Marketeando

Introduction

Over the past half century, a distinct canon of marketing thought and pedagogy, originally developed at US universities (Bartels 1962; Jones and Monieson 1990; Witkowski 2010), has now spread worldwide. This educational globalization is an important macromarketing phenomenon. Imported marketing concepts can shape local business practices, affect consumer welfare, and ultimately become deeply embedded within the cultural fabric of nations. The diffusion of global marketing thought into emerging economies has recently garnered the attention of critical theorists. Taking a strong postcolonial position, Varman and Saha (2009) describe how marketing education at top ranked business schools in India can be characterized by dependency on the West, the replication of dominant ideas, and a lack of criticality among educators and students. In a similar vein, Bradshaw and Tadajewski (2011) discuss how marketing ideology can become an export commodity sold to international students who attend Western universities and are indoctrinated through smuggled discourses of subalternity and neoliberalism.

Postcolonial critiques raise significant questions, but they are not the only theoretical models for understanding the expansion of the marketing canon in the developing world. This article proposes instead that the diffusion of global marketing ideas and educational methods be conceptualized within a theoretical framework of domestication as hybridization. A number of studies have shown how local consumers have had influence over the marketing mix of international companies. In the fast-food business, for example, customers in Moscow and in several East Asian cities have encouraged changes in menu offerings and have reinterpreted how restaurant space should be used (see, e.g., Caldwell 2004; Watson 1997). Analogously, we argue that local marketing educators and their students also can become active agents who adapt and combine imported global concepts and teaching materials to suit their own needs within their own economic and social environments.

This alternative perspective will be applied through a survey of the marketing education landscape of Peru. The goal of the study is to document instances where Peruvians have domesticated through hybridization processes, global marketing education, and its ideological underpinnings. Emerging areas of marketing education, thought, and practice that provide interesting insights into domestication have been chosen for discussion. This data selection is not meant to suggest that marketing thought has been completely reinvented in Peru or that a postcolonial theorization of its diffusion and impact is not possible in the country. Rather, the evidence will show a range of instances where Peruvian marketing educators creatively adjust, adapt, and even extend the marketing orientation to suit a whole range of projects, from training impoverished micro-entrepreneurs to imparting advice on how to best contribute toward what Peruvians themselves are calling la marca Peru (the Peru brand).

The remainder of this article is divided into five key sections. The first addresses some limitations of postcolonial theories and proposes an analytical framework of domestication as hybridization. The second section provides a sociohistoric context of hybridization processes unfolding in Peru, in particular Lima, its capital city. Next, the third section introduces the primary data sources gathered for this study and discusses how they were interpreted. The fourth section provides a brief summary of marketing education in Peru and then describes two instances in which marketing knowledge appears to be have been domesticated by Peruvian marketing educators—marketing as a philosophy of life and marketing as praxis. Finally, the discussion section evaluates domestication as hybridization as a theoretical lens for understanding the diffusion of global marketing thought and pedagogy in the less affluent world.

Theoretical Perspectives

Postcolonial theory has provided the deep intellectual and moral firepower for critiques of globalization and global marketing in the developing world (Witkowski 2005). In this view, dominant Western ideas allow multinational corporations to be “cultural imperialists” who use marketing and brands to manipulate personal tastes, displace and homogenize local cultures, and diminish diversity (Barber 1995; Jameson 2000; Klein 1999). With its emphasis on discourse, postcolonial theory also can serve as a useful framework for assessing the diffusion and impact of global marketing thought and pedagogy (Bradshaw and Tadajewski 2011; Varman and Saha 2009). However, understanding globalization processes according to postcolonialism has limitations. This theory may be gradually losing its explanatory power over time as less affluent societies evolve and prosper and colonial rule recedes ever further into the past. The world has been transformed since the 1970s when influential writers such as Foucault and Said were in their prime. This is not to say that the power of the West to shape thinking and culture has disappeared, but it is inexorably becoming less dominant as developing countries experience their own independent histories and account for a larger and larger share of the world economy. When subalterns own global brands and run multinational companies (e.g., India’s Tata Group and China’s Haier Group), times have changed.

Perhaps more important, postcolonial and antiglobal theories tend to underestimate the ability of populations to adapt global marketing locally (Witkowski 2005). A number of studies have uncovered evidence of these consumer domestication or “glocalization” processes (see, e.g., Ger and Belk 1996; Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006). Yazicioğlu (2010) described what happened to Western rock music in Turkey as “re-territorialization.” Over time, Turkish rockers created their own modes of producing and consuming music so that the genre was no longer regarded as foreign. In the fast food business, McDonald’s became a place for Tokyo teenagers to snack and hang out after school, and in Seoul the chain developed a reputation as having restaurants friendly to women in part because they did not serve alcoholic beverages and thus attract rowdy Korean males (Watson 1997). Russian consumers blurred local/global distinctions in their embrace of McDonald’s in Moscow. They personalized the restaurant—made it Nash (ours)—by combining ideas of intimacy with a more nationalistic discourse (Caldwell 2004).

These studies largely converge with what globalization theorists see as comingling of local and global influences in producing new entities and practices. This coming together has been theorized in terms of hybridity (Bhabba 1994; García Canclini 1995, 2006), mestizaje (Martín-Barbero 1993), and creolization (Hannerz 1987). Whereas mestizaje and creolization are generally used to describe mixing of races or languages, respectively, hybridity is more ductile to understanding broader cultural processes that incorporate a wide range of media technologies, sources, and manifestations (García Canclini 2005). Hybridity, as conceptualized by García Canclini (2005, p. 8), can be described as a continuous two-way borrowing and lending between cultures, a form of transculturation or sociocultural process in which discrete structures and practices that existed separately, are combined to create new structures, objects, and practices. As García Canclini notes, these so-called discrete structures cannot be considered pure, as they too, are a result from previous hybridizations.

The concept equips us to understand the tensions experienced in Latin American countries like Peru, as they jostle with neoliberal agendas for economic reactivation, the declining National projects of modernization and the weight of native traditions (Asaldo in García Canclini 2005). At the heart of these tensions are the collective and individual efforts of Latin Americans who, as García Canclini (2005, p. xxvii) claims, exert tremendous energy to “reconvert a heritage or resource (a factory, a professional skill, a set of techniques and knowledge) in order to reintegrate it to new conditions of [neoliberal] production and distribution.” This can happen as a form of happy marriages between different cultural products and processes, like for example, pre-Columbian iconography and contemporary geometrism or as it is evident in Peruvian folk ark, a playful recombining of transnational images with their own myths and symbolisms. To understand, hybridization as a process, implies dealing with the range of reconversion strategies that are required to repurpose and reinvest whatever social, cultural, and economic capital, one has to gain some ground in everyday life. These strategies are key, if local, traditional knowledge and practices are to be retained and reproduced (García Canclini 1995, 2005, 2007).

