Research Proposal: Managerial Challenges Facing Multinationals: A Case Study of Alibaba Group

Table of Contents

1. INTRODUCTION 3

1.1. Background 3

1.2. Objective overview 4

2 LITERATURE REVIEW 4

2.1 Managerial challenges facing global firms 4

2.2 Marketing Managerial Strategies and Challenges 6

3 METHODOLOGY 8

3.1 Research Method 8

3.2 Survey Questions 8

3.3 Data Types 8

3.4. Data Collection 8

3.6 Sampling 9

3.7 Data Analysis 10

4 TIME-PLAN 10

5 RESEARCH FUTURE AND ISSUES 11

References 13

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1. Background 

The sphere of influence of modern companies today extends from local to international markets. With an increase in the size and market share of an organization, the marketing and managerial challenges also tend to increase. The Chinese economy with the use of technology for the last 2-3 decades has grown rapidly, which has opened a huge local market for its firms (Bowen & Kent Baker, 2015). Firms like Alibaba have grown rapidly and expanded into the global market. While the global market offers huge opportunities it also presents major challenges in management and marketing which has led to huge multinationals to fail in global market, such as legal constraints and different market values, even when they have a huge domestic market, expertise, and resources (Warner& Rowley, 2015). As a global company, Alibaba faces several managerial challenges in carrying out activities and decision making in areas such as recruitment, marketing, operations, and expansion among others. Notably, managers play a significant role of creating a working environment that is favorable to its workers.

The growth and success of Alibaba is associated with the effort made by the company managers and especially its founder Jack Ma along with the aggressive strategies that define domestic and global operations (Kim, 2018). Even with the best technology and ideas, management is key in achieving organization success. Alibaba has faced significant management challenges that have affected its ability to expand across the borders and expand its domestic market size. In addition to managerial efficiency, marketing is critical in the success of global corporations. Indeed, the major challenge facing Alibaba and many other multinationals from replicating domestic market strategies is the ability to reach out to customers of different cultures, through glocalization and create a significant effect that holds on global markets. This paper seeks to examine the marketing and managerial challenges facing global firms with a case study of Alibaba.

1.2. Objective overview

The paper, in examining the marketing and managerial challenges facing Alibaba, it will seek to achieve the following objectives;

• To determine the managerial challenges facing Alibaba
• To determine the marketing challenges of Alibaba
• To determine the positive and negative influence of managerial challenges on the overall company performance.
• To determine the solution to major managerial challenges

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Managerial challenges facing global firms

In the process of entry into new markets, managers face new challenges; thus, it is critical for firms to build a competent workforce that knows business and are flexible minded (Baker M. J., 2014). Global firms no longer rely on a few managers with excellent multicultural experience or few country experts in order to be successful. It is important to note that managers require not just only minimal expertise by also be able to recognize the cultural issues that affect the day to day working relationships and communication of the workforce (Buckley, Doh, & Benischke, 2017). Indeed, the major managerial challenges facing multinationals are culture and communication since when an organization enters a new environment; some adjustment is required in terms of culture and communication. According to Phillipe (2017) cross-cultural issues relates to understanding and interaction between managers, workers, clients and partners between countries in the globe. The situation becomes complex when dealing with multicultural teams that are widely separated geographically and with dissimilar regional cultures.

Global corporate culture affects how managers deal with competitive environment, especially in business etiquette. Therefore, it is important when preparing managers for multinational assignments to train them on cultural sensitivity, impression management, and business relationships (Brislin, Worthley, & McNab, 2006). As a business globalize, there is a need for intercultural exchanges, cross-cultural awareness, impression management, and etiquette demonstration in order to manage the multiple cultural challenges and other traditional systems managers face (Meyer & Xin, 2018). Alibaba’s challenge of success in global markets is the difficulty of its managers to adapt and learn new cultures and traditional systems. In its effort to enter the East-Asia market apart from its Chinese domestic market, Alibaba tried to replicate its domestic management culture, which failed in the face of high competition from major local firms (Siebers & Qixun, 2018).

Among the major cultural challenges that managers face globally is language barrier.  With increasing globalization activity, language boundaries are also on the increase (Brislin, Worthley, & McNab, 2006). Language is intimately related to culture and organization cultural quality is determined by the internal communications. Internal organization communication is critical success factor in global competitive world. Communication is mostly language-dependent and relates to the degree of personal development (Rajhans, 2012). Language reinforces the barriers that exist between managers and employees, especially in global firms where managers are from abroad and do not speak local languages. In addition to language, attitude and values across global countries affect managerial strategies. The values and attitudes of an organization have a motivational characteristic in regards to the directions and actions of employees. Global managers always encounter performance evaluation difficulties for employees due to the cultural needs. While in China, Alibaba prefers providing performance results indirectly, others cultures prefer it to be direct (Glowik, 2017).

Transfer of management theories and even practices across borders and cultures has a significant challenge on the management of global firms (McCalman, Paton, & Siebert, 2015). Motivating global employees is a challenge as transfer of theories or practices can have a huge impact on the human resource practices in global markets. There is increased pressure on human resources in motivating diverse workers with diverse values and attitudes. Alibaba in its efforts to motivate diverse workers has developed flexible benefit plans that help workers to choose plans that best suit their needs. The diverse plans will help prevent wastage of benefits on employees who probably do not need it, hence has no motivational value. A major challenge with globalization is encouraging innovation in diverse workplace environment (Okoye & Nwaigwe, 2015). Innovation is essential for modern organizations and managers have the responsibility to drive and control changes in culture, process, and structure that promote deliberate creativity and innovation. Managers have to encourage innovation by fostering an inclusive, friendly, and flourishing environment. Alibaba’s global workplace and network has a disorganized management environment that has no foundation for creativity and innovation that has left for unruly platform without innovative considerations for customers (Davidson, Ding, & Marshall, 2017).

