledge bases.
Much thanks to Kate Gillespie, University of Texas
and editor of Global Interests, for tracking down a
speaker of Jeff’s caliber. The Global Marketing SIG
tries to highlight a global marketing practitioner at the
reception of each Winter Ed Conference. In addition
to a short reflection on the field, members can
interact further with our speaker during the mingling
portion of the reception.
The last ideas that I would like to share concern
feedback. After we cover the first 8 chapters in my
textbook (which like most global marketing texts
covers the environmental context of global
markets), I have students turn in a three-page
outline. Most get terrible grades, but it is only 5
percent of their final grade. This is a wake-up call
for them, encouraging them to work as a group,
think more deeply, and use at least 30 not 3
sources in their final report. I type specific
comments and distribute these to each student via
Blackboard. I let the students raise their grades by
allotting 5 percent of their grade to their class
presentations. I tell them that I don’t grade content
just presentation style. My students all do well with
this and get As. The presentations are set before
the final written paper is due, allowing me to send
them another round of comments via Blackboard.
When I sit down to grade the final paper, I have two
sets of feedback for each group that I look at first.
Most groups do really well on the final report. But
no student has ever contested a lower grade when
I point out that I have asked them twice to fix a
problem or cover a topic and they still fail to do so.
If anyone is interested in my syllabus, Country
Market Report outline, online source suggestions,
list of projects I have used, or more advice to
students, feel free to contact me.
Global Marketing SIG Website
www.amaglobalsig.msu.edu
Contact information for all board members, as well
as the SIG policies, procedures, and history, is
available through the website. Your thoughts and
ideas are needed and welcomed.
Contact the editor at
kate.gillespie@mccombs.utexas.edu
All the best,
Frank Franzak
fjfranza@vcu.edu
Global Interests 3
Interview with Avedis Sefarian – continued from page 1,
column 2
require that the overseas factories that make the
products they sell be compliant with WRAP
Principles. We monitor these overseas factories
using professional audit companies with local offices
– to make sure they are knowledgeable of local
conditions, languages and laws. We train and
accredit individual auditors within each of these
companies to conduct factory audits for us.
A major difference between our organization and
other programs in this field is that WRAP
incorporates a management systems approach and
integrates within our certification legal, labor and
environmental compliance, plus customs regulations
and security compliance which is wholly consistent
with US C-TPAT (Customs-Trade Partnership
Against Terrorism) guidelines. We are not only
interested in seeing that factories are compliant
when an inspector visits but that they have the
procedures in place to stay compliant after the
inspector leaves.
I read that a major group in Costa Rica was
reported as signing on to WRAP as the US
Congress debated a free trade agreement with
their country. Is this just a coincidence?
We’d like to think it isn’t a coincidence. Recently
passed and pending bi-lateral and multi-lateral trade
agreements contain labor and environmental
provisions. When I was in Guatemala, I addressed a
business association and explained how
participating in WRAP could help them demonstrate
compliance to these new requirements under the
then newly passed DR-CAFTA. It has become clear
that business needs to assist in demonstrating
compliance in trade agreements, as no government,
let alone ones in developing countries, has the
resources to take complete charge themselves.
As a non-profit organization, how do you
measure success at WRAP?
We live in a globally competitive world. Brand
and factory owners are under constant pressure
to contain—even lower—costs. This tremendous
pressure carries the threat of cutting corners in
ways that can be detrimental to workers.
In today’s global supply chain, there are about
80 countries that produce for Western markets.
What may be an acceptable business practice in
one place could be considered unacceptable in
another. For example, in some countries, it is
perfectly acceptable to discriminate based on
someone’s race, gender or ethnic background,
which is unacceptable in western countries.
Others view social and environmental
compliance as a non-tariff trade barrier. So our
biggest challenge is trying to gain consensus
and active participation on the part of the
producing countries and companies about what
the terms of engagement for today’s global
supply chain should be.
Your web site suggests that you might be
considering extending WRAP’s model to
other industries. Which are you considering?
What advantages are there in such an
extension?
Our Principles are pretty universal for any laborintensive industry: treat your workers right, pay
on time, no child labor. So our model is
extendable to such industries as electronics,
furniture, house-wares, jewelry and more.
Can you describe the job you do at WRAP?
