Mapping the Future of Consumers

Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:51 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi 14 Mapping the Future of Consumers Julien Cayla and Lisa Peñaloza Marketing will transform us into modern beings. Or at least that is the underlying assumption that lurks behind many conversations occurring in corporate boardrooms. Underlying the academic texts of international marketing and embedded in the everyday practices of marketing departments are the same fundamental ideas: that exposure to more market choices emancipates individuals and that the unavoidable development of markets worldwide will transform us all into modern consumers. This paradigm, which places Western consumers at the end of history and people from non-Western nations at the beginning, is at the core of marketing’s social imaginary—that is, the set of values, institutions, and symbols that animate the practice and teaching of marketing. Yet this social imaginary is rarely examined or questioned. This is all the more problematic because of the increasing reach of marketing discourse, tools, and techniques all over the world. An essential dimension of marketing’s social imaginary that we question here is a vision of history and development that exists not only in the marketing literature but also in the way marketers think about the historical trajectory of Western and non-Western countries. Key questions about the way we map the future of consumers, about how we trace the trajectory of non-Western nations, or about the way we define modernity lie largely outside the intellectual debate in marketing. Marketing theory has somehow avoided fundamental questions about the relationship between marketing practice and modernity by celebrating the creative resistance of non-Western consumers facing the hegemony of the West, or postmodernity as a form of reenchantment (Firat and Venkatesh, 1995). Yet in the boardrooms of Colombo (Kemper, 2001), Bombay (Mazzarella, 2003), Kathmandu (Leichty, 2002), and Tbilissi (Manning and Uplisashvili, 2007), executives are constantly discussing what it means to be modern. In this paper, we focus on the conceptions of modernity that circulate in India’s advertising world. We study marketing and Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:51 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Mapping the Future of Consumers advertising executives as cultural intermediaries brokering ideas and images about what it means to be a modern person. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in an Indian advertising agency, we examine the ideology of marketing as it is diffused in the non-Western world. Our approach is to consider alternately the vision of history that is presented in foundational marketing texts and the stories marketers tell us about the future of consumers. We want to examine the way marketing practice diffuses and reflects assumptions about the future and about modernity, which are at the core of academic marketing discourse. We go from the micro level of particular advertising campaigns and stories to the macro level of marketing’s imaginary—that is, the conception of the world and the future that dominates marketing academia and spills over into the professional marketing world. By attending to the details of everyday life in an advertising agency and examining the tools marketing and advertising executives use to map the future of Indian consumers, we seek to unearth the values and ideals that permeate marketing practices. We end by arguing that the vision of history that exists in marketing hinders our ability to imagine multiple trajectories for the evolution of market cultures. Fieldwork and Analysis In 2001 and 2002, the first author spent nine months at a Bombay advertising agency, a subsidiary of a large multinational advertising agency that we call Lorton in this paper. The offices of Lorton were located in South Bombay, a few hundred feet away from Salman Rushdie’s childhood mansion at the bottom of Malabar Hill, one of the poshest neighborhoods of the city. As a participant in the everyday activities of the agency (Lofland and Lofland, 1995), the first author regularly helped with small projects and tasks in the planning department (e.g., the analysis of focus group data). In exchange, the agency gave him access to meetings, archives, and employees who shared their experiences in selling products and services to Indian consumers. Advertising executives were managing campaigns for brands of ketchup, scooters, motorcycles, life insurance, cake mixes, or breakfast cereals, and in their meetings the most pressing questions were: “Who is the Indian consumer we are talking to? What are his dreams and aspirations?” The answers to these questions, which often took the form of stories about Indian men and women, are what form the basis of our analysis. Storytelling is one of the main ways humans make sense of the world. It is also one of the oldest forms of communication and is pervasive in every area of business. Consider these examples: Procter and Gamble trains managers 321 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:51 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Inside Marketing to create brand stories that will appeal to consumers (Zaltman, 2003), screenwriters advise companies on the best way to raise money by telling compelling stories (McKee, 2003), and marketing academics rely on case studies of what has happened to companies to teach students and executives. Narrative approaches have received considerable attention not only in strategy, organizational management, and public policy literature (Morgan, 1989; Boje, 1991; Wade, 2003), but also in such disciplines as history (Cronon, 1992), anthropology (Rosaldo, 1989), and psychology (Polkinghorne, 1988). Yet, even though management researchers have discussed strategy as a key sensemaking device (e.g., Weick, 1995), marketing researchers have not yet turned to narrative concepts and analytical tools for the rich insights they yield regarding marketing managers’ views of themselves, consumers, and processes of market development. Because strategic intent and planning are often made and implemented discursively as a series of explicit, sequential events (Barry and Elmes, 1997), we suggest that narrative analysis is particularly useful for researching international marketing strategy. We have not realized the full benefits of narrative approaches in marketing. The field has digressed from early insightful studies that revealed what marketers do and why to a current emphasis on producing formulas for individual customer satisfaction. Yet the stories managers tell about what they do and why are important to understanding how markets develop. In this chapter, we turn to these stories as data for examining managers’ explicit and implicit understandings of market development. We look at a range of stories in interviews, creative briefs, meetings, and presentations, but focus more specifically on the stories managers and advertisers tell about consumers, their organizations, and their products and services. We see stories as a way to study the greater narrative of marketing as it is diffused in different parts of the world. Drawing from semiotic and rhetorical approaches to studying narratives (Feldman Boje, 1991), we emphasize both structure and process in the analysis—structure in the sense of the elements and relations between them, and process in terms of the way the story is used, told, and received. We distilled the following fundamental elements for analysis: characters, voice, temporality, oppositions, interpretations, and audience (Barry and Elmes, 1997; Feldman et al., 2004). For the purposes of this paper, we will concentrate on the characters that emerge across stories, the plots and timing of stories, and the perspective from which managers told these stories about Indian consumers. We argue that such stories imply a hierarchy where consumption of and access to new commodities is placed at the very top, and where other ways of being and living are deemed to be on the lower rungs of the modernization ladder. 