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The UO’s Warsaw Sports Marketing Center creates academic and business connections between Oregon and China.
China failed in 1993 in its bid to stage the first Olympic Games of the new century.
So in early 2000, Beijing’s competition with Toronto, Paris, Istanbul, and Osaka to host the 2008 games weighed on the minds of China’s leaders and many of its 1.3 billion people.
The prospect of a Chinese Olympics also increased e-mail exchanges among three Oregon sports marketing experts.
“China was actively seeking to raise its international profile through the use of sports,” recalls Rick Burton, then the director of the UO’s new James H. Warsaw Sports Marketing Center, which included the world’s first graduate sports business program in an accredited college of business. Even in the center’s early years, Warsaw graduates were landing positions in professional leagues, sports equipment manufacturing, marketing, broadcasting, and stadium management. But few were applying their marketing know-how outside North America.
Former sportswriter Terry Rhoads ’90 had already begun to explore sports business in China. Fluent in Mandarin, he became Nike’s first China marketing manager in 1994, slowly nurturing interest in sports in a country that had traditionally discouraged athletic programs in its schools.
If Beijing hosted “the world’s greatest sporting event,” as Rhoads called the Olympics, he predicted a boom market for Nike and other U.S., Chinese, and international businesses using sports to market their goods to the vast audience of China’s new consumers.
But conducting business in Shanghai had taught Rhoads that China’s business leaders lacked expertise in domestic and global sports marketing, management, and investment strategies. He also learned that American executives knew next to nothing about China’s business methods, cultural nuances, and the communist government’s regulatory system. In the future, without professional coaching, businesses on both sides of the Pacific would blunder.
When Rhoads accompanied a Nike-sponsored Chinese men’s basketball team to Eugene in 1996 for a game with the Ducks in Mac Court, he discussed the dilemma with Sheng Li, a student in Warsaw’s first M.B.A. class. A Beijing native, Li’s dream “was to work on an Olympic Games hosted in China.” He was enthusiastic about Beijing’s prospects for hosting the 2008 games, confident his country could build the vast new infrastructure required for the event. But he says he also saw “a potential shortfall in human capital—sports marketing experts.”
At the Warsaw Center, Rhoads engaged in a similar dialogue with Burton, and, he says, he felt “an immediate kinship” because each wanted “to create programs that could benefit Oregon students, the Warsaw Center, Nike, and China.” A Beijing Olympics could be the catalyst.
By 1999, with help from colleagues and like-minded groups, Burton, Rhoads, and Li had assembled an educational consortium for cross-cultural business training. The Warsaw Center faculty agreed to take the lead role. Rhoads won Nike as a founding partner, and Li gained endorsements from business professors at Fudan University in Shanghai and from the Chinese Olympic Committee.
And “to create a significant ‘bang,’” says Rhoads, “to make people take notice of this innovative sports marketing education program for China,” in the spring of 2000, the consortium of Fudan, the UO, the Chinese Olympic Committee, and Nike—called FUON—produced a splashy conference for sports business scholars, international corporate leaders, and Chinese sports officials.
Four hundred guests in a posh Beijing hotel ballroom received greetings via video from Phil Knight ’59, CEO of Nike, the world’s largest athletic equipment manufacturer. Carl Lewis, the nine-time U.S. Olympic gold medalist (and “super-hero to the Chinese,” says Rhoads), and Madame He Hui Xian of the Chinese Olympic Committee gave keynote addresses. And for two days, experts outlined evolving concepts in sports marketing, advertising, sponsorships, facility management, broadcasting, and licensing.
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Faculty and staff members from the two universities soon began traveling to each other’s campuses to learn and teach important lessons. Fudan marketing professor Emma Qiu Lijin, who audited classes at the UO, says, “This period gave me the chance to observe the advancement of the sports industry in the U.S., and helped me think about what we could do to develop the sports industry in China.”
In Eugene, the Warsaw Center, which celebrates its fifteenth anniversary this year, added information in its classes about China’s business practices. And by 2006, to boost graduate students’ comprehension of crucial issues in China’s government, economics, culture, and social structure, Warsaw collaborated with the UO Center for Asian and Pacific Studies to produce “Engaging China” seminars. Second-year M.B.A. students then took study trips to Beijing and Shanghai, where Fudan provided lectures and tours of businesses and manufacturing sites.
Adam Antoniewicz, M.B.A. ’03, found that the Warsaw curriculum enhanced the experience he had already gained in Shanghai in the ’90s, when he earned an advanced Chinese learning certificate at Fudan University and worked with athletic companies in events and marketing management positions. Studying league structure, sponsorship analysis, sports finance, and sports law gave him the practical knowledge that embodies “the fundamental building blocks of sports business.”
Antoniewicz says the curriculum, the format of classroom project teams that tackle real-world industry issues, and the opportunity to travel abroad give students “a significant head start” over other applicants seeking employment in the sports industry.
Nevertheless, he says, while “it’s possible to work [in China] without speaking Chinese,” those who want to be in China long-term “are at a major disadvantage if they can’t speak and read the language.”
