Research Opportunities in Emerging Markets: an Inter-disciplinary Perspective from Marketing, Economics, and Psychology

Emerging markets are fast-growing developing countries that are creating not only a rapidly expanding segment of middle class and rich consumers but also have a sizable segment of “poor” consumers. This paper presents an inter-disciplinary perspective integrating insights from quantitative and behavioral marketing, social psychology, industrial organization, and development economics with the purpose of generating and answering research questions on emerging markets. We organize our discussion around three themes. First, there is substantial heterogeneity in the social, cultural, economic, and institutional environments as well as rapid change in these characteristics. Coupled together, the heterogeneity and dynamics increase the scope of variables and inter-relationships that have traditionally been investigated. Second, emerging markets continue to have sizeable “poor” and rapidly growing “new rich” populations, requiring marketers and researchers to understand how to market to the poor and the “new rich.” Exploiting these features in research can help deepen our theoretical understanding of markets and marketing. Third, from a methodological perspective, differences in types of available secondary data and the lower cost of collecting primary data create opportunities to develop new approaches for addressing research questions. We also encourage scholars to move beyond cross-country regressions offering broad-brush exploratory insight, to country-industry-specific research that exploits unique characteristics of a particular emerging market.