Marketing renaissance: How research in emerging markets advances marketing science and practice

In the last decades, our discipline has made tremendous progress in addressing scientific and managerial marketing problems. However, our knowledge of marketing phenomena derives almost exclusively from research conducted in high income, industrialized countries. We believe it is paramount for the future of marketing science and practice that we conduct more research in so-called emerging markets (EMs). EMs present significant departures from the assumptions of theories developed in the Western world that challenge our conventional wisdom. In this article, we take the view that marketing science is built on the gencralizability of our findings across studies, across cultures, across national boundaries. EMs are natural laboratories in which theories and assumptions about their underlying mechanisms can be tested, generalizations derived and boundary conditions identified. We propose a framework delineating four stages through which EM research contributes to the growth of marketing science. The four stages are 1) theory development, 2) acquisition of meaningful data, 3) analysis of the data to test one's theories, and 4) learning. Through the process of deductive logic, general theories are operationalized in specific settings while, through the process of inductive logic, specific findings are used to arrive at more general conclusions. We discuss the unique issues and contributions of EM research for each of the four stages of this framework. Subsequently, we elaborate on the implications of EM research for development and implementation of marketing strategies. Our discussion reveals that some research has started to address these issues, but we have only begun to scratch the surface. In this spirit, we present an agenda for future research in EMs. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.