Now director of marketing partnerships for NBA China in Shanghai, where he works with such corporations as Coca-Cola, Cisco, General Mills, McDonald’s, and Nike to market their products through professional basketball, Antoniewicz has learned to appreciate the similarities and differences between U.S. and Chinese businesses and consumers.
For one thing, he says, understanding that “Chinese law and attitudes are much more relationship-based” is crucial for future entrepreneurs. The preferred style of negotiating in China “is to have a solid relationship and trust, rather than to finalize all the details of a contract on the front-end.”
First-year Warsaw student “Phil” Shi-Mu Huang, a permanent resident of the United States with Chinese parents in Taiwan, confirms Antoniewicz’s observation. In the United States, he says, “It’s law, logic, then connections and relationships; in China, people talk about connections or relationships first, prior to the law, and then logic.”
Differences in U.S. and Chinese communication styles become obvious in the classroom, Huang says, when he and his fellow students work on project teams. These groups might hypothetically represent sports companies such as Ultimate Fighting Championship, for example, negotiating a sponsorship with Right Guard products. Within the teams, lively debates ensue, with classmates interrupting each other. These groups model the ideal, American-style work group, in which everyone’s ideas contribute to the best outcome. But, “in Chinese culture,” Huang says, “when you want to say that someone’s thinking is blatantly contrary, you better use a very indirect way, so that people won’t be offended. Here, it’s not that way.”
Austin DeKoning ’09 says he is grateful that even though he was an undergraduate, the Lundquist College of Business and the Warsaw Center gave him “both the classroom learning and the skills that help you transition from textbook learning to learning in the marketplace.”
With help from Warsaw managing director Paul Swangard ’90, M.B.A. ’99—a Warsaw Center graduate—DeKoning arranged an internship in his junior year with the international sports marketing firm IMG, which assigned him to Johnson & Johnson’s Olympic Games office in Beijing.
One of his tasks was to help J&J—an Olympic sponsor and the parent company to Band-Aid, Tylenol, and J&J baby products—identify opportunities for promoting its products at the Olympics and to nail down site logistics, from hospitality to security to marketing.
Fluent in Chinese, DeKoning says he was not only able to immerse himself in commerce but also in Chinese culture, staying in a traditional Chinese housing complex called a hutong. He says living in Beijing with Chinese roommates and working on the J&J team taught him “how to cooperate and collaborate with people on an international level.”
Noting a strong reliance on following rules and societal norms in the Chinese culture, DeKoning says he learned that “if your boss comes to you and says ‘this is what I want done,’ this is exactly the way you have to do it.”
Fudan alumna Laura Lu of Shanghai, who will begin her first year in Warsaw’s M.B.A. program this fall, is aware of the stark contrasts between U.S. and Chinese businesses. A recent employee of Rhoads at his new Shanghai firm, Zou Marketing, Lu helped negotiate sponsorship contracts between United Parcel Service and Chinese athletic teams.
Because the sports industry is “essentially state-owned” in China, she’s not sure which Warsaw Center courses will be applicable in her country. The fact that the Chinese government owns most stadiums, for example, may make it “hard to implement Stadium Finance course work in China’s market,” Lu says. “But who knows what will happen in the future?”
Lu says her parents support her dream of becoming a sports marketer, even though it means an extended separation from them. Having grown up during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76), when Mao Zedong closed urban schools and universities denied enrollment to most students, “They understand it is important to have a dream and take action,” Lu says. “I am lucky to have this right.”
Like Rhoads at Zou Marketing, the other early promoters of the Warsaw-China connection are still active in international sports business. Sheng Li is now general manager of Visa China and was honored as a distinguished M.B.A. alumnus at a Warsaw Center reunion earlier this year. Burton was recently named a distinguished professor of sports management at Syracuse University, his alma mater, where he will teach international sports relations among other things.
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China takes great pride in the success of the Beijing Olympics. The country’s domestic annual sports market was close to $15 billion by the end of 2008, according to Zou Marketing. Now, Fudan’s Qiu Lijin notes that “More Chinese people realize that sports can be thought of as an industry.” Even so, the current shortage of professional management skills and the continuing government controls over professional sports still present barriers as China builds its promising sports marketing industry.
But thanks to FUON, Qiu Lijin says, “More than 160 Fudan students have completed the sports marketing program, and around half of them are now working in the sports industry in China.”
Swangard says it makes sense that over the past seven years, Fudan’s sports marketing program has developed its own approach. “We [taught] a set of paradigms, and the Fudan faculty is making it market-relevant.”
Interested in repeating “FUON-like partnerships,” the Warsaw Center has recently begun discussions with universities in South Korea and Singapore about opportunities for exchanges and faculty engagement, Swangard says.
Beyond that, Swangard hopes the sports marketing program will attract to the UO more students “who have a strong interest in international business and who view Asia as a place to focus their attention.”
China was a great place to start. “There was always an inkling that the Chinese were going to use sports as a means through which to burst onto the global scene,” Swangard says. “In a way, [it’s] a language everyone can understand: Sports, like music and the arts, [can be] a connecting force.”
Husband and wife Pete Peterson, M.F.A. ’68, M.S. ’77, and Chris Cunningham ’76, M.S. ’80, are freelance writers in Eugene. They traveled to Beijing and Shanghai in March.
