THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, March 21, 1996 TAG: 9603210401
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MYLENE MANGALINDAN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
Jerry Barnes remembers being left behind in his Baltimore hotel room last year while his family toured the aquarium.
He needed to do some homework.
For Barnes and his classmates at Old Dominion University, such diligence paid off. The MBA class won an award from the governor for the best international marketing project in the state.
``It was a great project to work on because it gave us real world experience,'' said Barnes, president of Vantage Consulting Group, an investment consulting group to pension and profit-sharing plans. Barnes, 49, completed his master's in Business Administration degree last December.
James Antonick, who teaches the international marketing class, will accept the governor's award on April 12 in Richmond with most of his six-student team.
Old Dominion's International Market Planning program is sponsored by the Virginia Department of Economic Development. Each of the state's 12 universities with MBA programs teams up with a local company to help that firm break into the global market.
Last fall, Old Dominion joined Shorewood Packaging Corp. to explore entering the Chinese cigarette packaging market.
Shorewood, which has $357 million in annual sales and 2,700 employees, is traded publicly on the NASDAQ. The Newport News-based firm, which packages everything from cosmetics to multimedia tapes, had several U.S. customers who had entered the Chinese market or planned to.
The ODU students compiled a three-inch thick report recommending how the company could crack China's state-owned tobacco products monopoly.
The class learned that China is the world's largest producer and consumer of tobacco. Thanks largely to the participation of three Chinese students on the team, they identified cigarette factories and contacts, all through original research.
The Chinese students telephoned relatives in China to look up numbers in local phone books and spoke to foreign officials in Chinese. Monica Chen, one of the students who had worked in marketing for Procter & Gamble in China, even wrote letters completely in Chinese characters.
`They really gave me a lot of confidence they understood the market,'' said Sharon Gray, Shorewood's director of international tobacco sales. She described their report as ``excellent.''
Shorewood paid only $1,500 for the marketing plan, mostly to cover the ODU students' printing, phone calls and supplies expenses. Antonick estimates that his class' report could run as high as $25,000 if done by a consulting company.
``It's a lot like detective work,'' said Antonick, who worked with the Virginia economic development department before joining ODU's faculty. ``You work from leads. You don't know what you're going to end up with. It's very time consuming.''
Old Dominion is looking for other small- to medium-sized corporate partners for its international marketing program. Companies interested in developing an export plan with MBA students can contact James Antonick at 431-4900. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
Students Jerry Barnes and Monica Chen...
Color photo by BETH BERGMAN, The Virginian-Pilot
Teacher James Antonick
by CNB