322 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:52 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Mapping the Future of Consumers The Frame of the Stories Work on a new advertising campaign often starts with a focus group. We would travel from South Bombay, where elite Bombay residents lived and where the agency was located, to the north of the city and its sprawling suburbs of Andheri and Malad and study what Indian middle-class1 consumers aspired to buy and how they were responding to the influx of new products on the market. Auto-rickshaws driving on dirt roads replaced the black-and-yellow taxis of South Bombay, with women wearing saris instead of the jeans and salwar kameez2 of South Bombayites. We would typically hold focus groups in the homes of Indian families recruited for their connections in the neighborhood and the convenient location of their houses. Members of the agency team would sit in the family’s bedroom, observing on a television monitor the development of the focus group, while in the living room a moderator would talk to the group of recruited consumers. After familiarizing informants with the idea of the focus group and the tasks they were to perform, a large portion of the focus group was designed to develop ideas for new campaigns. For example, consumers would have to personify the brands of the specific category we were working on. For work on a new motorcycle, male informants, all in their late twenties and early thirties, were given a two-page leaflet of thirty-five pictures depicting Western men in a variety of situations: a young couple in the bath, covered in foam and in a sensuous embrace; a man in the snow, seated by a fire, nuzzled by his faithful husky and dressed in snow gear; and a picture of the American actor Mark Wahlberg, standing bare-chested. Sitting in another room with executives of the agencies and the clients watching the group, the first author observed these men examining and pondering these images while trying to decide which of these Western men best embodied the brand of motorcycle studied and which of these situations they could relate to. In one of the groups, when the moderator asked them which of the men was more like them, one man remarked in Hindi: “Hum nahi hain, gore hain” (“this is not us, these are white people”). When the first author asked one of the planners at the agency why it kept pictures of Western men despite most of the interviewees being Indian, and despite the agency being asked by clients to create ads that would resonate with the Indian middle class, his answer was: “We could not find enough variety in the Indian photographs we found to get a really good focus group going.” His answer could be interpreted in a number of ways, but the main point we want to make here is that the reality of the marketplace often takes backstage in the development of marketing research because the primary goal of the focus group is to establish a common language with clients. The structuring language of those interactions and of the group was the language of 323 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:52 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Inside Marketing aspiration. Studies of advertising have long shown how images and ads are produced to create the kind of distance that resonates with consumer desires while remaining close enough to the realities of their lives to avoid alienating them. In the context of Indian advertising, however, the language of aspiration needs to be contextualized and understood in relation to India’s increasing economic liberalization. The opening of the economy to foreign companies and foreign trade has helped promote individualism and the primacy of individual needs. To sell new forms of consumption, companies and their ad agencies have had to emphasize the figure of the cosmopolitan consumer in touch with his desires, willing to embrace new commodities and services. Hence these images of Western men were particularly relevant not because ad executives wanted to create ads that appeared Western, but because such images reflected a world of individual consumer desire that suited the products Indian executives were trying to sell. These images and the stories circulating in the agency emphasized the ability of individuals to become modern through the consumption of new goods and services, and for India as a nation to modernize by celebrating such individuals. These were specific notions of modernity imagined as individual choice and as the ability to consume the way people in wealthier countries do. The frame in which consumer stories had to fit was predetermined and reflected a vision of modernity that the agency executives could work with. Other chapters in this book explore focus groups and other tools of market research as framing devices. What we want to consider here is the ideology of the frame. More specifically, what we seek to detail is the hierarchy that lurks behind these stories and consumer representations. As Applbaum pertinently argues in his chapter, the tools that we use to represent the world are never merely tools. The maps, the creative briefs, and the stories we tell about consumption and consumers always involve choices. These choices are structured by the constraints under which corporate actors operate, but they are also always embedded in cultural and institutional frameworks. As with any other human endeavor, marketing operates in a context of both insight and blindness. Market research devices provide a perspective—a way of seeing the market—that is simultaneously a way of not seeing the market, of discarding an alternative future for consumers. For example, when some of these Indian men refused to recognize themselves in pictures of Western men, they were asked to take a leap of imagination (“just imagine what character the brand would be”). The fact that the realities of these men’s lives had little to do with images of a carefree couple taking a bath together had little relevance. First, the primary objective of the focus group was to generate new ideas for the campaign. They were not that interested in understanding the lives of the Indian men they were studying. Rather, the imperative was to devise a new 324 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:52 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Mapping the Future of Consumers positioning for the brand. Second, when they talked about their lives, this information had to be reinterpreted and fashioned in the language of aspiration and in adherence to the narrative of marketing as an agent of progress and emancipation. In the following section, we detail a campaign for Grainberry’s cake mixes that describes this story of marketing as emancipation and empowerment. Cake Mixes as Modernization In the choices that are made to represent consumers in the world of Indian advertising, there is also a hierarchy at play that positions consumption as a superior and more modern way of being, and paints the switch to new commodities and services as a journey toward modernity. Campaigns for Grainberry, an American company selling a range of time-saving products such as cake mixes and refrigerated dough, illustrate how this hierarchy structures the way Indian women are represented. In the United States, Grainberry is positioned as the “brand of baked goods that makes it easy to provide physical and emotional warmth for your family” (Grainberry Brand Manual). At the time of fieldwork, Grainberry’s brand volume was highly concentrated