ABSTRACT
Discussing the current situation with professors of marketing in September 1999, they failed to identify any area of marketing where China differs from the West. Chinese MBA schools use standard (mostly US) marketing textbooks-some translated and some not. They teach in Chinese, of course, and are desperate for local case studies. Tales from Harvard Business School are about as familiar to their students as the Arabian Nights. You may think this renders the next two chapters, on the tools and process of marketing, unnecessary. Or you may think that Chinese marketing academics live in ivory towers just like their Western colleagues. Either way the differences, while reducing, do in fact remain and we also need some understanding of where marketing, over a remarkably short space of time, has come from.