2.2 Marketing Managerial Strategies and Challenges

Indeed, marketing is the most crucial discipline in retail business. The ability of the company to reach the customers and attract them is one of the major tasks of the Alibaba management team (Baker M. J., 2014). Before Alibaba expands to particular market it should be able to determine the marketing situation and the possibility of acquiring a reasonable market share for its operations so that it can be able to achieve maximum sales revenue as per the company objectives. Over the last decade, Alibaba has engaged in a number of global expansion projects in Europe, Asia, and America. Alibaba marketing is based on its core purpose (Davidson, Ding, & Marshall, 2017).  Marketing strategies covering Alibaba global advancement and its perspectives will be appraised and indicated to show the prospective current and future market of Alibaba.

Like any other international retail magnet, Alibaba’s main marketing strategy lies on the prospect of understanding, maintaining and satisfying customers’ needs hence be able to attract many customers but its uniqueness is based on how it handles every customer on the basis of the services, customer care and prices (Li, Kumar, & Glinow, 2015). Customer care services are based on the delivery and achieving the customer needs and questions so as to develop and engage in realizing the future needs of the customer and measuring of customer care performance. Therefore, the study will look at the market segments of Alibaba and analyze every decision and process in its various markets. Upon reaching the respective global markets, Alibaba is always on the crossroads with certain marketing challenges (Kim, 2018). The study will look at and analyze every possible marketing challenge of Alibaba in Europe, Asia and America global markets. These challenges will be in order with the completion, growth and development of Alibaba in each of these markets.

• Research questions

The following research questions arise from the knowledge in the literature review that seek to identify the managerial challenges in the case study (Alibaba Group):

3 METHODOLOGY

3.1  Research Method

The study will use a case study to examine the marketing and managerial challenges facing Alibaba. The case study is commonly is used in research business area issues. Case study essentially analyzes specific issues in a boundary of a business environment or organization. The study will in particular employ explanatory case study. An explanatory study seeks to answer the how and why questions (Baker, Kim, & Michael, 2013). The study seeks to answer questions on how and why managers are facing challenges. Hence, an explanatory case study will fit the structure and requirements of the study. This research will involve only participants from Alibaba Group. All information and research methodology will be focused on Alibaba group and its business operations.

3.2 Survey Questions

The survey focuses on acquiring managerial and marketing data of the Alibaba Group to identify the challenges experienced in the multinational context. The study objectives are met by answering the following research questions:

• Which are the best managerial practices for multinationals like the Alibaba Group?
• What are the managerial challenges facing multinationals; especially the Alibaba Group?
• What causes the managerial and marketing challenges for the case study in the domestic and international market?
• What are the challenges associated with organizational activities like marketing and customer service?
• What are the consequences of these challenges on the performance and efficiency of the firm and overall profitability?

3.3 Data Types

Qualitative and quantitative data

3.4. Data Collection

The primary data of the study is collected through interviews that are conducted based on the specific research questions. The interview is carried out through the following channels:

• Phone interviews with respondents
• Social media interactions and discussion with respondents especially customers and employees of Alibaba
• Email correspondents with managers and employees of Alibaba
• Face to face discussion with respondents when possible

Secondary data will be collected from journals and other literature to bolster the research. It is important that data sources are diverse as possible to get a clear picture hence will cover more than one global operation of Alibaba. Secondary data will be highly significant for this research and will entail both quantitative and qualitative studies. Thus, the study’s data will be based on interview-based data and secondary data.

3.6 Sampling

The study will use stratified sampling methodology. The methodology involves dividing the prospective study population into different groups but who share similar characteristics. The research seeks to ensure the representation of all groups. The study population will include manager, employees, and customers of Alibaba Group, and stratified method will help group the population and acquire data from each group.The research population will be managers, employees, and customers of the Alibaba Group.

The prospective study population will be 30 respondents from local and global offices and stores of Alibaba and some of its consumers. The respondents will be interviewed with the help of interview questionnaire questions. The case study will rely on basic research procedures. The research respondents will be identified based on the outcome of the study whereby domestic and global managers and employees will be used. The identification of the participants will be based on culture, language, education background, management role, and geographic location. The exposure of the results will be assessed for the participant interviews.

3.7 Data Analysis

The data will employ data analysis methods especially statistical methods. The statistical methods to be used include, tables, graphs, trend analysis, ratios, and charts. The methods are used in analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data.

• Quantitative Data Designs
  • Qualitative Analysis
  • Technology for Qualitative Analysis
• Qualitative Data Designs
  • Qualitative Data
  • Laddering/ZMET
  • Qualitative Data Analysis
  • Qualitative Software Tools

4 TIME-PLAN

The research project will take 11 weeks to conduct. The following is the estimated plan of the research;

5 RESEARCH FUTURE AND ISSUES

Case studies sometimes are sometimes defective as they explain the setting into of a single organization. The consequence is that it will be hard in generalizing and applying the findings from one specific case to another as it is not easy finding similar cases. Even when the information has been collected and analyzed from diverse sources, it is possible to add bias into the research. Therefore, case study may not be applicable and future research should concentrate in comparing more than one setting and population.

References

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McCalman, J., Paton, R. A., & Siebert, S. (2015). Change Management: A Guide to Effective Implementation. SAGE: Chicago.

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