Historically, we must acknowledge that hybridization processes within the context of Latin America are by-products of colonialism. Hybridization emerged as a means of cultural survival, whereby retaining one’s culture required a reinterpretation of an imposed cultural order and a repurposing of held beliefs and practices (García Canclini 2007; Griffiths 1996). Griffiths (1996) explains that while the Andean population accepted the Catholic religious system, it did so from their own cultural matrix and introduced many indigenous elements. Instead of giving up worshipping of huacas (their dead), they embraced Catholic saints as stand-ins for their own deities. Reflecting on Latin America’s more recent history and the relationships between popular cultures and capitalism, Canclini notes a similar process of transculturation. He writes that artisan production for example, should not be seen as a lucky survivor of industrialization, but rather as surviving and prospering because it is a part of the process of social reproduction and the division of labor necessary for capitalism to thrive (García Canclini 2007). Differently put, capitalism does not expand by getting rid of popular cultures; rather it appropriates them, restructures, and reorganizes their meaning, objects, and practices. At the same time, subaltern groups (disenfranchised people in a postcolonial setting) can and do ensure their own survival by working within the imposed system.

Conceptually, however, hybridization and postcolonial theory (as it has been used so far to deal with marketing pedagogy) are very different. Postcolonial analyses have been concerned with describing the continued subordination of subaltern groups and the reproduction of colonial hierarchies of inequality that favor Western interests (Varman and Belk 2012; Varman and Saha 2009). Whereas a postcolonial epistemic ideology promotes the critical appraisal of how power is reproduced and maintained through the perpetuation of Western marketing knowledge in defining how marketing is to be understood and applied, hybridization opts rather for an analysis of new knowledge and practices created as a result of intercultural lending and borrowing. Similarly, where postcolonial theory seeks to expose how subaltern groups are systematically ignored or silenced, hybridization seeks them out as active knowledge producers themselves.

From this perspective, we can think of domestication as a hybridization process in which marketing educators frame their understanding of global marketing knowledge (captured in translated copies of marketing textbooks and manuals), with locally available forms of knowing and doing, including culturally convened ideals of what are worthy pursuits and how to achieve them, as well as more concrete and specific understandings of market and institutional constraints and opportunities (e.g., market conditions, technological, and business infrastructure, organizational cultures). Our usage of the term shares with Caldwell (2004) who introduces the term to discuss ways in which Muscovites have transformed McDonald’s as an intimate and familiar space, an interest in capturing how global sources are themselves incorporated into the process of generating local culture. Like Caldwell's (2004) informants who refashion McDonalds to reflect their own ideas as to what constitutes personally meaningful activities, marketing educators rework concepts and processes in ways that are rendered meaningful and useful to his or her students.

Evidence for domestication of marketing education can be found as early as the 1980s, when Communist officials were actively editing the content of textbooks that had been imported for newly launched marketing courses. In the Soviet Union, Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy rejected most aspects of marketing, but as early as the 1960s some marketing concepts were beginning to creep into the thinking of economists, trade specialists, and other researchers. By the time Kotler’s Marketing Management text was introduced in translation in 1980, much independent marketing research and writing had been conducted. The Soviet edition of Kotler, Unravlenie Marketingom, was heavily censored, but the 12,000 copies printed sold out immediately (Fox, Skorobogatykh, and Saginova 2005a, 2005b). In China during the 1980s, marketing textbooks typically began with a chapter of communist dogma (including quotations from Chairman Mao) that was quite inconsistent with the main discussion of marketing strategy. One text was titled China’s Socialist Marketing (Zhou 1991).

The mainstream literature on marketing education in emerging economies has largely avoided the topic of domestication. Articles in the Journal of Marketing Education and the Marketing Education Review have consisted largely of case studies and how-to guides for visiting academic missionaries (see, e.g., Chadraba and O’Keefe 2007; Rhea 1992; Swanson 1992). Authors have bemoaned the lack of “qualified” (i.e., Western-trained) marketing educators and have worried about how to overcome local hostility to marketing and cultural differences in learning (Alon and Lu 2004; Clarke and Flaherty 2007; Nevett, Nimran, and Viboonsanti 1993; Tuncalp 1988). The global marketing canon is considered the standard, but when pedagogy does need to be adapted, writers take the view of the visiting instructors. Neither critical nor reflective philosophically, this literature exhibits a postcolonial outlook about which most authors, however well intentioned, may have been unmindful.

Domestication and Hybridity in Peruvian Culture

The survival of pre-Columbian indigenous cultures during the Spanish conquest and colonization between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries has been credited to those populations’ ability to appropriate and manipulate the cultural order imposed by the Spaniards to serve their own needs and support their own cultural development (de Certeau 1988). From chronicles written in the 1630s describing El Cercado, an enclosed Indian ghetto in the outskirts of Lima, we get detailed accounts of how the Spanish Crown’s acculturation programs indoctrinated indigenous populations with the “civilized” and Catholic ways of the Spaniards (Higgins 2005). This and other chronicles also reveal the indigenous population’s reluctance to abandon their own worldview, despite the systematic religious evangelizing processes they were undergoing (Griffiths 1996). Residents from El Cercado were only allowed to partake in city life during religious festivals and carnivals, and did so by paying homage to their ancestors and performing their own music, dances, and ancient rites. Their marginalization continued in the Republican period, which commenced with Peru’s late independence from Spain in 1821, with a ruling elite bent in reasserting their connections to Europe. Conservative intellectuals of the time like José de la Riva-Agüero argued that while Peru may have evolved into a mestizo (mixed race) nation, in essence it was Hispanic because that was the culture that had supplanted the primitive Indian culture. In effect, Indian and mestizo populations alike were generally perceived to be culturally and racially inferior and a hindrance to the country’s modernizing aspirations (Higgins 2005). Despite this racist ideology, by the mid-twientieth century, these groups had found resourceful means, to borrow from de Certeau, of “making do.” For example, we can see this “making do” in the symbolic and material reconversion among rural migrants who fused their traditional craftwork with modern designs in order to gain a city clientele or who exploited their social networks in order to gain access to the economic capital needed to build a much yearned for home.