in the United States, with less than 12 percent of sales outside of its home market. But the company was increasingly looking to the Chinese and Indian markets to fuel its growth. Grainberry faced daunting cultural challenges in India. In the United States, Grainberry defined its products as being “modern and more efficient,” helping women save time with convenient products. In India, however, market research revealed that convenience, while attractive to housewives, was not compelling enough to trigger consumption. Most Indian women perceived processed foods as expensive, unhealthy, and unappealingly foreign. Baking is not common in Indian cooking and, while the tandoor oven has been part of Punjabi cooking for centuries, its purpose is more akin to grilling. Urban Indians often buy cakes for birthdays and office parties, but baking at home is still unusual in India. A market research report revealed that, in the early stages of Grainberry’s entry into the Indian market, the company was perceived by Indian women to be like an “NRI [non-resident Indian] woman; a foreigner with an alien lifestyle and upscale tastes.” Grainberry’s managers decided to deal with this issue in two main ways. First, Grainberry addressed the lack of oven penetration in India by developing a cake mix to be prepared in a pressure cooker, a much more common appliance than ovens in urban India. Second, marketing executives decided that they have would have to move the definition of their company to a higher level of abstraction, from convenience to empowerment. In an internal 325 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:52 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Inside Marketing report, a branding consultant summarized the findings of a brand essence workshop where Grainberry’s managers articulated the core of the Grainberry brand essence as warmth, togetherness, and empowerment: EMPOWERMENT—Grainberry liberates the housewife and puts her in control of her life. The effect of Grainberry’s rational and emotional benefits is to liberate the housewife from drudgery, to create time “to do”, to reinforce her role as a good mother and cook, to promote her self esteem, to invite appreciation and gratitude from her family, “and to deliver quality time for SELF . . . in short, the housewife feels EMPOWERED”. [Brand Essence Report, 2001] The objective, in the words of Grainberry’s marketing manager, was to give Indian women “modern means to express traditional values.” In interviews, Mrs. Mishra declared that she wanted her brand and the Grainberry woman to be “sociable, young, modern, progressive, empowered.” The Grainberry woman was to “look forward” without renouncing traditional values. There is a process of selective modernization in the way Grainberry’s essence was formulated: Indian women could adopt new commodities as long as they kept an Indian core of values and traditions. Here we are reminded of Chatterjee’s discussion (1993) of the role of women as custodians of Indian tradition. In Grainberry’s campaign and others, the Indian woman is treated as the custodian of tradition, defending Indian homes and Indian identity in the face of foreign contact. But what is never questioned in this and other stories that assume India would resist the invasion of foreign influences is the essential narrative line of marketing as progress—of foreign companies arriving on Indian soil as an illustration of India’s modernization process, even if this modernity came in the shape of cake mixes. The idea not just of modernity as an ineluctable wave, but of new products and brands as the expression of that modernity was never really contested by the Indian executives working on such brands. For example, in creative briefs, the advertising executive working on the Grainberry account described the “Grainberry woman” in the following way: Kamini Malhotra is the mother of two school-going children. Her home and her kitchen play the central role in her life. Baking is synonymous with western style of cooking and modernity and is thus aspirational. She would like to be considered as “prescribing to the modern school of thought” and this is the way she deludes herself as doing that. She looks traditionally homely yet contemporary [ . . . ] Baking is alien to her because she does not own an oven and was never taught baking by her Mom. Baking being associated with “modern Western-style cooking” is considered to be difficult but aspirational. It is important to note that such representations are often infused with the emotions and identity of the executives who craft them. Contrary to the story of Kamini Malhotra as aspiring to bake, focus group research revealed that 326 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:52 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Mapping the Future of Consumers baking cakes was not really perceived as aspirational. The market research company working on the account quoted Indian women saying about cake consumption: “Roz ki baat nahin hai” (“it’s not an everyday thing”); “It’s chuma consumption . . . . It’s not very definite the way you plan it.” Yet to justify the sale of cake mixes or other relatively new products, advertising and marketing executives had to take a leap of faith and imagine that middle-class Indian women would eventually buy such products. The identity and professional position of Indian marketers has become that of modernity brokers. They are active in diffusing that narrative line of progress and modernity because it gives meaning to their work and the presence of foreign multinationals in India. When we claim that the character of these stories, the traditional yet modern housewife Kamini Malhotra, is constructed, we do not imply that these descriptions have no relation to the reality of Indian women’s lives. The Grainberry campaigns do resonate with the Indian middle-class desire to experiment with a variety of food items. At the end of the 1980s, Appadurai (1988) talked about a growing class of Indian families using regional Indian dishes to position their identity as squarely middle class. The description of the target for Grainberry’s cake mix as “scouring through recipes” does resonate with the reality of wealthier urban Indians curious to taste new food items. Rather, we argue that there is a process of selection and construction that goes into the consistent representations of consumers that aspire to a modern future with a Western allure. Characters: From the Cosmopolitan Man to the Dutiful Daughter-in-Law Many of the multinationals that worked with the advertising agency decided early on that they would expand in India progressively. They would start with the upper-middle class, the “transnationally oriented” member of the middle class that Derne (2008) mentions, before moving on to the much larger but also poorer “locally-oriented” (p. 203) middle class. As in other models of market development, they would start with more familiar consumers—Indians who understood the language of multinational companies. Characters from the Indian upper and middle classes were prevalent in stories that circulated at Lorton. Discussions centered on the Westernized elite, the “cosmopolitan man,” and the “contemporary woman” that were most likely to buy the new types of products and services on the Indian market: cake mixes, powder detergents, health insurance, credit cards, ketchup, packaged flour, and canned vegetables. 