Selling it like it is

Foreign MBA students learn marketing strategies at a business seminar in Haifa and devise plans to promote Israel in their own countries.

By SHARON UDASIN
mba students_521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
mba students_521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Apart from a short business trip to Katmandu, Mohan Kulkarni had never been out of India until he came to Israel recently for a marketing seminar in his international MBA program.
“We view Israel as an innovator country,” Kulkarni told The Jerusalem Post, noting that while India received its independence in 1947 and Israel in 1948, Israel has made greater economic advancement. “It’s an important lesson for us to learn from such good experience.”
With some 20 other participants – from India, Namibia, Ukraine and Hungary – the Indian pharmaceutical CEO arrived for the one-week residential course at Haifa’s branch of the Institute of International Business Relations (IBR), which offers an executive MBA program based in Berlin’s Steinbeis University but with home bases in countries all over Europe, Asia and Africa. The program has the backing of the Foundation of International Business Administration Accreditation, a collective group from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The residential programs are part of the required course load in the two-year English-language program, which participants generally attend while still working their full-time jobs.
“All these [students’] countries have something in common with Israel,” said Prof. Andreas Kelling, German founder and director of IBR, who has been living in Israel for the past five years. “Israel moved from socialism to a free economy in 1986. Ukraine, Hungary, India and southern African countries experienced the same thing just a few years later. But all these countries are at a disadvantage,” he says. “The free economy is not keen on inviting competitors into its markets,” he said, noting that the students are coming here with “entrepreneurial spirit” to dig their countries out of the world economic periphery.
In Israel, participants learned advanced marketing skills from experts in Israel’s business, academic and governmental communities, including a look into human-centric, creativity-based Marketing 3.0 strategies, explained Prof. Liora Katzenstein, president of the Institute for the Study of Entrepreneurship and Management of Innovation in Israel. The culmination of the week in Haifa was the group’s final projects, in which each national team presented solutions on “How to market Israel to the world using the Internet and social networks” and use what they learned as a case study for marketing strategies in their own companies.
“My role was to teach them advanced marketing,” said Katzenstein, the consultant to IBR who was responsible for organizing the week’s speakers and events, “but to give them a common ground, I came up with this project.”
Kelling added, “We’re using the new possibilities of social media to increase Israeli tourism from the home countries of our students. We could teach them theory for a week, but we believe it’s much more useful for students to be able to implement it immediately. We ask them to work on a marketing plan to increase tourism from their countries to Israel.” Each group had a $250,000 budget to construct a hypothetical plan of action that they’d have to implement within the next couple of years.
First up was the Hungarian team. They said their biggest challenge would be to get beyond the ever-increasing anti-Israel sentiment in Central Europe While nearly one million tourists travel annually from Hungary to nearby warm destinations, only 30,000 go to Israel, reported Bela Horvath, the team leader and managing director at Still Kft, a company that oversees forklift sales in the city of Dunaharaszti.
Horvath told the group, “There are so many Hungarians who go mad if they hear the word ‘Israel’ or ‘Jewish.’ If these people are in the room where I am, I leave.” Within an already hostile Central European neighborhood, Horvath said that Hungary has one of the toughest attitudes toward Israel. So tough that he estimates up to one-third of the population would refuse to travel there if given the chance. While there are about 1,800 travel agencies in Hungary, fewer than 15 percent of them offer trips to Israel.
The team set a modest goal of increasing the number of outbound tourists by 5,000 people for the year 2012, focusing on pleasure rather than business travelers because the latter might come for work, regardless of their attitude toward the country. Using an advertising platform guided by both traditional and social media – such as Facebook and the Hungarian networking site iWiW – the group planned to remind customers of the inexpensive direct flights to Israel, which requires no entrance visa. They’d offer customized packages that focus on biblical sites and walking in Jesus’s footsteps.
One of the experts on the feedback panel was David Saranga, who is responsible for the digital diplomacy initiatives at the Foreign Ministry. He also serves as an adjunct professor at IDC Herzliya’s Sammy Ofer School of Communications. He encouraged the group to use other social networking tools like YouTube because even if some Hungarian viewers are unable to understand English, “they see the landscape and the people.” He also advised that they include the business traveling population in their plans.
Next up were the Namibians, who focused on creating a Save to Travel plan for the religious Christian community in their country. For the Namibians, the biggest issues with visiting Israel are lack of finances and concerns about safety, said presenter Vicky Richter, an executive manager at Bank Windhoek Limited – Namibia’s only native bank. There would be no problem attracting people to Israel emotionally because 95% of the 2.2 million citizens are Christian and quite religious, she said. But those leading the effort would have to introduce a “paradigm shift” – a new way of thinking about Israel – to get the population to think of Israel as a travel destination because the two countries have little historical connection, Richter explained. So the group advocated a Save to Travel project, where people could join a Facebook group and receive regular SMS messages with updates about their progress in saving up for their trip.