These dispersed and often hidden tactical means of traversing and working within an imposed cultural order have been captured by a growing body of ethnographic work carried out in Lima’s new migrant neighborhoods, today known as the Conos. Since the late 1930s, rural peasants began to abandon their villages in Andean and Amazonian regions of Peru in search of better opportunities in the capital city. This migratory process was accelerated in 1960s under the reformist regimes of Presidents Fernando Belaunde and Juan Velasco Alvarado. In the 1980s, the exodus from rural Peru to urban Lima was exacerbated further by a severe economic crisis with inflation reaching a staggering 7,000 percent annually as well as the reign of terror instilled by the Maoist terrorist group, The Shinning Path. Upon arrival to the city, neither the state nor the private sector could provide adequate employment opportunities or address the migrants’ most basic needs. Out of their own inventiveness and resourcefulness, they invaded barren lands previously owned by the state and built their own precarious neighbourhoods as well as instituting an informal economy. More recently, Peru’s aggressive neoliberal policies, initiated by President Alberto Fujimori in the early 1990s to activate the country’s economy, have helped produce the conditions necessary for migrants to use the market as a vehicle not only to subsist but to gain terrain, culturally and economically (Arellano 2010; Arellano and Burgos 2010).

Following the lead of Peruvian commentators, we refer to this manifestation of Peruvian hybridity as chicha culture (Bailón and Nicoli 2010; Quispe 2004). While chicha originally referred to a traditional, Andean corn beverage, sometime in the 1960s the term was applied to a then emergent musical genre, which mixed huaynos or typical Andean music, with Colombian cumbias and other Cuban rhythms. Both consumers and producers of chicha were migrants or second-generation migrants from the Andean and Amazon regions in Peru who had settled in the capital city, Lima. By association, chicha became a symptomatic descriptor for the young and poor migrants who were living in the outskirts of Lima and undergoing processes of acclimatization. When it first came to popular use, the term was associated with whatever was deemed informal, transgressive, in bad taste, or done haphazardly to meet the minimum standards of quality (Bailón and Nicoli 2010; Quispe 2004), but today meaning has shifted and chicha reverberates with much more positive associations.

This ability to creatively adopt and fuse is typical of Peruvian culture at large in the early twenty-first century. One manifestation of this cultural reinvention is the fusion style of its cuisine where Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian classics have been redone in a Peruvian way. An incessant blending of local and foreign influences has produced new architectural styles and innovative musical genres (Bailón and Nicoli 2010; Quiñones 2010a). Processes of hybridity have also transformed the style of marketing and advertising communications. Peruvian cultural commentators write about how a new chicha aesthetic—rich in Andean iconography, colors, and musical genres—has contributed to a reappraisal of cultural representations previously marginalized in favor of more Western ones (Bailón and Nicoli 2010; Quiñones 2010a). Movistar, a mobile phone company operating in Peru, recently launched new Internet-based services through an advertising campaign that appropriated the style, language, and medium (low-cost posters) usually used to promote chicha shows (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Movistar’s “YuTuB” advertising campaign (l.) and posters advertising Chicha events (r.).

Marketing researchers have noted this cultural transformation. Following the lead of Rolando Arellano (2010), a consumer analyst and lecturer at the Universidad Católica del Peru, marketing academics and practitioners have for some time recognized a significant change in the composition of the Peruvian market, from a very small and concentrated elite generally living in Lima and accounting for only 3 percent of the entire population, to a largely mestizo (mixed race), lower middle class dispersed across the country, making up the 28.7 percent of the population (Corrales, Barberena, and Schmeichel 2006). This expansive new middle class has been described as progressive, inasmuch as they are enthusiastic about their own entrepreneurial ambitions and are intensively patriotic (Arellano 2010). This new lower middle class is not only a key segment for marketing activity but also includes a new entrepreneurial class of small business owners who today provide 70 percent of Peru’s employment and generate 40 percent of Peru’s wealth. The nation’s 1.5 million urban micro-enterprises, such as the small grocery store merchant, pushcart food vendor, appliance repair shop owner, and the peddler of pirated books and DVDs, are responsible for providing much needed financial support for poor families living in the shantytowns of Lima. Despite continued economic growth since 2002, a substantial 36 percent of the population still lives below the poverty line (INEI 2008).

Entrepreneurial spirit is a defining feature of this “emergent Peruvian.” According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (Kelley, Bosma, and Amorós 2010), Peruvians score much higher than average on a series of measures of entrepreneurial attitudes and activities. Yet, the Peruvian embrace of a neoliberal, market-orientated philosophy that stresses individualism coexists comfortably with other discourses that revolve around family, community, and nation. A neoliberal discourse of progress, which underwrites market policies and perpetuates a form of government through which individuals are forced to be ever more industrious and productive, is neither fully reproduced nor uncontested in local discussions. From ethnographical work of rural migrants arriving to Lima between the 1980s and 2000s, we draw examples of reconversion strategies of the kind that García Canclini (1995, 2005) discusses in his work as mechanisms to adapt and exploit new modes of capitalist production. In the 80s, Peruvian anthropologists began to document the many ways in which immigrants contributed to Peru’s market economy through their resourceful reworking of their own cultural resources (Degregori et al.1986; Golte 2005; Golte and Adams 1986). For Golte (2005), the market could very well accommodate both the elite and the subaltern sectors, by providing the material and symbolic resources they needed to achieve personal and collective projects. In an earlier text written with Norma Adams (1986), Golte notes how the lack of employment opportunities in the city led to informal commerce arrangements structured in ways not too dissimilar to the rural communities where rules of parentesco or kinship ruled. Similarly, a later work by Néstor Valdivia and Norma Adams (1991) documented how the Andean immigrant now a “popular city entrepreneur” faced the adversities of city living with a Protestant work ethic akin to western capitalists but did so under an Andean logic of production and relating.

The reconversion of cultural values and ways of relating through market type arrangements are well illustrated by Ødegaard’s (2008) ethnography of an Andean market where items of dubious legal stature, like counterfeit and contraband goods, were routinely sold. In that study, she found how even if the market traders aimed to be profitable, the underlying motive was to reproduce the “Andean socio cultural logic of reciprocity, circulation and exchange” (Ødegaard 2008, p. 242). In more concrete terms, both ritualistic investment, via offers to the Andean deity, Pachamana (mother earth), and ritualistic spending in local festivities fed into the generation and accumulation of wealth in a market economy. Ultimately, such experiences give support to an optimist thesis of popular culture as not being subsumed by a neoliberal project, but rather a reworking of neoliberalism itself, via the material and symbolic practices of popular agents. In short, these studies argue that the quest for individual success is moralized by a collectivist discourse where attaining wealth ultimately invigorates bonds of reciprocity and sociality, and these too, are fed by collective, ritualistic endeavors.