My main role as Director of Compliance
Administration is to manage the certification
program. As part a non-profit with a small staff, I
get to wear many hats. I guess you would say I
am a jack-of-all-trades, which is really very
satisfying because it means I have no typical
day. I am the in-house counsel, I liaise with
monitoring companies, run the certification
program, and even oversee our IT systems.
There’s something new every day.
We look at the number of participating factories. We
have seen this number grow 18-20 percent in each
What advice would you give students
of the past three years. We also look at the number
interested in working in a social compliance
of brands that subscribe to WRAP. But we look at
organization such as WRAP?
qualitative information, too. For example, many of
our participating factories tell us that applying WRAP
As this is a relatively new, multi-disciplinary field,
standards has helped them to retain workers. We
there is no clear career path to this area. A
see this as a sign that worker morale in increasing.
business or a legal background would be good,
In fact, we have well over 1 million workers in WRAP
but many practitioners have backgrounds in
certified factories in about 70 countries around the
quality, production, human resources, health and
world today. We are also pleased to see overseas
safety or environmental management. An
factories are now contacting us to understand how to
appreciation of multi-cultural environments, and
become socially compliant before they even seek
knowledge of foreign languages would be an
U.S. or European contracts.
asset.
What do you consider the toughest challenges
WRAP still faces?
Global Interests 4
Award Nominations
SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTIONS TO
GLOBAL MARKETING AWARD
The Global Marketing Special Interest Group of the
American Marketing Association invites nominations
(including self nominations) for its Annual Award for
Significant Contributions to Global Marketing.
The Award will be presented during the AMA
Summer Educators’ Conference, in San Diego, in
August 2008. This eminent award recognizes a
marketing educator for a lifetime of significant
contributions to the field. The key criterion is the
achievement of a record that has influenced the
advancement of global marketing thought.
2008 EXCELLENCE IN GLOBAL
MARKETING RESEARCH AWARD
The Global Marketing Special Interest Group of the
American Marketing Association invites nominations
(including self nominations) for its Annual Award for
Excellence in Global Marketing Research. The
Award will be presented during the Summer AMA
Educators’ Conference in San Diego, in August
2008. This distinguished award recognizes the
author(s) of an outstanding research article,
published within the last 10 years, which has
significantly influenced the direction of global
marketing.
Award recipients are expected to attend the 2008
Summer Educators’ Conference in San Diego to
receive their award. Nominations for either award
can be sent to William J. Lundstrom, Cleveland
State University, by June 1, 2008.
w.lundstrom@csuohio.edu
CALL FOR CONCEPTUAL ARTICLES
JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL
MARKETING
The greatest advances in international marketing
thought often begin with novel, insightful and
carefully crafted conceptual articles that challenge
conventional wisdom. The Journal of International
Marketing (JIM) wishes to publish conceptual articles
that advance international marketing thought and
that can serve as a foundation for future research
streams.
Conceptual manuscripts should advance theory
or the theory development process in the area of
international marketing. While welcoming
theoretical contributions grounded in
management, psychology, sociology, or
economics, JIM also welcomes submissions that
approach international marketing theory from
nonstandard perspectives.
Manuscripts can be submitted at:
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ama_jim.
Questions pertaining to the submission of
conceptual work should be directed to:
David A. Griffith
Editor, Journal of International Marketing
Associate Professor
Department of Marketing
The Eli Broad Graduate School of Management
Michigan State University
Phone: 517.432.6429
e-mail: griffith@bus.msu.edu
GLOBAL NUGGETS
Is Tata more American than IBM? It’s getting
hard to tell. U.S. sales account for 51% of total
sales at Tata, an India-based consulting firm.
U.S. sales account for only 35 percent of total
sales at U.S.-based IBM.
Source: Steve Hamm, “IBM vs. Tata,” Business
Week, 5 May 2008, p.28.
When is an Oreo not an Oreo? The Oreo cookie
was introduced in the USA in 1912 and in China
in 1996. But the Chinese were unimpressed with
a cookie they deemed too sweet. A newly relaunched Oreo was designed for the Chinese
market and bears little resemblance to its
American cousin. The new cookie is a chocolatecovered wafer with vanilla and chocolate filling.
Another redesign addresses the age-old problem
associated with chocolate—melting and freezing
both ruin its quality. A new process assures the
Oreos can withstand hot, humid weather in south
China as well as the cold weather of the north.
Julie Jargon, “Kraft Reinvents Iconic Oreo to Win
in China,” Wall Street Journal, 1 May 2008, p.28
Global Interests 5