327 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:52 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Inside Marketing For global brands of vodka, cars, and clothing, the ad executives would discuss the life of the cosmopolitan man: an English-speaking, well-educated Indian man who is linked to global networks of production and consumption. In a meeting, Lorton’s advertising executives described him as a “global manager, somebody who wants to show his position in society; dressed in Van Heusen, smart clothes, international style”; “he watches the BBC or the National Geographic channel.” The cosmopolitan man is connected to the outside world. His car, his bank, and the whisky he drinks are all taken to be signs of an international culture of success that India has successfully assimilated since the liberalization of its economy. The feminine counterpart of the cosmopolitan man is what Indian executives would call the “contemporary woman.” Similar to the cosmopolitan man, in a print ad for breakfast cereals she is addressed as a global consumer with the headline, “the world over, a good breakfast lesson begins with V-I-RL-O-G.” She is constructed as connected to a larger sphere of consumption (cf. “the world over”) and is reassured that, despite the claims on her time, she is doing what is best for her family. In an Indian ad for chocolate, the young contemporary woman wears Western clothes and teases her boyfriend with a chocolate bar. The executives working on the chocolate campaign describe her in the following terms: “She is urban, she knows what she wants, she is not too serious about things.” The contemporary woman is constructed as more individualistic, more Western, than her locally oriented middle-class counterparts. In a campaign for Virlog, she is described as “more like an NRI,” a woman who is able to navigate both India and the Western world. A few rungs down the social ladder are people executives described as “traditional” and “vernacular.” One of the directors of the agency explained that, as one goes down the social-class ladder, “consumers become more cultural.” For example, the housewife appearing in advertisements for Grainberry and Hansel retains enough tradition to appear authentically Indian while having some of the contemporary woman’s freedom. In Grainberry’s cooker-cake advertisement, she is portrayed as enjoying a fun and loving relationship with her children, whom she surprises with her cakes. She is not only a mother but also a friend. Cake mixes allow her to go beyond her traditional role and establish a warm relationship with her children. The male equivalent of the traditional yet modern housewife is the character of the “cosmopolitan-local man.” Fried Burger executives would exchange stories about this character when they tried to devise the best ways to attract the Indian middle class to their restaurants. After three years in the Indian market and despite many local adaptations such as buffalo (instead of beef) burgers, cheap eating options (ice cream cones priced at seven Indian rupees), and advertisements broadcast in Hindi, Indian middle-class consumers still saw Fried Burger as largely inaccessible and foreign. In the words of the ad 328 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:52 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Mapping the Future of Consumers executive working on the campaign: “For them Fried Burger is like taking a trip abroad.” For Fried Burger, expanding the consumer base from upper-middle-class to middle-class Indians then amounted to creating a zone of comfort, both in their restaurants and in the commercials they broadcast on Indian television, that middle-class Indians could enter. In this context, the character of the cosmopolitan yet local father featured in Fried Burger ads becomes reassuring: he is a man from the locally oriented middle class who enjoys a special relationship with his son and takes him to Fried Burger to forget his worries. Most importantly, this reassuring and friendly father is a way for Fried Burger’s executives to represent a figure the middle-class Indian can identify with. In the advertisement, the character speaks Hindi and, though he wears Western clothes (pants and a shirt), is far from the image of the cosmopolitan man equipped with a briefcase, a mobile phone, and a foreign car. The father’s modest and gentle manners contrast with the aggressive desire of the cosmopolitan man to get ahead. To create a more vernacular type of Indian masculinity, advertising and marketing executives endow male characters with a humility that contrasts with the materialism of the cosmopolitan man. All of these characters are more than representations of the market; they reflect and reinforce a cultural hierarchy. Discussions revolving around questions such as “who is the modern Indian housewife?” and “how is she different from the traditional Indian housewife?” mirror and solidify deep-rooted assumptions about what it means to be modern. Through these discussions, ad agencies produce a system of oppositions and relations between consumers. We recall here the structuralist insight about difference (Saussure, 1966): that meaning is not in the signifier itself, but only exists in a network of relations between signifiers. In stories about consumers, the figure of the cosmopolitan man only has meaning through its relation to such characters as the vernacular man or the cosmopolitan-local man. These oppositions are also rife with assumptions about market development: for most executives interviewed, many Indians were becoming more like the character of the cosmopolitan man or the contemporary woman. Plots and timing The plot that is implicit in many of these stories about Indian consumers is that they would eventually upgrade to new commodities, and that this switch to cell phones, sachets of shampoo, and powder detergents would be an expression of their latent modernity. Stories about Indian lives needed to conform to a metanarrative about the relationship between an increase in consumption choices, the availability of products depicted as modern, and their own modernity: the modern consumer buys modern products. 329 AQ1 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:52 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Inside Marketing The case of Hansel, an American company selling a variety of household and personal-care products, illustrates this narrative of progress that Indian consumers were supposed to be following. Hansel entered India in the late 1980s on the platform of bringing superior products to middle-class Indians living in large cities. But in the mid-1990s, lured by the promise of a vast rural market, Hansel decided to penetrate the Indian heartland by selling detergent to consumers living in medium-sized towns and rural areas. Hansel’s main challenge was to convince Indian women to switch from their more traditional oil-based bars of soap to synthetic powder detergents. The challenge of selling powder detergents is similar to that of selling cake mixes. It involves convincing Indian housewives that their work won’t be replaced by convenient products. In the following quote, an ad executive describes how grueling the process of washing clothes is in India, yet how little enthusiasm convenient laundry products generate: In the Indian context, washing laundry means you soak clothes then scrub it with a detergent cake then scrub it with a brush, rinse under water, check for stains and then do it all over again. Even people using washing machines would also scrub clothes. Collars and cuffs would be treated with a detergent cake, then a brush and then put it in the machine. More than anything, what’s important is the feeling of involvement, that what she is doing cannot be replaced by a machine; “it needs my rigor, it needs my elbow power then only I can get satisfactory results”. Even though she was offered a convenient product she was very reluctant to accept that. (Pradnya) Similar to cake mixes, discussions about powder detergent revolved around notions of convenience, efficiency, modernity, and progress: how can Indian women be convinced to upgrade to more efficient products without emphasizing their convenience? As they