As of late, a notion of patria or nation has provided a new impetus to such individual and collective efforts to, as a marketing educator told us, “constantly better yourself.” Arellano (2000) and Quiñones (2010b) describe how Peruvians have recently found renewed reasons to be proud of being Peruvian: its economic boom, its cultural patrimony, the commercial success of Peruvian brands in local and foreign markets, its internationally acclaimed cuisines and, more recently, Mario Vargas Llosa’s 2010 Noble Prize in literature. Cultural heroes are often self-made men and women who through their hard work and inventiveness have enhanced the Peru brand. Peru’s most successful micro-credit bank, Mi Banco, targets its bottom of the pyramid segment with an eloquent and patriotic message that pays homage to the “hard working Peruvian” (see Figure 2). Unsurprisingly, we find this cultural predisposition to merge and tinker playfully with whatever resources are available, to get by in the hope that this will benefit one’s family, community, and the nation, is also manifest in how marketing is understood and taught.

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Figure 2.

Mi Banco advertising (2010) “We are the bank of those who move the country” (Source: Cristina Quiñones, 2010 Consumer-Insights.com).

Data Sources and Methods

In mapping out the various ways in which marketing education is understood and undertaken by Peruvian educators, a number of primary data sources were reviewed. Our data set consists of three key types of documents: (1) marketing textbooks, manuscripts, and blogs written by Peruvian educators for university and college students, (2) PowerPoint presentations and manuals used within the context of microcredit training programs, and (3) newspaper commentaries written by marketing authorities in national and regional newspapers, like El Comercio and La República. We reviewed 16 different educational items, which included titles like Marketing and How it Can be Applied in Peru, Chicha Power: Marketing Re-Invented, and It All Depends on You. Our sample of training material was substantially smaller, with four PowerPoint presentations used by the group APRENDA for training activities and three manuals. Twelve newspaper articles written between 2002 and 2011 where marketing experts and educators explicitly discussed the role of marketing were also consulted (see Table 1).

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Table 1.

List of Sources Used.

Marketing Textbooks and Manuscripts	Marketing Manuals and Other Training Material for Micro Entrepreneurs	Newspaper Articles
Araujo, Patricia and David Mayorga (2002) Marketing estratégico en la empresa peruana [Strategic marketing in the Peruvian firm] Arellano Roland (2009), Bueno, Bonito y Barato [Good, nice and cheap] Arellano, Rolando (2010), Ciudad de los Reyes, de los Chavez, Los Quispe [City of Kings, of Chavez and Quispe] Arellano, Rolando (2010), Al medio hay sitio. El crecimiento social según los estilos de vida. [There is space in the middle. Social growth according to lifestyles] Bailón, Jaime and Alberto Nicoli (2010), Chicha Power El marketing se reinveta [Chicha power: marketing reinvents itself] Borrero, Julio (1998), Marketing estratégico [Strategic marketing] IPM (2008), Todo depende de ti [It all depends on you] IPM (2009), Como aplicar el marketing en el Peru [It all depends on you] IPM (2008), Leyes del Marketing práctico en el Peru [The laws of practical marketing in Peru] Linares, Luis (2009b), Concepto Marketing Personal [Personal marketing] Linares, Luis (2009a), Introducción al Marketing [Marketing introduction] Mayorga, David (2009), Las mejores practicas del marketing, casos ganadores EFFIE 2008 [The best marketing practices, cases and winners, EFFIE 2008] Pipoli, Gina (2002), Casos de la Mercadotecnia Aplicados a la Realidad Peruana [Marketing case studies applied to the Peruvian reality] Pipoli, Gina (2007), Las mejores prácticas del marketing, casos ganadores, EFFIE, 2006 [The best marketing practices, cases and winners, EFFIE 2006] Ramirez Cornejo, Enrique, (2007) El desafío competitivo: estrategias de empresas peruanas exitosas [The competitive challenge: The strategies of successful Peruvian firms Roger Pingo Jara (2008), El marketing del Marketing [Marketing marketing]	APRENDA (2007), Secretos útiles del Marketing y ventas. [Useful marketing and sales secrets] Training material. ——— (2007), Las necesidades de mis clientes [My clients’ needs] Training material. ——— (2007), ¿Por qué no vendemos? [Why don’t we sell?] Training material. ——— (2007), El cierre de ventas [Closing deals] Training material. Becerra Marsano, Ana María and Emilio García Vega (2008), Aspectos básicos de márketing para la micro y pequeñaempresa [Basic marketing aspects for micro and small enterprises] Zelada Briseño, Luis Fernando (2000), 20 aplicaciones de marketing para PYMES en América Latina [Basic marketing aspects for micro and small enterprises] ——— (2002), Florencio el Confeccionista [Florencio the tailor] ——— (2002), Florencio el Confeccionista [Florencio the tailor]	Arellano, Rolando (2003) Marketing y desarollo nacional [Marketing and national development], Fundación Peruana de Marketing ——— (2002), No somos gringos [We are not gringos], El Comercio ——— (2008), Tres Limas, tres mercados, [Three Limas, three markets], El Comercio Arellano, Rolando (2002), De Simpemente Maria a Chacalón [From simply Mary to Chacalón], El Comercio ——— (2008), Lima de arriba y de abajo [Upstairs and downstairs Lima], El Comercio ——— (2010), Marketing contra la gripe [Marketing against the flue], El Comercio Pingo Jara, Roger (2008), El mundo es tuyo con marketing [The world is yours with marketing], La República ——— (2008), El marketing del Peru, Opinion, La República ——— (2008), Marketing, marketing, marketing, La República ———(2008), La Marca Yo SA [Brand me] Opinion, La República

We complemented our written sources with interviews of the dean of the Instituto Peruano de Marketing (IPM) and six other practicing marketing educators working in the further education (FE) sector in Lima. We conducted our interviews between September 2010 and January 2011 via telephone. On average our interviews were one hour long and were often followed with further e-mail correspondence. We finally note that two of the authors are native Peruvian marketing academics based in Peru and in the United Kingdom. One of the authors has penned a number of marketing texts aimed at Peruvian university and college students.

Marketing Education in Peru

Evidence of when and how marketing was first taught in Peru is difficult to find. Linares Vera who teaches marketing at a higher institute of education in Lima, CIBERTEC-UPC, states that by 1978 a marketing module was being taught in the University of Lima. Other sources (ESAN 2010) put this as early as 1977, when marketing began to be taught in a few universities like the Escuela de Adminstración de Negocios para Graduados (ESAN) and the University of Lima as part of their business administration curriculums. Only after 1996, was marketing offered as a stand-alone course in a handful of universities (Linares Vera 2009a). Outside of academia, marketing training had long focused mainly on sales and promotional campaigns undertaken by advertising practitioners, communication specialists, or consumer researchers.

