Journal of Macromarketing

This article investigates American household purchasing roles from the late colonial era to the mid-nineteenth century. Issues examined include marital authority versus the real balance of power, home production and the gendered division of labor, and family decision-making influences and purchasing behaviors. The article points out historical changes and continuities as well as some social class differences. The concluding section suggests implications for marketing and consumer history as well as some limitations of the research.

Late nineteenth-century economists discussed marketing in the context of system-environment interactions. Although Alderson’s work during the mid-twentieth century was concerned with system-environment interactions in marketing, relevant earlier work in economics was overlooked. Recognition of this earlier work would have broadened the scope of mid-century marketing thought.

The focus of this article is the persistent continued strength of “wet markets” in Hong Kong and the weakness of supermarkets in the fresh food area. This phenomenon is surprising because, based on the experiences in North America and Western Europe and given the well-developed economy of Hong Kong, one would have expected supermarkets to dominate fresh food retailing and wet markets to be in retreat. In this article, the authors explain the reasons for the continued dominance of wet markets. They argue that consumers’shopping and consumption culture, the effectiveness of wet markets in handling consumers’needs, and the appropriateness of the simple technology used by wet markets are at the basis of this dominance. An analysis of developments in the wet market system, in the supermarkets, and in consumers’ behavior leads to a conclusion that there are no indications of possible changes in wet markets’superiority.

Consumption inequities have been explored within the consumer behavior and public policy literatures in marketing, but few investigations within these domains have examined their global dimensions. To help fill this gap, the authors investigate the gender aspects of consumer inequality worldwide using measures of quality of life at the societal level. After a brief introduction, a discussion of the theoretical foundation of our work and the measures used to examine inequities between men and women are presented. Analyses and results come next, followed by global policy recommendations and future research directions.

The author proposes a postmodern framework for understanding the contemporary global economic and social/cultural order. Because the origins of postmodernism are so diverse and disparate, the challenge for macromarketers is to capture the key concepts that are relevant to macromarketing theory and practice. Toward this goal, the author specifies five postmodern conditions that constitute the postmodern framework: the sign system, hyperreality, particularism, fragmentation, and the symbolic nature of consumption. The article proceeds to identify and analyze three contemporary macromarketing topics using the postmodern framework: the global sign economy, flexible regimes of production and consumption, and the information economy and informational capitalism. The article concludes with implications for future research and practice.