Search results

I am proud to be joining the many colleagues who appear in this volume, many younger but some more experienced in the marketing and the international business disciplines, honoring S. Tamer Cavusgil's retirement from Michigan State University. I am proud for many reasons, but mainly because throughout the years I have observed how Tamer's contributions to our professional and personal lives have shaped our growth as a fraternity of business scholars and teachers. I feel very fortunate to have grown as Tamer's colleague through the many papers we have published, the many doctoral students we have mentored, and the many service contributions we have made to the international business field during the past 30 years. I feel luckier, however, that I have come to know this remarkable person as a friend.

I learned my first important lesson on research from the research design seminars offered by Drs Tamer Cavusgil and Roger Calantone. During my first semester in the Ph.D. program, I took a Ph.D. seminar class, international business research with Dr. Tamer Cavusgil. In that class, each student was asked to select a topic to research, present findings to the rest of the class, and write a term paper that could be turned into a potential publication. In the midst of my struggle to find this big bang topic that could lead to a potential publication, Dr. Tamer Cavusgil showed us a few surveys designed by previous Ph.D. students. He mentioned that we could use these surveys as guidelines to develop our own thoughts. These surveys turned out to be the concrete piece of information that I needed to be on track with my research. Prior to this, I had gained some interests in understanding how trust and relational norms govern inter-organizational relationships. One of the surveys Dr. Cavusgil passed to us happened to be about this research area. Under the guidance of Drs Cavusgil and Joseph Bonner, I developed my first research ideas on understanding the third way of governance, relational norms in international channels of distribution.

In 1989 I decided to join the doctoral program in Marketing at Michigan State University (MSU). Although I had been accepted into the doctoral programs at several universities, including UCLA and the University of Washington, I chose MSU because of its strong reputation in International Marketing, and its emphasis on managerial applications. Tamer Cavusgil had recently joined the MSU faculty and had just initiated the Center for International Business Education and Research. I wanted to learn from him as my mentor and dissertation chair, and was encouraged by the potential resources available through the CIBER to do international research. This decision to come to MSU and to be a student of Tamer Cavusgil is a decision I have never regretted, and that has enabled me to become a successful, full professor, engaged in a career in International Marketing.

In the summer of 1989, I followed a beacon of scholarship in a journey that brought me from Istanbul to East Lansing, Michigan. The beacon of scholarship was embodied in the person of Dr. Tamer Cavusgil who guided me through my doctoral study at Michigan State University. When I was invited to attend the symposium to celebrate Dr. Cavusgil's contributions to marketing and international business and write an essay reflecting on my career, I immediately knew what the focus of the essay would be: the processes Dr. Cavusgil put in place at MSU to develop scholars who can push the boundaries of their fields in the Innovation Age. This chapter uses my academic career as the context of describing that process.

My decision to pursue an academic life in international marketing was unplanned. It was spring 1989 and I was an MBA student in my last semester in East Lansing. Because my MBA concentration was in finance I had applied for a number of finance PhD programs. While waiting for my applications, I was taking an elective course, international marketing, from Prof. S. Tamer Cavusgil. I was immediately hooked. His lectures were absorbing. Difficult concepts became lucid when he explained them with vivid stories. Classical theories became refreshing when he used them as a backdrop for contemporary phenomena.

Relying upon personal interviews with 70 companies, this article offers some conclusions on the nature and scope of international marketing research activities. Specifically, the analysis provides a general characterization of such activities and gives specific examples of how companies approach international marketing research. Various indicators of market potential used by companies are also discussed. A categorization of research themes is offered based upon level of company internationalization. Use of various sources of information is discussed. Finally, specific approaches to foreign market opportunity analysis are highlighted and illustrated with company experiences.

Among all the pieces of work I have written, this is most likely to be a chapter with the deepest meaning at a personal level. Being invited to the symposium on MSU Contributions to Research in International Business and Innovation held on May 7–9, 2008 at Kellogg Center on the beautiful Michigan State University (MSU) campus in East Lansing, MI was a big honor for me to start with. Secondly, it gave me the opportunity to reflect back on my days at MSU which both my family and myself remember with great joy and excitement. Lastly, but most importantly, it was a lifetime chance to pay partial gratitude to my mentor, Prof. Tamer Cavusgil, as well as my professors and colleagues at the Department of Marketing at Eli Broad College of Business, the International Business Center (IBC) – home to MSU CIBER, and University Apartments Residence Life (UARL) at MSU.

My days in the Michigan State University (MSU) doctoral program were days filled with intellectual stimulation and long hours of work on various research projects. Starting from my first day on Campus, I was part of the Center for International Business Education & Research (CIBER), which consisted only of Prof. Tamer Cavusgil and his assistant Kay Fitzgerald. Dr. Cavusgil's days were filled with writing research proposals to secure funding for the center. He was so good at this that the center grew rapidly. In my second year in the program, I was involved in the Marketing Expert Systems project. As part of this project, I worked with a team of doctoral students. The artificial intelligence brain of the project was Mike Mitri, a doctoral student at the Computer Engineering Department. Each doctoral student was assigned an application area in international marketing: I was assigned the Evaluation and Selection of an International Logistics Company.

In this empirical study, export strategies of 131 California exporting manufacturers were examined. A factor analysis of fifty variables yielded five factors which were analysed subsequently through multiple discriminant analysis. Two of the five factors, strategic planning and export strategies, were found to be meaningful in discriminating between small and large exporters. Implications for managers are offered.

Until recently, little research has been directed at the measurement of the impact of governmental support on the firm. The major focus of this article is on the methodological and measurement issues that appear to have a confounding effect and may account for broad equivocality of the findings in many of the studies. An evaluation paradigm is developed and applied to the research reviewed. The article concludes with a synthesis of the issues and provides specific directions for future research.