The liberalization of the Peruvian economy under Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000) and succeeding governments has created sustained economic growth and favorable conditions for marketing in Peru. ¹ According to Jaime Montesinos who teaches at the IPM, with growing commercial exploitation and competitive pressures, interest in marketing has burgeoned. Not surprisingly, the appetite for marketing education is voracious. Pingo Jara (2008a) notes how all sorts of Peruvian organizations from small to medium enterprises (SMEs), micro-entrepreneurs to health centers are increasingly looking to hire marketing practitioners. Great demand for both FE and higher education (HE) has ignited a boom in the sector, with some sources estimating that currently about 110 FE and HE institutions operate in Peru (Comisión de Educación 2010). Based on available secondary data, which includes a University ranking (Hermoza 2010) and other trade resources, from sixty-six universities and colleges currently operating in Peru, approximately twenty-seven offer dedicated careers in marketing or combined with another degree, and over sixty offering some kind of marketing education within a business management course.

The provision of marketing through the formal education sector is dwarfed when compared with the number of trained marketers who graduate from generally free courses offered by nongovernmental organization (NGO) subsidized, or privately funded micro-credit organizations. For instance, a very well-established consortium, APRENDA financed by a Peruvian NGO, ACP, has trained over 62,000 business owners and entrepreneurs in Peru and Latin America (APRENDA 2007). They have reached a potential audience of 3.5 million Peruvians through a series of televised workshops carried out nationwide and attracting 12,000 participants (ACP 2008). Similarly, Mi Banco, a nonprofit micro-credit bank, invested 1 million dollars to teach 25,000 clients free of charge with its APRENDA 2007 “Tools for Business.”

There is an inherent plural quality to how marketing is understood by those writing about and teaching it in Peru. Plurality first emerged as a problem of translation, when various terms were used to capture the meaning of the English “marketing” in Spanish. Initially, terms like mercadeo, mercadotecnia, and commercialización were introduced in the translated texts of Stanton and Futrell (1987), Kinnear and Taylor (1991), Kotler and Armstrong (1994), and McCarthy (1960) in a bid to find a suitable Spanish equivalent. All failed to capture the nuances of the English term (IPM 2008, 2009; Linares Vera 2009a). Commercialización reduced the marketing function to just those activities required to bring products to market. Mercadotecnia, which roughly translates into Spanish as market technology, failed to include the more artistic and creative dimension of the marketing function.

This initial ambiguity continues to influence the way marketing is defined and taught by Peruvian marketing educators. The English language word, marketing, remains popular, but new terms have emerged in recent years, such as micro-marketing (marketing for SMEs), marketing personal (personal marketing), marketeando and marketing chicheril (intuitive marketing carried out by promoters of chicha music), all of which suggest a broadening and diversification of the concept (see Table 2). Linguistically, the degree of domestication varies and even direct translations can be seen as different from the original (Benjamin 1970). Whether academics are producing their own translations from texts in English or are simply reading a translation, the original text is being transformed in some way.

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Table 2.

Definition of Marketing Concepts.

Term	Definitions
Comercialización	A group of related activities that have the broad aim of placing a product in the marketplace
Marketeando	A neologism that turns marketing, understood as a noun when it is translated into Spanish, into an active gerund. Colloquially, the term is used to describe the various promotional activities that an individual or an organization may undertake to gain success. The term is readily applied outside business contexts to deal with broader aspects in life, like becoming a successful and productive member of a family, community, and nation
Marketing chicheril	Low-cost, intuitive, grassroots promotional work originally carried out by chicha music promoters to attract audiences to their music events. This kind of marketing is highly responsive to a target’s needs, given the marketer’s proximity to the segments targeted and exploits opportunities with very few resources. For example, concerts may take in public car parks and low-cost posters are often placed on private and public property
Marketing práctico	Practical processes and techniques that are carried out to achieve an organization’s commercial objectives, taking into account financial and technological constraints. Includes manuals on how to carry out marketing tasks and often relies on local examples of marketing practice. The basic principle endorsed is that one must know the consumer to be able to satisfy his or her needs with an excellent product or service
Marketing personal	A system of activities aimed at achieving personal goals, which include segmenting and targeting potential jobs markets, analysis of one’s strengths and weaknesses, positioning of current and desired states and use of marketing mix tools to achieve specific aims (product: defining one’s competitive strengths; price: salary negotiation; promotion: business cards, CVs, distribution: social networks, public appearances). This goes beyond just securing an ideal job but aims to transform the individual into a better person
Micromarketing	Practices carried out by microentrepreneurs to help generate sales and offer good customer service, generally within specific marketplace settings. Includes guidelines on how to identify consumer needs, satisfy them, offer good customer service and seal deals promptly, generally illustrated with vignettes

Many instructors teach marketing by simply applying the basic concepts found in Kotler’s textbooks on marketing strategy because, as methods of analysis and practical guidelines, they are seen as universally applicable. On the other hand, some marketing education goes beyond the managerial orientation to a broader, more philosophical approach that provides practical advice on how to lead a more worthy and productive life. Marketing educators in Peru often have a hybridized understanding of their subject that creatively and reflectively appropriates a whole range of global and local texts in order to better accommodate the local reality. We now turn to two different forms of domestication and illustrate our discussion with examples collected from textbooks, monographs, training material, and interviews with marketing academics in Peru.

Marketing as Praxis

Marketing education becomes domesticated when marketing educators are faced with the need to adapt foreign textbooks into practical manuals that can be both understood and subsequently applied by a local audience. This process has brought about a dual process of transformation. On one hand, marketing educators base their teaching of marketing on what is termed general or foundational marketing theory including the marketing concept, marketing mix, competitive strategies, and segmentation. On the other hand, the very definition, scope, and application of marketing is domesticated when it incorporates the knowledge of local educators, as well as the needs of the local business community, the future employers of marketing students.

Peruvian educators, like Linares Vera and Montesinos, often use well-known introductory and more specialist marketing texts, such as those written by Philip Kotler, Peter Drucker, Alvin Toffler, Don Peppers, Al Ries, Philip, Stan Rapp, J. J. Lambin, Santiago Rodríguez, Miguel Lucas, Don Schultz, Paul Fleming, and Drayton Bird, alongside case studies designed by educator themselves or adapted from ones found in textbooks. These texts contain a series of methods and processes, such as SWOT analyses, marketing plans, and types of differentiation strategies that can be implemented in Peru but require a modicum of tailoring in order to meet the needs of students. At a basic level of domestication, the teaching of marketing as praxis requires that the marketing educator test, as it were, marketing theory with local problems and case studies.