researched habits of consumption, Hansel and Lorton executives discovered that Indian women paid special attention to clothes that were to be worn outside. A memo details the importance that clothing worn outside the home appear very clean: “There is a category of “important” clothes which is given special care while washing e.g. husband’s office/“outgoing” shirt, children’s school uniform, costly saris.” (Lorton archives, July 1995). The same memo emphasizes that, for rural housewives, getting very clean clothes might not be that important: “It is not important to get very clean clothes which will be dirtied in the fields the next day.” However, she will want her children “to go into service where clothes are important because of our standing in society.” The cleanliness of clothes becomes associated with social status and the aspiration to enter the middle class through employment in the Indian administration. There is a large amount of research emphasizing the boundaries between the outside and the inside, between the public and private spheres in India 330 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:52 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Mapping the Future of Consumers (e.g., Chatterjee, 1993). By traversing both spheres, clothing becomes an extension of the household’s identity, its purity, and social status as its wearer goes outside. The distinction between the private and the public is also evident in the Western clothes that urban Indian men will wear in public (pants, shirts) and the Indian clothes (kurtas,3 pyjamas) they typically wear inside the house. The outside is the domain of work and contact with things that are impure and foreign. It is also the domain where men can rise through the social hierarchy by being more professional and by understanding Western practices of professionalism, hygiene, and cleanliness. Hence, clothes worn outside are doubly important: they are to be cleaned because the outside is impure but also because it is necessary on the path to professional achievement. But while Hansel and Lorton executives agreed that Indian women would buy a premium detergent like Hansel for special clothes to be worn outside, they disagreed about the profile of Indian women Hansel could sell to. In rural areas, the ad agency argued, people would look for the cheapest alternative— Indian brands such as Nirma or regional contenders like Ghadi—not foreign detergents like Hansel, which command 25 percent higher prices for the same quantity. At the core of discussions between Lorton and Hansel is the notion that, as they become richer, consumers advance to better, premium products that are more efficient, a notion Lorton’s Managing Director Rajeev refers to when he says, “The assumption is that if consumers are given better quality products, they will run to buy them.” This assumption surfaced in briefs that Lorton and Hansel executives devised for the “hinterland” campaign: “We believe that there is a distinct psychographic group of consumers whom we can target. These are upwardly mobile women who aspire for a better life for their children and husband and want to be recognized as belonging to a more progressive social class.” (Lorton Creative Brief, 1997). The use of “we believe” suggests that, rather than being based on data, the construction of this consumer representation stems from the hope that Indian women from the middle class will eventually be more like upper-class Indian women and Western consumers in their willingness to pay premium prices for quality detergents. None of the market research indicated that consumers were really unhappy with their detergents. One of the reports rationalized that Indian women just did not know the kind of cleanliness and whiteness Western consumers are used to. They would need to be shown that superior cleanliness, described by one executive as higher “standards of cleanliness,” was possible and desirable. The assumption that Indian consumers would eventually become more like their Western counterparts is not specific to Hansel, but is corroborated repeatedly for many companies in fieldnotes and archives. For example, an underlying assumption that circulated at Virlog was that Indians would adopt 331 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:52 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Inside Marketing breakfast cereals at the same pace as in other countries, and that one needed only to map the penetration of cereals in Mexico to determine how far behind India was. When asked about the challenges the company faced in India, one of Virlog’s managers revealed that the speed at which India was moving along that imaginary axis of development was not as fast as had been predicted. In India, successes have been mainly to create a market for breakfast cereals. Challenges have been related to the fact that maybe the pace of market expansion has not been as fast as we thought it would be. We thought that for example our generation would be more receptive to change and more likely to adopt products like breakfast cereals. But that has not really happened; lifestyles and habits are much more entrenched than we originally thought they would be. While upper-middle-class Indians were consuming an increasing amount of cereals, Virlog faced the same problem as other foreign companies in India: convincing Indian households from the middle class to switch to more efficient and expensive forms of consumption had proven to be more difficult than expected. Market research showed that Indian consumers enjoyed their Indian breakfasts. They were also not keen to consume cereals with cold milk because milk is usually delivered hot every day to urban Indian households. Despite this resistance to foreign habits of consumption, marketing executives at Virlog and other multinationals still believed that Indian consumers would eventually become more like Western consumers. They accepted that the pace at which different cultures would reach that point varied, but the nature of cultural change was never really questioned; more Indian consumers would eventually become more global, more like their Western counterparts, and the apex of these changes was considered to be more modern. In discussions about the future of Indian consumers, the executives at Lorton would often play the role of cultural broker, emphasizing their understanding of Indian market culture. After all, their very existence depended on the necessity to localize advertisements for the Indian market. As Mazzarella (2003) describes in his monograph, Indian advertising agencies use this purported expertise on Indian market culture to fashion advertisements and ad characters they see as resolutely Indian. They were quick to point out that India would resist the arrival of foreign companies, reflecting Nehru’s description of India’s integration of foreign influences: “She was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously” (Nehru, 1946: 39). But it would be naïve to assume that Indian ad agencies always resisted MNCs’ narrative of Indian consumers becoming more like their Western counterparts. While part of the agency’s position of being a cultural broker is predicated upon this resistance and preservation of Indian cultural difference, agency executives are also adamant that Indians are 332 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:52 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Mapping the Future of Consumers becoming more consumerist and global and hence modern. It would be a misleading approximation to equate Indian advertising agencies with the local and MNCs with the global. Rather, the stories organizational actors were telling showed they were always operating along the same axis of development, from traditional to global consumers and from vernacular to global and Western