2008 - Marketing Educators' Association

multicultural understanding for international marketing
students. Through examination of how marketing
students respond to the new teaching technique
relative to the effectiveness of their learning,
recommendations are offered for marketing educators.
The paper will also seek to understand how critical
thinking theory relates to this teaching technique. We
believe that assisting students in their critical thinking
skills is a crucial element of marketing education and
helps prepare students for real world experience. The
study proposes a new teaching technique – a
business proposal, which encourages student’s critical
thinking.
OVERVIEW OF THE BUSINESS PROPOSAL
The business proposal is the primary project assigned
in a required International Marketing course at a public
four-year college. Each individual student in the class
acts as part of a marketing department of an American
corporation (the student chooses an actual company)
which is developing a product (the student chooses
the product) for a foreign market. The particular project
was prepared for the Russian market, although in the
future this project may apply to any foreign market.
Each student is given a particular geographic region of
the foreign market, which makes the project more
challenging from a real perspective. After marketing
research and analysis of the region of the foreign
market, each student prepares a synthesized business
proposal for the foreign partner. In this case, three
foreign partners were selected; one from Moscow, one
from Vladivostok and one from St. Petersburg. Each
has very unique regional characteristics.
The preliminary stage of the project includes the
preparation period by the instructor. The instructor
contacts real business partners overseas who are
interested in helping with this student project. In
addition to selecting several foreign partners, two
conditions exist: partners must be experts on the
particular region of the foreign market, and partners
must be willing to provide student evaluations and
offer constructive feedback. The project includes two
primary learning objectives. The first objective is to
gain a multicultural understanding of the foreign
market. The project emphasizes the need to
understand the unique environment as an essential
step preceding the preparation of a business proposal.
The second objective is to provide students with the
opportunity to prepare a business proposal for a real
partner overseas. The project allows students to
reinforce key concepts covered in International
Marketing and other courses; and motivates students
to expand their critical thinking skills through an
international business experience.
116
There are five functional steps of the project for
each student:
(1) Conduct a marketing research analysis of the
sub-region of the foreign market (for
example, an analysis of Moscow, Vladivostok
or St. Petersburg).
(2) Select and analyze a product of an American
company which might be suitable for this
sub-region.
(3) Complete the business proposal to get the
product accepted by the foreign partner.
(4) Email the business proposal to both the
foreign partner and the instructor. Include an
appropriate subject title, such as, “Business
Proposal for X Product from [the student’s
name].”
(5) Receive feedback from the foreign partner
and discuss this feedback with the instructor.
Students should consider that the instructor is an
expert on the foreign market throughout the
preparation period. Students and the instructor
use email and class discussion to coordinate
activities and strategies. It is critical that the
instructor follows and evaluates each stage of the
student project.
METHODOLOGY
In order to analyze the effectiveness of this
experiential learning technique, student feedback
was collected for spring and fall semesters from
2004 through 2006. The sampling frame for the
study consisted of 155 students in an International
Marketing course. These students were
undergraduate level seniors and juniors of the
Business School. The majority of the students
were marketing majors. Participation was
voluntary, although 98 percent of the students
completed the survey. The sequence of the
course was designed to expose the students to a
variety of instructional methods, including a
traditional case study and an experiential learning
exercise (the business proposal). The survey is
based on studies by Olsen (1994) and by Turley
and Shannon (1999) and further refined by
Frontczak and Daughtrey (2004) and Frontczak
(2005).
Students were asked to evaluate both teaching
methods on a variety of dimensions. The students
responded to a three-page survey including two
areas of questions, which are shown in Tables 1
and 2: perceived effectiveness of the business
proposal assignment and a measure of critical
thinking. The two areas contained twelve and four
statements, respectively. Students were required
to evaluate each statement on a 5-point scale that