A hit and a miss in marketing

The China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), headquartered in Shanghai and boasting a new campus in Beijing, is a several-hundred-pound gorilla in the MBA education sector here, enrolling about 200 full-time MBA students and 700 EMBA students per year.

In late August, CEIBS will host several dozen journalists, local and foreign, for what they’ve named the Advanced Business Reporting Programme, which they also refer to as a mini-MBA for media. The two-day program offers 90-minute sessions titled Sino-European Business Relations, Game Theory and Business Strategy, China’s Macroeconomic Landscape, Cross-Cultural Management, Investor Behavior and Protection and a few others. These sessions introduce subjects typically covered in MBA programs, and some of CEIBS leading faculty are slated to teach.

The advantages of this initiative include:

– Business journalists often don’t have MBAs. That’s not necessarily a problem, but when such journalists gain a stronger exposure to what MBA programs teach, they gain an additional perspective on the business world, one that’s shared by many of the world’s business leaders. Therefore, business journalists who attend such a program should be better-equipped to cover their beats.

– The journalists attending will gain a better sense of what b-schools do, and how CEIBS works in particular. More favorable coverage of or references to b-schools in general, and again CEIBS in particular, should result.

– The CEIBS faculty who are teaching the various seminars gain recognition by the attending journalists as thought leaders in their various disciplines. Following the program, we will likely seek quotes from and interviews with more CEIBS faculty in various media, adding another boost to CEIBS’s brand recognition.

The journalists attend this two-day session at no charge. CEIBS is therefore investing to make this program happen, but they also benefit from deep-pocket backers. CEIBS is a Sino-European joint venture; the European partner is the EU, which has funded what they call the Business Management Training Project (BMTP), aimed at promoting Sino-European business understanding. The BMTP supports the mini-MBA for journalists.

Laurie Underwood, Director of External Communications and Development at CEIBS, suggests that one b-school in Europe has held a similar program, but neither of us have ever heard of anything like it in the PRC. Proposing such a program to any complicated organization, and getting it approved, is usually a daunting task; I suspect that Underwood deserves a hat-tip for making such a program happen, as it clearly will benefit CEIBS over time.

CEIBS has exhibited a level of global leadership in marketing tactics with its Advanced Business Reporting Programme, a model of the kind of deep communication and transparency that defines great marketing everywhere. At the same time, it has recently been using a catchphrase in its marketing materials that diminishes the school: "China’s first, largest and best-ranked business school."

– CEIBS is nowhere near the first business school in China. The earliest predecessor to CEIBS, an entity called the China Europe Management Institute, launched in the early 1980s, an era in which a number of domestic b-schools were reestablishing themselves after the academic horrors of the first few decades of Communist Party rule. These domestic b-schools initially launched before World War II.

– CEIBS has somewhat less than 2,000 students enrolled at any one time. Some leading fully domestic b-schools have more than double that. CEIBS may have a larger square-meter footprint, but other than that any claim to being the largest b-school in China is entirely bogus.

– Claiming ranking leadership is something that all b-schools in the world seek to do – no one should single out CEIBS for making such a claim. However, rankings as they are currently administered are a necessary evil at best, more often a net value reduction for business education. True leaders in the sector don’t brag incessantly about their rankings.

With this catchphrase, an approach sarcastically called ‘beautification’ (美化) by the locals, CEIBS has exhibited an old cadre’s sense of marketing. In the bad old days, a cadre could make a wildly exaggerated claim, knowing that no one would challenge it. In the 21st century Chinese business world, those days are largely and thankfully past, and Confucius’ 2,500-year-old exhortation in the Analects to “rectify names,” an imperative echoed by Orwell, Chesterton and many others, is slowly regaining followers.

The respective fates of the program and the catch-phrase will tell us something important about CEIBS’s future – if the program, which truly is a first for China, thrives, and the phrase joins such risible initiatives as the "Green Dam Youth Escort" software and the plagiarized Expo promotional jingle on the scrap heap, CEIBS will be exhibiting a sense of market maturity that bodes well for its future. If the phrase stays and the program languishes, well…

John D. Van Fleet works in the university sector in China. He lives in Shanghai.