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New strategy for cross-border marketing relies on interdependent ecosystem
LAWRENCE – In a recent article, a University of Kansas professor introduces a new concept-based approach to inform and guide cross-border marketing strategy. It looks at how Starbucks, Uber, Airbnb, Amazon and Apple function in today’s digitally interconnected worldwide markets. It’s published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing. “Marketing ecosystem orchestration (MEO) is creating the environment for the whole marketplace to grow and become better,” said Murali Mantrala, the Ned Fleming Professor of Marketing.
Conservative or queer-friendly? Russian writer reassessed
LAWRENCE – In a new book chapter, two University of Kansas researchers challenge the notion that Ivan Goncharov was the most conservative Russian writer of his time. “Part of what we’re trying to say is that Goncharov is actually putting some really interesting philosophies and ideas into the mouth of this nihilistic character, who’s not quite as problematic as we think,” said Ani Kokobobo, associate professor and chair of the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Languages & Literatures.
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Contact: Jon Niccum, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
New strategy for cross-border marketing relies on interdependent ecosystem
LAWRENCE — The COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with supply chain obstacles, has made the international marketplace even trickier for businesses to navigate. But Murali Mantrala, the Ned Fleming Professor of Marketing at the University of Kansas, advocates that companies consider a new approach.
“Marketing ecosystem orchestration (MEO) is creating the environment for the whole marketplace to grow and become better,” Mantrala said.
“And in the process, it ‘lifts all boats.’”
His article titled “Cross-border marketing ecosystem orchestration: A conceptualization of its determinants and boundary conditions” introduces a new concept-based approach to inform and guide cross-border marketing strategy. It looks at how Starbucks, Uber, Airbnb, Amazon and Apple function in today’s digitally interconnected worldwide markets. It’s published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing.
“From the perspective of our research, the old model of thinking was that multinationals have to expand abroad and pick and choose what kind of partnership or arrangement they enter,” said Mantrala, who co-wrote the article with colleagues Kelly Hewett, G. Tomas M. Hult, Nandini Nim and Kiran Pedada.
“They basically invest in their own assets and partnerships to build what we call the value chain. But when you look around since about the last 10 years — maybe even 20 years — a lot of the most successful companies are those that are not relying simply on developing their own chain. They’re actually fostering or seeding growth in areas which might benefit them but also could benefit other parties independently.”
Mantrala interviewed several dozen CEOs and CMOs from different companies while looking at case studies of how these businesses adapted to new environments using MEO.
“The most misunderstood thing about the international marketplace is that somehow companies can simply bulldoze their way through other countries and just do things for themselves,” he said. “I think the entire environment has to be supported.”
For example, Starbucks, the Seattle-based company that is the world’s largest coffeehouse chain, thoroughly tailors its approach to expansion based on what country is involved. In Spain, Portugal and India, Starbucks adopted exclusive marketing partnerships.
“Like in India, Starbucks relied more on these joint ventures; it didn’t do much in terms of trying to build up the coffee-drinking habits of the country or in coffee growing,” he said. “But in China, which was really a tea-drinking place, it figured out that first it has to create the market through marketing ecosystem orchestration.”
This produces the most lasting kind of market. Otherwise, countries such as China sometimes force companies to leave that are becoming too successful on their home turf.
“China actually welcomed the way Starbucks is going about doing things,” Mantrala said. “It not only helps Starbucks, but helps a lot of farmers and other workers. This approach is not necessarily meant for everyday marketing but for CMOs or CEOs thinking of launching or entering new markets.”
This strategy isn’t exactly a modern invention. It’s been used in past decades by subsidiaries of multinationals — such as the London-based consumer goods company Unilever and US corporation General Electric — to penetrate rural sectors of emerging markets like India and Bangladesh. In more recent times, tech company platforms such as Uber and Amazon often use an MEO approach in different country markets.
The impetus for Mantrala’s research didn’t start with coffee; it started with newspapers.
“The industry had advertisers and readers, but they really were getting hammered by online news sources. Newspapers needed new strategies to figure out how to keep financially viable,” he said of his platform-based research.
Mantrala discovered that the financial fallout was not as bad as newspaper publishers assumed because they kept thinking their success was based on getting more advertisers. They were abandoning investments in the editorial side only to realize advertisers were there in order to get to the readers, and readers were only attracted by strong editorial content.
“What they should really be investing in is the editorial content, and they were doing the exact opposite,” he recalled.
Based on this research of networking and building two sides of a market, Mantrala was recruited to be part of a thought leadership conference in his home country of India at the Indian School of Business. This developed into a group tasked with “new thinking for international strategies,” which became this current team working on marketing ecosystem research.
A faculty member at KU since 2020, Mantrala specializes in quantitative marketing strategy, specifically retailing channels, marketing resource allocation and salesforce management.
The professor believes marketing ecosystem orchestration represents the perfect corporate strategy for the here and now.