For example, Arellano’s influential Lifestyles in Peru makes direct reference to well-known segmentation strategies in order to offer his own lifestyle study of Peruvian consumers. Key researchers like Fishbein, Ajzen, Rokeach, Kolter, and Yaneklovich are carefully cited and, in justifying his focus on lifestyle segmentation, Arellano draws on a wide range of well-known social theorists including Milton Rokeach, Max Weber, and William Lazer. Arellano profiles different markets based on ESOMAR parameters, which he then questions, “the problem that we have here, in a country that is not fully monetized, a great percentage of income may be obtained by bartering or produced by oneself, which makes it difficult to measure wealth” (Arellano 2010, p. 33).

Such questioning of socioeconomic measurements of wealth is not easily found in US or European marketing textbooks. Instead, markets in developing economies are simply described as pyramids with tiny affluent elites at the top and vast but very impoverished bottom of pyramid (BOP) segments (e.g., Cateora and Graham 2007; Gnosa 2011; Hopkins 2012). C. K. Prahalad’s (2004) work in particular has popularized the view that the poor constitutes a market with undervalued fortunes that are worth targeting. Where Prahalad’s BOP paradigm presupposes the existence of a clear hierarchy of low and high standing consumers, Arellano argues that Latin American markets cannot be simply organized as such. While he concurs with the idea that there is marketing potential in catering to BOP segments, he disagrees with the unproblematic separation between poor and rich. Instead, based on his detailed surveys of Peruvian lifestyles, he argues instead that Latin American markets are best described as rhomboids, with striving new middle classes. Such rhomboids also house an entrepreneurial class from humble backgrounds, “who having money, haven’t changed their way of thinking of acting” (Arellano 2010, p. 15). Such thinking also contravenes the tacit acceptance of trickle down principles underpinning marketing segmentation. A typical text predicts “as income rises consumers typically seek better housing, better food and wider recreational activities” (Croft, 1994, p. 25), while another explains that “macrocriteria such as profession, education, family income and property value... each social class tends to share a mix of common values that has a strong influence on purchasing decisions” (Kotler, et al. 2009, p. 349). The very notion of social class may reproduce unhelpful, even racist stereotypes. For Arellano the use of such variables produce erroneous reading of “white, Europeanized consumers living in traditional neighborhoods as rich” and the “many well-to-do with Andean surnames living in marginal zones, who are more globalized thanthose assumed to be rich as poor” (Arellano 2010, p.14).

For Arellano, imported socioeconomic classifications do not capture the new realities of Peruvian societies, in particular the hidden wealth of micro-entrepreneurs living in the Conos, because they restrict measures of wealth to indicators like paid monthly salaries, formal employment, and assumptions of wealth based on education level and neighborhood characteristics. A truer representation of wealth and hence a more useful way of segmenting Peru’s market is to account for variable wages that characterize its informal economy and real cost of living (cost of living in the Conos is substantially lower than other well to do neighborhoods). Instead of simply using typologies developed elsewhere, be it VALS, Mosaic, or other Latin American scales like Gallup’s segments for Latin American consumers, Arellano carried out the first comprehensive study of consumer lifestyles in Peru and developed his own ten Peruvian lifestyles.

It follows then that marketing knowledge as a cultural import is not assimilated wholesale but rather becomes a source from which new expressions of marketing thought emanate. Marketing chicheril, marketing práctico (practical marketing), and micromarketing are three variations of marketing done the “Peruvian way” (see Table 2 for definitions). Fundamentally, these variants envision marketing as a set of practical guidelines that can be applied to the problems of small market stall owners to more academic exercises of city and nation branding, la marca Peru. Examples of these instances of domestication range from the testing and adaptation of marketing theory to innovative marketing teaching, which reflects idiosyncratic ways of doing marketing in Peru.

A type of domestication carried out at grassroots level by those who are not formally trained can be seen in what Bailón and Nicoli (2010) have dubbed marketing chicheril. In their book Chicha Power, Jamie Bailón, a communications professor at the Universidad de Lima, and Alberto Nicoli, a marketing lecturer at the Universidad de Ciencias Aplicadas de Lima, describe an intuitive marketing practiced by chicha music promoters and now used by a more professional class of marketers. Bailón and Nicoli (2010) note how chicheros (chicha music promoters) were practicing their own flavor of marketing. Although they often lacked formal training and financial resources, they had a privileged “permanent position in their market, which enabled them to act as soon as opportunities or threats were identified” (Bailon and Nicoli 2009, p. 122). From practice emerged what in the 1980s seemed to be a counterintuitive notion that those who were peddling pirated copies of music sold by the official promoters of chicha music had to be actively encouraged in their trade, so that this could generate demand for the consumption of live music events where money was made. Similarly, the detailed ethnographies that are now being carried out by larger organizations in Peru were predated by the kind of rudimentary market research carried out by chicha music promoters who were in essence the consumer they were also targeting. This is an instance where domestication of marketing takes place from the ground up, where marketing practiced the Peruvian way is then reinserted within the more formal spaces of marketing education.

Another variety of marketing education is practically oriented. Montesinos who teaches at the IPM stresses that marketing education in Peru needs to be practical, flexible, and adapted to the characteristics of Peruvian markets, especially the less affluent, and adjusted to the financial constraints of small business owners and small entrepreneurs. The Institute has published two texts, 24 laws of Practical Marketing in Peru and How to Do Marketing in Peru, which have been written in “a practical way for those who wish to practice marketing in Peru” (IPM 2009, p. 5). Practical constraints result from existing market conditions, business infrastructure, lack of legislation, and small marketing budgets, all of which produce changes in how marketing is practiced and thus how it is taught in Peru. Similarly, some of the more information technology intensive applications, such as e-commerce, customer relationship management, and interactive and real-time marketing, as our interviewees told us, are not possible, given the lack of technological infrastructure. How consumers behave in Peru make certain marketing strategies less applicable. Repeat purchasing is limited and the lack of economic capital often means that the majority of consumers would rather repair goods than dispose them of and buy new ones (Arellano 2010; Halper 1966). Similarly, an average income of US$200 a month (Perú 21 2010) means that most Peruvian consumers are extremely price sensitive. These constraints require that marketers offset financial and technical limitations with innovative approaches to achieve sale targets. These conditions produce a type of domestication of marketing theory where a process of selecting and simplifying takes place in order to siphon elements that in the Peruvian context are deemed redundant.