languages. Debates between agency and MNC only revolved around the pace at which the change would occur and what strata of society would be involved. The ineluctable path of development and the nature of development were never really questioned by agency or MNC executives. Voice To understand the stories managers tell, it is important to understand the perspective from which they are telling them. The overwhelming majority of executives working in advertising agencies in Bombay come from the uppermiddle class. They have often benefited from the liberalization of the Indian economy, enjoying access to better-paying jobs in the service sector. These are men and women in their late twenties who are often able to buy their own cars, expensive clothes, and holidays abroad. One of the most difficult challenges for the executives was to empathize with and relate to a locally oriented middle class whose lives and aspirations seemed quite distant from their own. The women working on the Grainberry account would often tell stories about the fact that, while they have to advertise food products, they are hardly ever involved in the preparation of food in their own households (servants would do most of the cooking). Other executives often told stories about other executives’ lack of knowledge about Indian culture. In a client meeting, executives on the Virlog marketing team expressed concern that Indian women would pour warm milk over their cereal, making it soggy. They would use the milk that had been delivered at their doorsteps early in the morning and which they had boiled to preserve it longer. A creative director revealed her lack of knowledge about middle-class consumer behavior by asking, “Why doesn’t she pick up a carton of milk in the refrigerator?” An account planner told me: “The executives working for the client, Virlog, were kind of startled, looking at her. I mean, how many people have milk cartons, Tetra Paks, in their house in India?” Examining the background of advertising executives helps in understanding the types of identities that they fashion for Indian consumers. As in the case of other cultural producers (Dornfeld, 1998), Indian advertising and marketing executives project many of their own contradictions and desires onto the advertising characters they create. The aspirations of the characters Lorton executives created probably had more to do with their own aspirations and vision of the good life than the consumers they were trying to advertise to. 333 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:52 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Inside Marketing Many of these executives had global dreams and talked of future plans of “getting away” to Western countries: Nestor related to me his plans to move to Canada, Tasneem aired her frustrations after being refused an American visa, and Kaushik spoke of plans to move to London. While at work they emphasized their ability to speak in the language of the local man, while outside of work they watched television channels broadcasting in English, talked of their desire to go to Western business schools to get their MBAs, and avidly read management and marketing textbooks. A popular character who came to the agency every other week was the young salesman selling marketing and business textbooks to ad executives. He would open a big suitcase, replete with new editions of David Aaker’s books on branding (e.g., Aaker, 1996) or Jean Marie Dru’s Disruption (1996). The salesman knew little English, but knew the names of the marketing gurus necessary to elicit attention and make a sale. Outside the agency, at one of the busiest intersections of the city, they could pick up the latest edition of the Harvard Business Review collections of articles. Young boys would swiftly pass between air-conditioned cars on the street to sell the latest management books alongside novels and magazines to Indian executives stopped in traffic. On the street corner, a small newsstand carried myriad Indian marketing magazines as well as foreign publications. For Indian executives, these were important points of access for mastering what they saw as sophisticated forms of marketing knowledge, models of consumer behavior, and ways of understanding marketing systems that came from the West. Those who were quick to point out that India was different and that the Indian market required a tailored approach were the same who regarded marketing as a universal language they had to master in order to progress in their careers. It is from this intersection of the world of Western brand gurus and the reality of the Indian marketplace that advertising executives construct their stories of market development. As advertising executives imagine Indian consumers, they devise a story of resistance to global pressures, yet in their conceptions of progress and development, they are not only embracing but also diffusing a Western-centric, teleological view of development as essentially consumerist and populated with global brands. The Imprint and Enduring Legacy of Modernization Theory Here we use the data collected in India to reflect upon the assumptions about history that already exist in marketing textbooks and articles. Rather than being an oddity, the account of history that is found in Indian boardrooms reflects a view of the world that is ubiquitous not only in international marketing practice but also in academic scholarship. The repeated criticisms raised against modernization theory (see Mehmet, 1999) should have 334 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:52 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Mapping the Future of Consumers relegated this model of development to a footnote. Yet one can find the influence of modernization theory in numerous marketing articles and books. The most popular modernization theorist was Walter Rostow. Originally published in 1960, Rostow’s seminal work, The Stages of Economic Growth, was tellingly subtitled a “Non-Communist Manifesto” because it offered a capitalist alternative to Marxist theory. It was also a specific vision of the world which saw development as a civilizing process, a singular and universal path that involved individual emancipation, technological advancement, and human mastery of the environment; if America was a first-world country, and if firstworld countries were advanced and third-world countries were traditional and backward, then third-world countries would inevitably seek to emulate them. Like much marketing scholarship, modernization theory emerged during America’s economic domination in the 1950s and its ideological battles against communism. In modernization theory, the model of the modern man (Inkeles and Smith, 1974) is that of an individual ready for new experiences and open to change but also punctual, regular, orderly, and confident in his ability to dominate his environment through the exercise of careful planning. The modern man, as conceptualized by modernization theorists, is the Western man. Modernization theory still carries a great deal of influence in marketing and is still taught in many business schools as though this model of development were devoid of ideological underpinnings. Early on, marketing scholar Coskun Samli (1965) explained that the terms “underdeveloped” and “developing” applied to countries “whose inhabitants desire some of the modern facilities and comforts of Western life” (p. 42). The work of Rostow is still reported, though not critiqued, in major international marketing textbooks which sell thousands of copies all over the world. For example, Cateora and Graham (2002) use Rostow’s five-stage model of economic development and his idea that less developed nations have fewer needs for symbolic goods. In his classes and lectures, Philip Kotler regularly uses Rostow’s stages of development to explain how nations progress through different stages of economic growth, from traditional societies to societies of high mass consumption (Applbaum, 2009). Marketing scholars also use modernization theory to develop managerial recommendations. For example, Ramarapu and her colleagues (1999) suggest that companies can recycle technologically dated products in less developed countries such as China and India because their level of development lags behind that of the United States. In fact, modernization theory has become so naturalized in marketing that discussions of Rostow and modernization theory in international marketing often fail to mention the conditions of its emergence (see e.g., Luqmani et al., 1994). Even more dangerously, modernization theory creates a pernicious hierarchy which puts Western countries at the pinnacle of development. 