Developing markets are a challenge for researchers who study them and for governments, business leaders, and citizens who strive to improve the quality of life in them. The limitations of the dominant development paradigm coupled with the need to focus on consumers provide tremendous opportunities to engage in truly transformative research. Toward this outcome, several interactive forces must be understood and addressed during research design, management, and implementation. The purpose of this essay is to provide a synthesis-that is, a framework in the form of a conceptual model-with practical applications to transformative research in developing markets and, ultimately, with the broader objective to stimulate new conceptualizations, research, and best practices to transform consumer well-being.
The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are challenging the world to work towards a more sustainable future. Its 17 goals are ambitious, requiring concerted and system-based efforts driven by critical and socially aware thinking. However, marketing education is largely falling short of teaching students to think that way. Given macromarketing’s unique perspective on the interactions among markets, marketing, and society, macromarketers are poised to contribute to marketing pedagogy and to commit students to realizing the SDGs. This article first looks back at the previous 40 years of macromarketing pedagogy, before offering contemporary approaches to teaching macromarketing through four illustrative case studies found in an online repository called Pedagogy Place. It then looks forward, setting an aspiring vision for macro-oriented classrooms in the coming years.
Purpose -To familiarize readers with the nature, scope and history of macromarketing and, more specifically, with the European contribution to macromarketing. Design/methodology/approach -The paper is based on a selective literature review and personal observation with a focus on the past, the present and the likely future of macromarketing. Findings -The paper reports both on the limited degree of emphasis placed on macromarketing by marketing scholars and the reasons why macromarketing has not received more attention. Originality/value -This paper provides a heretofore missing overview of the nature and scope of an important subdiscipline within academic marketing. The European contribution to macromarketing is discussed in considerable detail. Some personal views on the likely future development of this area are also offered.
The role of local intermediaries in impoverished contexts has been a focus of attention within the marketing and development literature since shortly after WWII. A systematic review of this work reveals that while much of this literature identifies market intermediaries as exploitative and unspecialized entities, other work views them more positively. These conflicting accounts, rarely supported empirically, have resulted in diverging policy recommendations. Many scholars call for the wholesale removal of such intermediaries, while a lesser number argue that they can and should be supported. The dominant view as regards local intermediaries reflects three prevailing biases in the marketing and development literature: an emphasis on transformation; a rejection of the local; and a favouring of consumers and producers over intermediaries. This paper describes these biases and proposes shaping constructs, potential future research questions, theoretical lenses, and methods of analysis that should ideally guide future scholarship on the role of local intermediaries within impoverished contexts.
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