This is particularly the case of the material produced to train SMEs and micro-entrepreneurs. Texts are much shorter than academic marketing textbooks. For example, Bercerra Marsano and Garcia Vega’s (2008) manual for SMEs is comprised of only eighty-four pages and is divided into three sections (clients and marketing; what is marketing and how it can be applied to SMEs, and factors to consider in marketing; and the marketing mixes and the marketing plan). A similar guide written by Zelada Briceño (2000), who leads a specialist School of Marketing PYMEs (marketing for SMEs), is comprised of only sixty-six pages. In training the micro-entrepreneur in how to carry out marketing activities, the milieu is the marketplace setting and the set of practices considered in most detail are sales techniques and customer selling. As practical manuals they provide very brief definitions of concepts and processes, which are quickly used to illustrate applications by a Peruvian firm or micro-entrepreneur. However, very specific local conditions inform the selection and application of existing theory.

For example, the section on competitive strategy in Marsano and Vega’s manual (2008) provides a simplified version of Porter’s generic strategies to gain competitive advantage and is then followed by lengthy examples to which local readers can easily relate to. They write:

Another example of differentiation strategy is a business of hand embroidered hand bags. They added value to the bags by adding perfectly executed embroideries. The bags were aimed at segment of young A-B Universidad del Pacífico students. In this case, the design (size, handles, colors, lining and overall finish) was modified with the help of an advisory group; and types, textures, colors and embroidery threads that would decorate the front of the hand bag were chosen. The final product was perceived by the market as being unique, because it was; there weren’t two alike (p. 37).

Similarly, in texts by the IPM and those written for micro-entrepreneurs and SMEs, case studies are prevalent. In the introduction manual, detailing 20 marketing applications for SMEs in Latin America, the author covers some pedagogic features, such as the style in which it was written “which uses agile, simple and direct language, creative and humorous treatment of everyday life in the marketplace” (Zelada Briceño 2000, p. 1). The document is rich in case studies, which are presented in dialogue form to capture everyday exchanges between buyers and sellers and used to illustrate what is marketing. For example, to distinguish marketing from a sales orientation, the author describes a market seller as focusing her attention in describing the make-up she was selling as “being ultra-fashionable and designed by renowned Italian make-up artists,” and the marketer, “asking her client to see how well the make-up suits her, given the shape of her face, the color of her skin and her way of dressing” (Zelada Briceño 2000, p. 3).

In APRENDA’s (2007) training program on Useful Marketing and Sales Tips, the micro-entrepreneur is advised on how to deal with potential customers in very pragmatic terms: “Greet the client, have a friendly smile, be well presented, where possible use their name, ask open questions to know your client’s needs; your body language must always denote respect, speak in plural when referring to your business.” Domestication in this sense involves fully embedding marketing knowledge in the local milieu, to the point that the case study in some instance trumps the definition of concepts. For example, Florencio, El Confeccionista (Florencio, the clothing manufacturer; 2002) explains how a micro-entrepreneur “who didn’t consider himself to be a rich man” found success, when his constant application of marketing saw “his productivity increased and this enabled him to support his family and re-invest in his business.” The text combines short paragraphs and illustrations to explain the various marketing activities Florencio had engaged in and the results that he had obtained (see Figure 3). These examples all help illustrate a kind of domestication where the context in some respects dictates what marketing knowledge is drawn from and to what degree.

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Figure 3.

Illustrations of Florcencio’s marketing activities (Source. Zelada Briceño).

Discussion

The spread of marketing education throughout the developing world is a relevant subject for macromarketing analysis. Modern marketing systems have knowledge generation and pedagogical components, so the ideas and embedded ideologies this education conveys should eventually interact with the societies hosting it (Hunt 1981). Postcolonialism provides one theoretical lens for understanding this phenomenon. Postcolonial critiques call attention to the underlying managerial discourses and neoliberal ideologies that inevitably have accompanied the diffusion of marketing thought. With a few exceptions (e.g., Bradshaw and Tadajewski 2011; Varman and Saha 2009), the marketing education literature has championed the spread of the American and now arguably the global marketing canon without critical oversight. Authors have been sensitive to cultural differences (Nevett, Nimran, and Viboonsanti 1993) and have reported inappropriate content and unfavorable attitudes toward marketing (Tuncalp 1988) but have regarded these issues largely as barriers to be overcome and have rarely questioned the ideological underpinnings of their textbooks and courses (Hackley 2003).

Macromarketing research on the impact of marketing education in developing countries should be open to postcolonial critiques as well as to a theoretical framework of domestication as hybridization. Situations in developing countries do vary and researchers should choose the most appropriate analytical tools either alone or in combination. Interestingly, both approaches need to account for awkward and contradictory findings. For example, Witkowski, Nguyen, and Huyen (2010) found that students and teachers in Vietnam apparently prefer that the global and, more specifically, the American marketing canon be taught with relatively little or no adaptation to local conditions. Moreover, this canon does introduce ideas that while novel and subversive may also be beneficial and worth pursuing. A customer orientation in educational matters may upend traditional Confucian (i.e., hierarchical) relationships between teachers and students in China (Alon and Lu 2004), but potentially results in learning more practical, career-enhancing knowledge and skills. Marketing education can serve as a social schema through which ideological tensions between neoliberalism and collectivism may be accommodated and developing economies can be transformed.

Undoubtedly, some aspects of Peruvian marketing education clearly replicate the global canon and its rhetoric. American texts in translation are ubiquitous. National economic discourse and policies have been strongly influenced by neoliberal ideology since the 1990s. In addition to this, Peruvian educators’ opportunities to domesticate marketing pedagogy may be restricted by lack of access to recent marketing textbooks penned by Peruvians, institutional imposition of core imported texts and set curriculums, or subordinate to existing material and technological conditions abetting or facilitating the performance of certain marketing functions. Beyond this, Peruvian educators we talked to and the texts we reviewed seemed to endorse an understanding of marketing as fulfilling locally valued cultural ideals, for instance the need to strengthen the rules and bonds of reciprocity operating at family, community, and national levels, which domesticates the meaning and orientation somewhat.