335 AQ2 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:52 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Inside Marketing As Ferguson (2005) puts it, the narrative of modernization employs a temporalized historical sequence in which poor countries are not simply at the bottom, but also at the beginning. What is left unspoken in this development metanarrative is the fact that the economic gulf between the richest and poorest countries is actually growing, and rapidly. As an illustration of this growing divide, Easterly (2000) has noted that most African countries are much further from the promised economic parity with the third world than they were twenty years ago. Linear models of development such as the ones that exist in international marketing or in corporate boardrooms mask the uneven and unequal way in which the global economy is evolving. Many scholars have in fact insisted that the wealth of developed economies depends on absorbing the resources of less wealthy nations. Several researchers have started to question the Western-centric view of the world that is prevalent in business research (Boyacigiller and Adler, 1991; Usunier and Lee, 2005). They have turned their attention to Western underpinnings of management and marketing concepts and criticized the Westerncentric view of the world that endures in many multinational companies. For example, Prahalad and Lieberthal (1998) point out that the first wave of MNCs simply exported the products they were already selling in the West, assuming that middle-class consumers in China and India would favorably respond to this influx of new products and services. As Prahalad and Lieberthal point out, after many blunders and efforts to grapple with the reluctance of “underdeveloped” consumers to buy obsolete products, many MNCs have started to think differently about emerging markets. Turning to other emerging markets, they have enjoyed some success in transferring knowledge, personnel, and other resources from one third-world country to another. In his work on what is called the “bottom of the pyramid,” management researcher C.K. Prahalad (2004) has gone further and encouraged companies to address the needs of the poorest consumers on the planet and to turn the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid into an economic opportunity for companies. However, it is our sense that much of this work on the “bottom of the pyramid” never really questions the ideas about development and modernity that are the core of business research and business practice. The idea that “underdeveloped” nations follow in the footsteps of “developed” ones is never really questioned. In addition, the stories that are told in this literature about companies addressing poorer consumers (see Prahalad and Hammond, 2002; Prahalad, 2004) are almost always stories about consumption of and access to better, more efficient commodities. Of course, there is no denying that some of these commodities, such as mobile phones, provide better access to jobs or facilitate commerce. Prahalad (2004) recognizes that development is more than increased access to consumption choices, but most of the case studies he cites only illustrate development through examples of increased 336 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:52 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Mapping the Future of Consumers consumption and choice. For example, Prahalad argues that the ability of poor people to buy sachets of shampoo and detergent empowers consumers by improving their dignity and self-esteem. But one has to wonder what ideology allows marketing and management researchers to equate access to cheaper, more efficient detergents with emancipation. This is not a far cry from the idea circulating in Indian boardrooms that cake mixes are tools of empowerment. What do we miss if we only frame development and human emancipation as a story of more and better consumption? A different vision of history, an alternative to this ineluctable temporal evolution of societies and consumers, can be found in the idea of “alternative modernities”—the idea that third-world nations are on parallel tracks, inventing their own forms of modernity as they go via diverse and creative cultural practices that simultaneously coexist with variations in modern consumption and marketing practices (see Gaonkar, 2001). This stream of literature in the social sciences finds resonance in the consumer research literature examining the creative ways through which non-Western consumers have adopted, transformed, and resisted foreign cultural influences (see Ger and Belk, 1996). However, even this romantic story about agency, plurality, and cultural difference fails to question basic assumptions about economic progression and development. For many people in third-world nations, the hope of development has been replaced by “a game of chance, a lottery in which the existential temporal horizon is colonized by the immediate present and by prosaic short-term calculations” (Mbembe, 2002: 271). Talk of consumer agency will often highlight individual consumers at the top of Prahalad’s pyramid in their respective countries and ignore the worsening of global inequality and the inadequacy of these development metanarratives to explain it (Ferguson, 2005), to say nothing of dealing with it strategically. The boardrooms of Indian advertising agencies are humming with creative adaptation, the types of alternative modernity that scholars have talked about at length. They often emphasize respect for traditional values and the fact that Indian consumers will not buy into the Western vision of the good life. Yet the equation of modernity with the increase of consumption choices and the availability of more efficient products is never really questioned in corporate boardrooms. Of course, that the advertising world operates with such conceptions of modernity is not very surprising. Conclusion In this chapter, we have documented how the everyday practices of marketing—the crafting and telling of stories about consumers—diffuse marketing ideology. We have shown that local advertising and marketing executives 337 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:52 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Inside Marketing maintain and propagate many deep-seated assumptions about the future that reinforce a hierarchy in which consuming subjects are at the very top of a global pyramid, and where Western consumers are at the end of development and poorer, non-Western people are at the beginning. Discussions about cake mixes in Indian corporate boardrooms and the lessons of international marketing textbooks have in fact much in common. They reflect and repeat the underlying vision of the future that dominates marketing scholarship and practice: a future of more consumption that is equated with human emancipation. In his chapter for this volume, Kalman Applbaum observes that not all our fears, hopes, and passions “are reducible or even