Over Summer 2, a group of 19 students and three professors made their way from the most dense parts of Vietnam to the most remote areas, learning about business strategies of marketing surrounding consumer preferences and industry changes in the country on a Dialogue of Civilizations.
The group visited four cities, navigating big crowds on scooters like locals, as well as smaller towns and rural areas surrounded by bamboo and lush forest. The dialogue began in the northern Vietnamese city of Hanoi.
Duane Levefre, an international business professor, previously led the Emerging Markets dialogue in India for the past decade. This summer marked the first one he led in Vietnam. Levefre said the dialogue attracts an “adventurous group of students” each year.
“I grew up abroad in Tokyo. So I was already kind of familiar with being abroad in Asia, and I loved growing up as an expat,” said Ella Morse, a second-year business administration major on the dialogue. “So I thought Vietnam was the perfect place to go because I already have an interest in marketing in Asia because I might want to live there when I’m older.”
Students took two courses while on the dialogue: Marketing in Asia and International Business. Along with looking at case studies, students were tasked with presenting a product launch and pitching a creative marketing campaign to a public relations company, Publicis.
“We were also assigned in random groups, so I was with other Northeastern students that in the beginning of the trip I had never met before,” said Leila Rooney, a second-year business administration and psychology combined major who attended the dialogue. “We all had different majors and were at different age levels, so everyone had different experiences and a lot of different ranges in talent and experience.”
After the group left Hanoi, students spent one night on a Ha Long Bay cruise ship, then traveled to the coastal city of Hoi An, a beach resort town. Students’ last destination was Ho Chi Minh City, also known as Saigon, for the back half of the trip.
“I was fortunate to go on my first dialogue with another professor to South Africa back in 2013 and we moved around a bunch,” Levefre said. “I’ve kind of always modeled my programs after that.”
The program is comprised of business visits, notably the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, where students learned from an economic officer about the political and economic progress and improvements in Vietnam. They also visited Huntory PepsiCo, a joint venture that runs the Pepsi business in Vietnam.
The group also went to the Kimberly Clark Corporation, which produces paper-based consumer products, and heard from the brand manager of Kotex, a brand of menstrual hygiene products, who came to talk to students about the global positioning of the corporation. Students traveled to a startup that connects with local retail stores through an ordering app to provide products and supplies to their store, instead of owners traditionally having to close their shop to travel themselves in order to retrieve products. The startup works to make a more efficient and modernized system for local retailers.
Rooney described the environment of the cities as “organized chaos.” She said the most surprising cultural aspect to her was that majority of people in the city ride on scooters, and public transport is primarily dependent on “Grabs,” or scooters used similarly to Ubers.
“It was very popular to call a Grab scooter rather than an actual vehicle,” Rooney said. “So a lot of the times when we were getting from place to place, we’d be hopping on the back of these scooters.”
In between class trips, students participated in immersive cultural excursions through agricultural districts, villages and landmarks of Vietnam. One of the trips included a visit to a pottery village, where Morse recalled the group bonded as they sculpted their pottery together.
“We saw how they harvest coconuts and how they use every last ounce of gram of a coconut. That was kind of fascinating in a different kind of way,” Lefevre said, recalling another village visit. The group also explored Incense Village, a major tourist destination of Vietnam, an experience Lefevre described as “very Instagrammable” as the group was surrounded by thousands of fluorescent pink bamboo incense sticks.
Rooney said the group’s favorite restaurant was called Pizza 4P’s, which served everything from chicken teriyaki pizza to sushi sashimi pizza. The group would eat there multiple times per week, Rooney added.
Lefevre said the length of Northeastern’s dialogue program — a month — is the perfect length of time for students to “really get a sense of the country.”
“There was so much insight I got from just feeling like I lived in Asia for a month and a half,” Rooney said. “[There was] so much I was able to realize about other people and their way of life.”
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