ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 6, 1997 TAG: 9704040086
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: HANOI, VIETNAM
SOURCE: IAN STEWART ASSOCIATED PRESS
Dartmouth College is teaming with the Vietnam National University for a crash course on economics.
Hold on to your hammer and sickle, class is in at communist Vietnam's new school for capitalism.
Taught by some of Dartmouth College's top business faculty, Vietnam's leading executives were back in the classroom last month for a crash two-week course on free market economics.
One lesson covered a basic precept of capitalism: marketing.
Inside a makeshift lecture hall at the Communist Party's International Club of Hanoi, about two dozen of Vietnam's corporate elite huddled around a television and video player. On the screen, poultry icon Frank Perdue is served up as an example of marketing ingenuity.
The video shows how Perdue's neatly packed rows of pre-plucked, pre-butchered fowl have become synonymous in the United States with chicken. It's a stretch for most Vietnamese, who still select their squawking birds live at the local open-air market.
``Perdue is the quintessential American example of marketing success,'' said Dartmouth business school professor Rohit Dishpande. ``It may not be directly applicable in Vietnam, but it illustrates the concept of brand equity.''
Dishpande is keenly aware that these students work in a realm different from those at the Ivy League school in Hanover, N.H.
``We're looking at marketing strategies in a place where the natural laws of marketing don't apply,'' he said.
Until recent years, Vietnam's ruling Communist Party ran an austere, pragmatic country where consumer choice was as rare as free market competition.
Economic reforms and liberalization have turned Vietnam into a promising new market and have triggered a demand for knowledge.
Dartmouth is teaming up with the Vietnam National University to help corporate executives make the leap from socialist economics to capitalism.
``We're just entering a market economy and our information on how things are done is still very limited,'' said Dang Thi Cat, the deputy director of Asia-Pacific Bank Vietnam.
Going from the regimented socialist ideals of noncompetitive central planning to survival-of-the-fittest capitalism isn't always an easy jump for many of Vietnam's senior executives.
The student roster at the Dartmouth program reads like an alumni gathering from the former Soviet bloc's most prestigious socialist academies.
Duong Manh Cuong, the man charged with turning heavily subsidized, state-run Vietnam Airlines into a viable business entity, graduated from Moscow's Economic University class of 1980.
``The one thing we've learned above all else is flexibility. You can't be stiff, or rigid, and succeed in a competitive market,'' Cuong said.
With foreign investment pouring into Vietnam, competition is bound to force many central planners into new ways of thinking.
``They see big foreign companies coming in and they say to us, `How do we compete?''' said Paul Argenti, a marketing professor from Dartmouth. ``We're trying to show that you can turn small into a good thing.''
Much of the 9 percent annual economic growth in recent years has been driven by the success of foreign companies entering Vietnam's burgeoning new consumer markets. In many instances, the state-run competition has struggled to keep up.
Advertising, for example, is still a nascent industry in Vietnam, where Vietnam Advertising Co. Director Binh Ba Thanh estimates the market is worth about $141 million.
``The bigger companies are beginning to realize the importance of marketing and advertising,'' Thanh said. ``Especially as foreign companies with large marketing budgets enter Vietnam.''
Thanh and his classmates will have an opportunity to see advertising and other business concepts in practice when they travel to the United States as part of the program. Once there, the group will visit Wall Street, Microsoft and Boeing, among other leading business institutions.
The Dartmouth program is one of a growing number of academic partnerships forged between the United States and its former enemy Vietnam.
In Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, Harvard University and the Fulbright Center are helping executives from state-owned and private Vietnamese companies make the transition to market economics.
Partnered with the Ho Chi Minh University of Economics, Harvard faculty teach introductory and advanced training in macro and micro economic development.
Other U.S. schools, including the University of Hawaii, have established exchange programs with Vietnamese schools such as the University of Hanoi.
Back at the Dartmouth program, professor Argenti sizes up the progress made by his students and, by extension, the future for Vietnam.
``My hope is to own stock in Vietnam,'' he says. ``These people are going to make it.''
LENGTH: Medium: 98 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. 1. Vietnamese business leaders (above) spent twoby CNBweeks at Dartmouth College learning to make the leap from socialist
economics to capitalism, American style. 2. What they learned
ultimately is expected to filter down to the vendors in the streets
(right). color.