ABSTRACT
Under the banner of explaining and reconciling the differing paths currently being followed by theory and practice, as noted by Deshpandé (this text), this chapter outlines the principles underlying an ethnic marketing focus and considers their robustness in a changing political and technological environment. The approach advocated in this book will be challenged for its emphasis on catering for differences based on ethnicity and its advocacy for the disaggregation of broad-based cultural groups. The case for this approach must be placed in the wider context of fundamental issues that marketing theory seemingly has failed to adequately address and in the need to account for a changing socioeconomic domestic environment in advanced economies that also threatens the relevance of marketing nostrums. There are uncertainties (Koeman, Jaubin and Stesmans, 2010) as well as limitations to the universal application of the targeting approach advocated (Makgosa, 2011) and these also need to be considered.
Marketers and academics are going in very different directions.
Rohit DeshpandéI think in some ways, the practitioners are ahead of the researchers. They don’t try to figure out why it’s happening. They just have a hunch that it is working and this is what they’re going to do. We’re trying to figure out why and then we’ll try to figure out the application. So, we have a very different standpoint when we do this type of research.
Mark ClevelandI’d like to think that there’s a lot of overlap…. I don’t know whose business views you have in mind. I don’t know who are the academics you have in mind, so that’s a really difficult question for me to answer…. In terms of the theoretical underpinnings sometimes, to be honest, I have the sense that academics–and I put myself in this group–are basically trying to catch up with what business is doing and, in many ways, trying to update some of our theories to catch up with what’s going on.
Lisa Penaloza