translatable to that one component of our experience described by the word ‘consumer.’” We would add that not all visions of modernity equate it with more consumption and a model of development that is linear and preordained. Other paths and futures can be imagined. For managers, the type of reflexivity we encourage is not only a moral necessity, but a strategic and pragmatic one. In addition to relegating thirdworld consumers to an anachronistic space (e.g., Indian consumers are from “before”), the linear logic of market development that is found in modernization theory and in the stories many managers told us is inherently unable to respond to market dynamics and future developments that are by definition uncertain. Plotting consumers and countries along a preordained temporal axis of development prevents companies from imagining another future for consumers and other ways of interacting with them. For social scientists in general and marketing scholars in particular, there is an opportunity here to reflect upon the conceptualization of modernity which we perpetuate in textbooks, conferences, and journal articles. If the sight of small, barefooted Indian boys carrying copies of the Harvard Business Review proves anything, it is that academics may live in ivory towers, but their values and credo take life on the streets and in the boardrooms and meeting halls of many cities around the world. It is only when marketing and business scholars become truly reflexive in their vision of the world and of humanity that we can start imagining other forms of market relations. Notes 1. The term “middle class” is problematic in the Indian context. As Dwyer (2000) argues, the middle class is a category that originates in Western countries where the socioeconomic class pyramid actually bulges in the middle. When we employ the term “middle class” in this chapter, we usually refer to an expression used by the executives we interviewed and observed. 338 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:53 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Mapping the Future of Consumers 2. A long shirt and a pair of pants, often complemented by a rather large scarf, called a dupatta. 3. A loose, collarless shirt. References Aaker, D.A. (1996) Building Strong Brands. New York: The Free Press. Appadurai, A. (1988) “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India.” Comparative Studies in Science and History, 30(1): 3–24. Applbaum, K. (2009) Personal communication. Barry, D., and Elmes, M. (1997) “Strategy Retold: Toward a Narrative View of Strategic Discourse.” Academy of Management Review, 22: 429–52. Boje, D. (1991) “The Storytelling Organization: A Study of Story Performance in an Office Supply Firm.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 36(1): 106–26. Boyacigiller, N., and Adler, N.J. (1991). “The Parochial Dinosaur: Organizational Science in a Global Context.” Academy of Management Review, 16(2): 262–90. Cateora, P., and Graham, J. (2002) International Marketing. Burr Ridge, IL: McGraw-Hill/ Irwin. Chatterjee, P. (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cronon, W. (1992) “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative.” Journal of American History, 78: 1347–76. Derne, S. (2008) Globalization on the Ground: New Media and the Transformation of Culture, Class, and Gender in India. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Dornfeld, B. (1998) Producing Public Television, Producing Public Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dru, J.M. (1996) Disruption: Overturning Conventions and Shaking Up the Marketplace. New York, NY: Wiley and Sons. Dwyer, Rachel (2000) All You Want is Money, All You Need is Love. London: Cassell. Easterly, William (2000) The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ferguson, J. (2005) “Decomposing Modernity: History and Hierarchy after Development.” In Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty, eds. Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Duke: Duke University Press, pp. 166–82. Firat, F., and Venkatesh, A. (1995) “Liberatory Postmodernism and the Reenchantment of Consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research, 22(3): 239–67. Gaonkar, D.P. (2001) Alternative Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ger, G., and Belk, R.W. (1996) “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke: Consumptionscapes of the ‘Less Affluent World’.” Journal of Consumer Policy, 19(3): 271–304. Inkeles, A., and Smith, D.H. (1974) Becoming Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kemper, Steven (2001) Buying and Believing: Sri Lankan Advertising and Consumers in a Transnational World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 339 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:53 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Inside Marketing Leichty, Mark (2002) Suitably Modern: Making Middle-Class Culture in a New Consumer Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lofland, John, and Lofland, Lyn H. (1995) Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis (3rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Luqmani, M., Yavas, U., and Quraeshi, Z.A. (1994) “A Convenience-oriented Approach to Country Segmentation: Implications for Global Marketing Strategies.” Journal of Consumer Marketing, 11(4): 29–40. Manning, Paul, and Uplisashvili, Ann (2007) “‘Our Beer’: Ethnographic Brands in Postsocialist Georgia.” American Anthropologist, 109(4): 626–41. Mazzarella, W. (2003) Shovelling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mbembe, A. (2002) “African Modes of Self-Writing.” Public Culture, 14(1): 239–73. McKee, R. (2003) “Storytelling That Moves People.” Harvard Business Review, June : 51–5. Mehmet, O. (1999) Westernizing the Third World: The Eurocentricity of Economic Development. London: Routledge. Morgan, G. (1989) “The Role of Stories.” In Creative Organization Theory, Understanding the Culture of Your Organization, pp. 297–8. Nerhu, J. (1946) The Discovery of India. Calcutta: The Signet Press. Polkinghorne, D.E. (1988) Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press. Prahalad, C.K. (2004) The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Upper Saddle River: Wharton School Publishing. ——and Lieberthal, K. (1998) “The End of Corporate Imperialism.” Harvard Business Review, 76 : 69–79. ——and Hammond, A. (2002) “Serving the World’s Poor, Profitably.” Harvard Business Review, 80(9): 48–58. Ramarapu, S., and Timmerman, J.E., and Ramarapu, N. (1999) “Choosing Between Globalization and Localization as a Strategic Thrust for Your International Marketing Effort.” Journal of Marketing Theory & Practice, 7(2): 97–105. Rosaldo, R. (1989) Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. Rostow, W.W. (1960) The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Samli, Coskun (1965) “Exportability of American Marketing Knowledge.” MSU Business Topics, 13(Autumn): 34–42. Usunier, J.C., and Lee, J. (2005) Marketing Across Cultures. New York: Financial Times/ Prentice-Hall. Wade, R.H. (2003) “The Invisible Hand of the American Empire.” Ethics and International Affairs, 17(2): 77–88. Weick, K. (1995) Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Zaltman, G. (2003) How Customers Think. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. 340 AQ3 Comp. by: PG0994 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001227811 Time:15:25:53 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001227811.3D Date:10/11/10 OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/11/2010, SPi Author Queries: AQ1. Saussure (1966) is not listed in the reference list. Please provide bibliographic details for the same. AQ2. Samli (1962) has been changed to Samli (1965) as per reference list. Please check. AQ3. Please provide bibliographic details for the reference.