From this vantage point, domestication of marketing education in Peru is deliberatively restricted. That is, as we found in our data, it entails a careful negotiating of global marketing cannon, more locally available forms of knowledge and practice and pragmatic concerns. Domestication as hybridization can be explained as a repurposing of marketing concepts to make them work within the Peruvian context but also as a reconversion of available skills, knowledge, and practices to carry out marketing functions. We can see the repurposing of the marketing canon in Arellano’s challenge to the BOP often championed in foreign texts as a viable strategy for emerging economies like the Peruvian one and the simple importation of demographic variable to make sense of Latin American markets. Such repurposing would have not been possible had Arellano’s team, being suspicious of the poor fit between American socioeconomic variables and Peruvian socioeconomic structure, had not changed the very variables used in segmenting markets.

A more dramatic form of domestication where we can more clearly see a reconversion of an Andean sociocultural logic of reciprocity, circulation, and exchange underwriting marketing pedagogy is marketing chicheril as taught by Jaime Bailón and Alberto Nicoli. In principle, US and Eurocentric marketing pedagogy constructs distinct subjectivities for marketers and consumers, where an understanding of the latter, as a marketing function is seen as a corporate, technology intensive process, and output. In a textbook by Armstrong, Harker, Kotler, and Brenna (2009, p. 16), consumer knowledge is described as a “corporate memory” attained through “a careful management of detailed information about individual customers and carefully managing customer touch points in order to maximize their loyalty.” Such knowledge is mediated by complex technologies or assumes that the marketing agent is a different entity to that of the consumer. Alternatively, the chicha music promoter was both marketer of and consumer of chicha music and his knowledge, experiential, and not a corporate memory. Whereas marketing texts write about paid sponsorship, for marketing chicheril bringing a product to market requires drawing on one’s social capital, as opposed to economic capital. The marketing of chicha music depends on social networks and bonds of reciprocity between music promoters, their music acts, those pirating the music, and the radio station that aired the music.

In summary, marketing education in Peru represents an instance of theoretical and practical domestication, where marketing concepts and applications are transformed to meet very local and idiosyncratic needs. This theoretical perspective on marketing’s educational diffusion foregrounds the agency of local people over their dependence upon the global canon and discourse and, therefore, provides a more upbeat account than perhaps would a postcolonial critique. For truly understanding marketing education in Peru at a variety of social strata, we believe that analysis of domestication, as a process of hybridization is more fruitful. Not only does it award the supposed targets of alienation and exploitation with a much more active role in edifying forms of knowing and doing, but it also does not preclude a more critically orientated analysis. If anything the adoption of domestication as a hybridization process as a tool for analysis can give macromarketing researchers conceptual ammunition to illuminate the often-hidden efforts marketing educators invest in transforming marketing pedagogy in ways that make understanding and applying marketing within their own sociocultural milieu possible. While postcolonial studies have condemned the silencing weight of Western hegemony in postcolonial settings, they do so at the expense of shedding light on ways in which subaltern groups themselves become knowledge producers. In our work, this is more obviously seen with marketing chicheril.

Although hybridity studies have been accused for being too celebratory in their analysis of how migrant groups in particular are able to rework cultural resources in order to fulfill their own agendas (e.g., Cornejo Polar 1996), our understanding of hybridization can also support a critical reading in future work. To speak about hybridization as a process we can access or not, abandon or be subordinate to, can help us better understand not only the various possible subject positions implicated in intercultural relations but also the various forms of knowledge it creates (García Canclini 2005, p. 2006). Hybridization implies no singular outcomes or process but multiple possible trajectories. In some instances, elements from a cultural domain are transferred metonymically or metaphorically to another, while in others subjects alternate between identities of origin and destination, for instance the migrant in Lima who speaks Quechua and Spanish (Cornejo Polar 1996; García Canclini 2005). Our research provides a first analysis of instances where marketing educators are repurposing and challenging marketing canon.

There is more work to be done on the globalization of marketing thought in Peru and in other rapidly developing countries. Future research needs to map out the multiple trajectories possible in the marketing knowledge production process. The timeliness and hierarchical standing of both domesticated and imported marketing knowledge in educational and professional circles should be assessed. Similarly, a critical appraisal of the conditions that make it possible for marketing educators to produce marketing knowledge within their own institutions, and the contexts where the application of their domesticated marketing pedagogy are likely to occur, will sharpen understanding of both processes and consequences. Our analysis of Peru introduces some bias in that it deliberately highlights examples of domesticated marketing pedagogy, while downplaying those instances where domestication is neither desirable nor possible. Finally, it would be desirable to gather more information about the meaning of marketing directly from respondents—educators, students, and practitioners from a variety of social strata—in order to supplement the mainly text-based data sources used in this study.

Conclusion

Domestication of marketing in Peru represents a dual process of transformation. On one hand, marketing educators teach the basic marketing concepts found in texts penned by American academics, while simultaneously adapting them to local knowledge and to limited financial and technological infrastructures. In so doing, they change the very definition, scope, and application of marketing to meet the local needs of the business community. Stated differently, domestication of marketing thought produces a continuous reinvention of global knowledge appropriate to local ways of understanding and to the constraints that make the implementation of certain activities more difficult (e.g., e-commerce, above the line advertising, and complex real-time integration of marketing systems).

These interpretative efforts also transform marketing education a second way by extending its application beyond the traditional business context and into the domain of everyday life. This is typified in the enunciation of marketing as a verb, marketeando, and signals the opening and broadening of the application of marketing to include both the vocabulary and tools necessary to become not only a successful entrepreneur but a better person. This culturally situated understanding of marketing progress blends individual success with communitarian and national ideals and becomes particularly apparent when marketing education is positioned as a positive agent of change for those who lack cultural and economic capital. In this regard, the provision of marketing education to small entrepreneurs becomes a part of social reform. Marketing education is seen as a means of preparing the learner to assume his or her role in civil society, where the market is deemed the preferred mechanism for reducing poverty and achieving political freedom and social justice.

College-level texts, as well as marketing manuals aimed at the micro-enterprise owner, all promote individual rationality and self-enterprise. This endorsement of marketing knowledge as a useful guide for conducting everyday life and becoming a “better,” more professional, self-enterprising individual, respond to a typically Peruvian appraisal of progress. Reciprocity, solidarity, and communitarianism—social practices that characterize the societal arrangements of indigenous populations in Peru—reconfigure a Western understanding of progress as individual achievement, to a community-nation one. So, in Peru marketing education as part of larger neoliberal project ends up being practiced and understood in distinctively situated ways. Marketeando then can be understood as a fluid template for action that is fed by all sorts of knowledge, global and local, which ultimately do not constitute a triumph of market imperialism, but rather an instance where programs of transformation end up being transformed themselves. Marketing is thus domesticated the “Peruvian way.”