In January 2007, Rebecca D. Monro (associate director of the Institute for Research in Marketing and a current Carlson MBA candidate) traveled to India on an MBA program Global Enrichment Elective. With her classmates, Monro met with President of India Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. The group also met government and business leaders including Commerce Secretary G. K. Pillai, Secretary of Biotechnology M.K. Bhan, and Dell India’s vice president and managing director Vivek Mansingh. Below, Monro describes their insights into marketing practices in her own words.
While India is a culture vastly different from our own, each of these influential leaders emphasized the similarities between us as one of the key reasons India is so successful. America has built itself on the success of each generation’s innovations, and India is building on those as well. Innovative thinking has moved India out of the periphery of the global economy and into a brand that resonates across the world.
Indian leaders said, consistently and across the board, that American strengths are being implemented in India. Secretary Bhan draws on the language and design of American websites to employ advertising campaigns in India, and President Kalam uses American models of education to interest young children in becoming leaders.
An executive enthusiastically showed our group an animated slide show of positions, responsibilities, and processes that global businesses are outsourcing to India. At the end of the show, the only area that he did not see being outsourced to India within the next 10 years was marketing. From a professional standpoint, I appreciate the optimism. But beyond the potential job security, this revelation challenges everyone in the field of marketing with the task of identifying what makes the discipline unique in this manner. What distinguishes marketing from every other skill set and field that can be implemented by someone else, somewhere else? In a global economy, it is the recognition, replication, and expansion of those assets that make us distinctive in our field.
The discipline of marketing, including the areas of consumer behavior, pricing, channels of distribution, decision making, and branding, to name a few, is viewed by many as the driver of organizational change. So it is reasonable to think that these skills need to stay at the base of the organizational structure.
As business relationships become more interconnected with India, entities like the Institute for Research in Marketing will aid the endurance of marketing as an internal strength to many businesses. The synergy of cutting-edge theory, born in academia, and the first-rate minds that put that theory into practice is precisely what will help marketing remain the sole surviving area of expertise that leaders in India felt would stay in the businesses’ country of origin.