“How far are you from the Holy Land? Maybe your friend is 500 km away – then you’ll want to catch up with your friend,” said Valeria Kambarami, managing director at Ventab Education, in Windhoek.
The trip would be a “religious experience,” said Richter, totalling $2,700 and including visits to Jerusalem, Haifa, Nazareth, a kibbutz, the Dead Sea and the Jordan River. Their ultimate goal, said Kambarami, would be to have the first group of 10 ambassadors visiting Israel in 2011, with 20 the following year, hopefully leading to exponential growth in visits.
“You used a great expression that is relevant to all groups in the room – ‘paradigm shift.’ This paradigm shift is the basis for promoting Israel, especially in countries with challenges such as Namibia,” Saranga commented.
Kelling said the Namibian model could be exported to other southern African countries, such as Botswana or Zambia.
Danny Abramovich, a marketing lecturer and specialist in tourism and Marketing 3.0, praised the group for being “emotionally into the program.” He added, “Small Namibia is really what Israel was 60 years ago, or really even up to five years ago. You are very technologically advanced, and I think you should use it better.”
The Indian group also focused on their Christian segment. It is a tiny segment of the national population but is still huge – 266,000. “The Indian outbound tourist market is emerging. There’s a large Christian population to attract for faithbased tourism. That’s our starting point,” said Chandra Sekhar Mallela, engineering manager at Vitesse Semiconductors in Hyderabad.
They said they would target Christians with higher incomes, offering a package deal of 1,500 euros to the five or 10 most prominent churches during April for Easter, the summer and Christmas time, Mallela explained.“Once they return, we want them to become ‘friends’ of Israel,” said Nikhila Vaik, vice president of strategy at the Couth Infotech software development firm in Hyderabad. From there, said Vaik, they’d use social media networks and SMS promotions to target friends of these friends for future travel.
The Indian group felt they didn’t need to work on a paradigm shift of India’s perception of Israel. Vaik said, “Our independence was in 1947; Israel’s was in 1948. We are a country that faces real threat from terrorism; Israel is a country that faces real threat from terrorism. At a deep level, we have some connection. We felt it was more a problem of promotion than a paradigm shift.”
While the feedback panel agreed that there was no need for a paradigm shift in India, Saranga criticized the group for focusing solely on their comparatively small Christian population. “Since we live in a world of perceptions, you are a superpower,” he told them. “There is no problem of language, there is no need for a change of paradigm. People in India know what Israel is all about,” he said. “It’s very easy to go to the obvious, but you have to try the unexpected. You have to use your budget in a more sophisticated way.”
The Ukrainian presentation, considered by the panel to be the strongest, focused on convincing tourists interested in traveling to Egypt to extend their vacations into a combined Egyptian-Israeli package. The first step toward getting Ukrainians to Israel would be the upcoming bilateral agreement in February, where Israel is scheduled to cancel the need for Ukrainian entrance visas, said Olena Droshchenko, head of human resources for the Bank of Cyprus’s Kiev branch. While 70% of Ukrainian tourists travel within the country, she explained, of those who travel to Middle Eastern destinations, 28% go to Egypt, 42% go to Turkey and only 4% visit Israel.“We need a new product that we can offer to Ukrainians.”
The Ukrainian group’s goal would therefore be to increase tourism to Israel by 49,000 people annually, with a total revenue of $14.7 million, by offering a combined Egypt and Israel package called From the Land of the Pharaohs to the Holy Land, said Ievgen Kostin, chief financial officer at AOLA Asset Management Company in Kiev. Travelers would still have six days in Egypt but would have a four-day extension in Israel.
“At the center of it is a website called Israel for Ukraine,” said Olena Zhytnyk, chief marketing officer at InMind marketing and consulting group in Kiev. She advocated using viral social networking and establishing a Days of Israel event in the country’s capital to showcase their new product.
Calling their plan “brilliant,” Saranga said, “Egypt is the core, but Israel is the by-product. The idea itself is out of the box.”
The following day, he told The Jerusalem Post that the Foreign Ministry would be implementing some of the Ukrainian contingent’s ideas in particular.“These people know the environment and culture of their own people, and they know how to advertise a product to their own people,” he said. “The Foreign Ministry will be in contact with the group and pick their brains on this topic and listen to their insights regarding how to market Israel in the Ukraine.”
As for the presenters – most of whom had little interest in Israel prior to their seminar – many of them say they now intend to implement parts of their plans in their home countries.
“I’m a member of a Christian church, and a lot of people want to go to Israel from my church,” Zhytnyk told the Post. “I will probably think of some presentations about how Israel looks. Some people can’t afford it, though. The most important issue is to encourage people to spend the money to come here.”
Richter agreed. “It’s a product we can develop – it’s a thing we’re looking into doing. It’s not just a case study.”