Journal of Macromarketing

The Base-of-the-pyramid (BoP) corporate strategy perceives market-based solutions to the problem of global poverty. The strategy is premised on the view that people in BoP markets live in fundamental lack, which can be overcome with business intervention. The merits of this idea seem obvious, but its ideological premise within contemporary capitalism is often lost on many. The purpose of the authors in this paper is to explore the ideological premise of the BoP strategy. The authors employ Foucault’s notion of “governmentality” to suggest that corporate adoption of the BoP strategy mimics a neocolonial incursion into heretofore inaccessible markets, by constituting the poor as free, self-governing individuals—modern citizens in the Western liberal sense—toward facilitating market control and exploitation for corporate ends.

As organizations continue to increase their level of operations across international borders, their ethical conduct becomes a greater social concern. A global code of ethics allows organizations to follow one code for all countries rather than creating and administering multiple separate codes. Currently, there are several thoughtful global codes of ethics developed by different stakeholders. This paper provides an analysis of some of the major global codes of ethics available to multinational corporations. Their shared norms are identified and synthesized into three Hyper Norms that can both aid marketing organizations in formulating their core principles and be applied to research dealing with macromarketing systems.

An alternative trade organization (ATO) is one where philosophies of social justice and/or environmental well-being preside over mission-based marketing transactions. The primary mission of such organizations is to develop equal partnerships among members of a marketing channel—the producers, retailers, and consumers. The present research uses data from one such ATO, TransFair USA, to examine the impact of Fair Trade marketing practices on coffee producers in Latin America. In this context, this study contributes to previous research by empirically testing the idea that participants in the Latin American fair trade coffee channel benefit from their participation as claimed by proponents of ATOs. Results show that producers belonging to a FairTrade organization reported a greater overall sense of well-being and a more positive outlook for their future as a result of their participation in the TransFair, USA coffee marketing channel as compared to nonmembers. Higher levels of participation in the cooperatives among participants with longer tenure in the organizations also enjoyed higher subjective quality-of-life perceptions. Results suggest that researchers should be cautious not to over generalize the effects of fair trade marketing on producers quality of life across contexts, marketing channels or countries.

Small-scale retailing is characteristic of many developing and emerging economies. It has been argued that in the course of economic development a retail environment will be transformed into a more efficient system by fewer but larger retailers that often are gigantic global players. However, in many societies, small retailers have other functions in addition to retailing. As shown in a sample of small retailers in the People’s Republic of China, many retailers started their businesses due to unemployment or retirement. In countries such as China where the social security safety network is lacking, starting a small-scale business is one way to earn a living. The benefits of the modernization on retailing notwithstanding, this paper discusses how economic development and efficiencies of scale in retailing may destroy a well-functioning system that provides income for less-fortunate individuals. The findings are based on observations and interviews conducted in 1993–2010 in Guilin, China.

It is increasingly common for western universities to recruit marketing students from across the globe, and in particular from notionally “developing” economies. This practice raises questions across a variety of issues: It can smuggle discourses of subalternity into the classroom; it can construct marketing education as an agent of globalization; it can undermine commitments to maintaining criticality in the subject area; it can result in all manners of pedagogical challenges; it can raise huge amounts of money for universities; and it can reconstitute marketing education as an object for export. These issues get to the heart of marketing education in an age of ever-increasing commercialization of universities and general tendencies of neoliberalism. To explore the phenomenon, an interdisciplinary roundtable discussion was held at Royal Holloway, University of London, on September 8, 2010. The participants here present short statements outlining their positions regarding marketing education, not just as a subject for teaching and learning but also as a product for export at a time of globalization, neoliberalism and political–economic transformations.