“There’s all this emphasis on sustainability, especially among the younger generation,” Mantrala said. “MEO is very consistent with that sustainability and ‘justice for all’ kind of thing. Because what you’re really advocating is that if you want to be healthy and profitable and grow, it sometimes pays off to invest in other actors and activities in the market.
“It supports people who support you.”
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Contact: Rick Hellman, 785-864-8852, [email protected]
Conservative or queer-friendly? Russian writer reassessed
LAWRENCE — In a new book chapter, two University of Kansas researchers challenge the notion that Ivan Goncharov was the most conservative Russian writer of his time. Rather, they assert, Goncharov’s treatment of a nihilistic character in his 1869 novel “The Precipice” reveals a certain sympathy with a “queer” approach to “normal” family life.
It’s not that the character Mark Volokhov is homosexual. Rather, it’s his devil-may-care attitude toward then-typical gender roles, along with any other societal norm.
Ani Kokobobo, associate professor and chair of the University of Kansas Department of Slavic and Eurasian Languages & Literatures, and Devin Culley McFadden, a doctoral candidate and graduate teaching assistant in the department, are among the international scholars brought together to reexamine Goncharov’s life and work through a 21st-century critical lens. Kokobobo and McFadden combined to write the chapter “The Queer Nihilist — Queer Time, Social Refusal, and Heteronormativity in Goncharov’s The Precipice” in a new book, “Goncharov in the 21st Century” (Academic Studies Press, 2021), edited by Ingrid Kleespies and Lyudmila Parts.
Kokobobo, who has written about Goncharov before, was invited to contribute to the project and eagerly involved her colleague as collaborator.
“My dissertation covers queer Russian literature from the 1880s to the 1930s,” McFadden said, “and this was a little bit earlier than that, so it helped me expand my research so that I had a full spectrum of Russia’s queer literary history.”
McFadden and Kokobobo write that, during the 20 years Goncharov worked on his magnum opus, Russia was in the midst of pre-Revolutionary fervor that included a clash of nihilist and materialist ideologies. In this context, the author — who worked for a time as a czarist censor — is typically seen as an anti-nihilist and a political conservative.
But the KU researchers argue that Goncharov has made the nihilist character, Mark, quite attractive, while he makes the normative ones unattractive. And keep in mind, these are not the fire-starting, extortionist nihilists of the 1998 film “The Big Lebowski.”
“Russian nihilists during this time aren’t necessarily the quintessential Nietzschean ones that we think about, because also this is 10 or 20 years earlier than Nietzsche, and so these ones were more positive and productive,” McFadden said.
“Nihilism is not really a belief in nothing,” Kokobobo said. “It is a kind of commitment to objective reasoning and science as a way to understand the world. Scientific reasoning, in Russia, was seen in many ways as a form of nihilism because it’s not faith-based. In Goncharov, it can also be a belief that one has to destroy all existing civilizational models and ways of thinking in order to achieve any future truth.”
There were many intersectional strands and layers of nihilistic thought in Russia, Kokobobo said, with some like Mikhail Bakunin mixing in anarchism, too.
“They were very focused on the creative potential of destruction,” she said. “And then there’s the way ‘The Big Lebowski’ thinks about it, which is that these people believe in nothing. They are just self-focused, and that is the true nihilism. And then there is even truer nihilism, which is really belief in nothing; emptiness. So it is a multi-layered, deeply loaded term — an unstable terrain of ideologies — on which we are situating our research article.”
Still, the authors are confident that they have a fresh take on Goncharov.
“Many think of him as probably the most conservative of Russian writers,” Kokobobo said. “So his intention here is to pan Russian nihilists a little bit. But it’s also more complicated. I think he’s wittingly or unwittingly engaging in some kind of progressive strategies.”
McFadden said the character Mark’s “sexual orientation is definitely hetero — there’s no question about that.” “But his ideology, his disposition to the world is very queer in nature,” McFadden said. “It lends itself well to the queer lens, we can say, in the sense that he’s disrupting. He is against the traditional idea of marriage — that you can love one person for the rest of your life. He believes love is like a natural force and something you can’t contain. So he is very much opposed to that traditional understanding that it’s one man and one woman forever and ever.” At one point, McFadden said, Mark wears a woman’s nightgown and even gets a little gender-fluid. “He’ll just push those societal norms and disrupt them constantly,” McFadden said. Kokobobo noted that “everyone loves Mark” and his iconoclasm until he gets mixed up in a love triangle with the character Vera and her wealthy suitor, for whom Vera eventually settles out of pragmatism and not passion. She notes that Russian authors of this period often used sexual mores as metaphors for taboo political topics. “Part of what we’re trying to say is that Goncharov is actually putting some really interesting philosophies and ideas into the mouth of this nihilistic character, who’s not quite as problematic as we think,” Kokobobo said. “When we think about how long he worked on this novel and how important it was to him, maybe there’s more to this author — and maybe there’s more that’s relevant to our contemporary period — than we scholars have traditionally given him credit for.”
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