Teaching marketing in emerging countries: reflections from a Brazilian undergraduate classroom

Emerging markets seemed, for a long time, to have been only marginally considered by marketing academics. More recently, however, they were finally “discovered”, as evidenced by several calls for papers and special issues devoted to these markets. Nevertheless, research on emerging markets was often approached through a neocolonial lens. A similar situation could be observed in marketing education and, consequently, in the teaching of marketing itself.

This scenario posed a considerable challenge for marketing professors working in emerging countries, particularly in undergraduate programs, where students usually demanded practical and applied content. Within this context, I repeatedly faced a set of unavoidable questions: how could I teach marketing to undergraduate students in an emerging country without reinforcing a colonial view of the realities in which they lived? How could I incorporate students’ everyday experiences, as well as their involvement with small and medium-sized enterprises, into the learning process, given that many of them were involved in these businesses as employees or family members? And how could marketing education respond to public policies aimed at fostering entrepreneurship in local communities, a key issue in many emerging economies?

Although there were several possible answers to these questions, one of the paths I pursued was the use of product development as a pedagogical approach in undergraduate marketing courses. This was an experience that I developed over several years, beginning in 1992, at the Universidade Estadual de Maringá, in the state of Paraná, Brazil.

At the beginning of the marketing course, I invited students to form teams of three or four members. Each team was challenged to develop a product that was not yet available in the market. The product did not need to be entirely new or radically innovative; it could be a modified, adjusted, or adapted version of an existing offering. What mattered most was that it remained closely connected to the reality of the local market. Although local markets were already deeply intertwined with global dynamics, I encouraged students to begin by observing local needs and engaging with local culture.

Throughout the course, each programmatic unit was directly connected to the product under development. In this way, I provided a structured roadmap that guided students step by step. This roadmap included, in summary: (i) initial product identification; (ii) analysis of the market environment; (iii) understanding of the consumer market; and (iv) the marketing mix, encompassing detailed actions and strategies related to product, distribution and logistics, communication and promotion, costs and pricing, which together amounted to approximately 30 sub-items. At the end of the course, students produced a written report on the developed product, presented a prototype, and delivered a public presentation to me and to their classmates.

This teaching experience generated several positive outcomes, including initial processes of brand and patent registration undertaken by some students. Perhaps its most important contribution was the opportunity it offered students to think autonomously, starting from their own realities and progressively discovering market agents and relationships. The high level of student engagement throughout the project was also noteworthy. On the other hand, one of the main limitations of the experience was the difficulty of synchronizing the content of the marketing course with other disciplines offered concurrently in the curriculum.

The experience reported here sought to address a longstanding issue in marketing education. At the same time, it acknowledged that education is, above all, a dynamic process that is neither static nor governed by uniform standards. Rather than proposing a definitive model, I simply aimed to share an alternative way of teaching marketing in emerging countries, offering one possible path beyond dominant approaches to marketing education.

Related References

Araujo, L. (2007). Markets, market-making and marketing. Marketing Theory, 7(3), 211–226. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470593107080342 

Boschi, M. R., Barros, D. F., & Sauerbronn, J. F. R. (2016). A introdução da disciplina de marketing no Brasil: “uma linguagem comum que nos une”. Farol – Revista de Estudos Organizacionais e Sociedade, 3(8), 888-956. 

Bradshaw, A., & Tadajewski, M. (2011). Macromarketing roundtable commentary – the export of marketing education. Journal of Macromarketing, 31(3), 312–321. https://doi.org/10.1177/0276146711406443 

Faria, A., Ibarra-Colado, E., & Guedes, A. L. (2010). Internationalization of management, neoliberalism and the Latin America challenge. Critical Perspectives on International Business, 6(2/3), 97–115. https://doi.org/10.1108/17422041011049932 

Hackley, C. (2023). Critical marketing pedagogy: caught between ideology and enlightenment. RIMAR - Revista Interdisciplinar de Marketing, 13(2), 173-178. https://doi.org/10.4025/rimar.v13i2.67575 

Vieira, F. G. D. (1994). Em direção à qualidade na formação de administradores: Criando e desenvolvendo produtos na disciplina de marketing. Em Anais do XVIII Encontro Nacional da Associação Nacional dos Programas de Pós-Graduação em Administração (EnANPAD): Vol. 6. Área de Formação e Treinamento de Administradores (pp. 115-126). Curitiba, PR: ANPAD.