Olga Kravets

Competently Ordinary: New Middle Class Consumers in the Emerging Markets

Although the new middle classes in emerging markets are a matter of significant interest for marketing scholars and managers, there has been little systematic research on their values and preoccupations. This article focuses on new middle class consumers to identify the new, shared socio-ideological sensibilities informed by the recent neoliberal reforms in emerging markets and examines how these sensibilities are actualized in consumption. Through an ethnographic study of fashion consumption in Turkey, the authors explicate three salient new middle class sensibilities, which implicate the mastery of the ordinary in pursuit of connections with people, institutions, and contexts. These sensibilities crystallize into a particular mode of consumption—“formulaic creativity”—which addresses consumers’ desire to align with the middle and helps them reconcile the disjuncture between the promises of neoliberalism and the realities of living in unstable societies. The article provides recommendations on product portfolio management, positioning strategies, and marketing mix adaptation decisions.

The discourses of marketing and development: towards 'critical transformative marketing research'

Abstract In order to understand the connection between development, marketing and transformative consumer research (TCR), with its attendant interest in promoting human well-being, this article begins by charting the links between US ‘exceptionalism’, ‘Manifest Destiny’ and modernisation theory, demonstrating the confluence of US perspectives and experiences in articulations and understandings of the contributions of marketing practice and consumer research to society. Our narrative subsequently engages with the rise of social marketing (1960s-) and finally TCR (2006-). We move beyond calls for an appreciation of paradigm plurality to encourage TCR scholars to adopt a multiple paradigmatic approach as part of a three-pronged strategy that encompasses an initial ‘provisional moral agnosticism’. As part of this stance, we argue that scholars should value the insights provided by multiple paradigms, turning each paradigmatic lens sequentially on to the issue of the relationship between marketing, development and consumer well-being. After having scrutinised these issues using multiple perspectives, scholars can then decide whether to pursue TCR-led activism. The final strategy that we identify is termed ‘critical intolerance’.

Iconic Brands A Socio-Material Story

This article takes the story of a monument to a Soviet brand of cheese as a starting point for discussing the socio-material practices that underlie the elevation of some brands to iconic status in the post-Soviet context. While the literature on iconic or ‘symbolically dense’ brands primarily focuses on shared meanings and ideas that iconic goods come to stand for, we argue that a material perspective provides a richer and more nuanced understanding of this consecration process. Accordingly, we consider the manifold material forms and practices through which the iconic status of some Soviet goods is constituted and identify (perceived) material constancy, monumentalization and legal codification as three main realms through which the transcendent socio-cultural values of these brands are contested and established. We take the story of a monument to a brand as a challenge to bringing the notion of materiality into a more explicit and dynamic relationship with signification, thus moving from the separation of the two notions. Such a move, we suggest, helps elaborate the role of iconic consumer goods in re-constructing social bonds, community identities and ideology.

Russia’s “Pure Spirit” Vodka Branding and Its Politics

This article examines the interplay of vodka branding and politics in post-Soviet Russia. The trajectory of vodka branding over the past three decades reflects shifts in politics and articulates changes in ideology, while setting the environment in which certain sociopolitical ideas unfold and become naturalized. The analysis suggests that the political economy and historical dynamics of a market system, and the societal standing of the commodity being branded, define and frame the potentialities of marketing meanings and their ideological inflections.

Developing Markets? Understanding the Role of Markets and Development at the Intersection of Macromarketing and Transformative Consumer Research (TCR)

Situated at the intersection of markets and development, this commentary aims to promote a cross-fertilization of macromarketing and Transformative Consumer Research (TCR) that directs attention to the sociocultural context and situational embeddedness of consumer experience and well-being, while acknowledging complex, systemic interdependencies between markets, marketing, and society. Based on a critical review of the meaning of development and an interrogation of various developmental discourses, the authors develop a conceptual framework that brings together issues of development, well-being, and social inequalities. We suggest that these issues are better understood and addressed when examined via grounded investigations of the role of markets in shaping the management of resources, consumer agency, power inequalities and ethics. The use of markets as units of analysis may lead to further cross-fertilizations of TCR and macromarketing and to more comprehensive theorizing and transformational impact. Two empirical cases are provided to illustrate our framework.

Marketing for Socialism: Soviet Cosmetics in the 1930s

This article examines the marketing practices of the Soviet state trust for cosmetics, TeZhe, in the 1930s. Drawing on company records, industry reports, and popular press, we show that TeZhe used an array of marketing tactics, which were similar to those of the Western manufacturers. However, TeZhes marketing was aligned with the states economic and sociocultural initiatives and shaped by the ideological dictates of the Soviet system.

On Technology, Magic and Changing the World

Robert Lusch (2015) astutely observes that humans are “massive creators of tools and we need to start understanding that.” In my commentary, I seek to complicate and extend this statement on tools or technology by drawing attention to the magic of technology, and how it simultaneously obscures the view of things and invites a fetishistic belief in technological efficacy to change the world. I argue that we must deepen our discussion of technology and start questioning the many ways that today’s technology orders the social world and humans.