Fairtrade Towns (original) (raw)
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Grounded Theory as a Macromarketing Methodology
Journal of Macromarketing
This paper details and justifies Grounded Theory as a methodology for researching into significant and emerging macromarketing phenomena, through an exploration of its use to investigate the marketing dynamics of the Fairtrade Towns Movement. The paper describes the research 'journey' undertaken from the initial consideration of Fairtrade Towns as an underresearched and challenging topic, through to the final production of new theory rooted in the reality of the research context. The philosophy and systematic processes that underpin Grounded Theory are explained, along with examples of how the key processes of data collection and analysis were undertaken. The insights generated in this paper demonstrate Grounded Theory as a suitable, yet underused, research approach available to macromarketers. It is revealed as a methodology that can bring rigor and confidence to research into emerging macromarketing themes, and the paper concludes by considering its potential for application in key spheres for future research.
Places where people matter: The marketing dynamics of Fairtrade Towns
Social Business, 2015
The purpose of this study was to understand how Fairtrade Towns, a relatively new but rapidly expanding phenomenon that promotes social business in terms of the consumption of Fairtrade products, operate as a form of place-based marketing network. This paper, which underpinned a Keynote Address delivered at the Second Biannual Social Business Conference, explores how Fairtrade Towns combine the 'people' dimension of Fairtrade marketing with a place-based perspective. Methodology This project applied grounded theory and gathered data through long-term ethnographic involvement in one Fairtrade Town initiative, and interviews with 29 key participants across 11 other Fairtrade Towns. Contribution This study demonstrates the need to understand phenomena such as Fairtrade Towns, not as abstract marketing systems, but as activities and processes driven by, and concerned about, real people in real places. It contributes to the growing appreciation of the need to understand particular aspects of social business from a multidisciplinary perspective.
Expanding the boundaries of brand communities: the case of Fairtrade Towns
European Journal of Marketing
Purpose This paper aims to further the authors’ understanding of brand communities, and their role in brand co-creation, through empirical and theoretical contributions derived from researching the marketing dynamics operating within a successful but atypical form of brand community, Fairtrade Towns (FTT). Design/methodology/approach The paper reflects a pragmatic application of Grounded Theory, which captured qualitative data from key “insiders”, with a particular emphasis on FTT steering group members and their role as “prosumers”. Data were gathered via ethnographic involvement within one town and semi-structured interviews with participants in others. Findings FTTs, as brand communities, demonstrate elements of co-creation that go beyond the dominant theories and models within the marketing literature. They operate in, and relate to, real places rather than the online environments that dominate the literature on this subject. Unusually, the interactions between brand marketers a...
International Review of Management and Marketing
This paper critically and systematically examines the discourse surrounding the history of fairtrade development, stakeholder involvement and the implications of mainstreaming marketing strategy on consumer engagement in the UK from the late 1950s to the early 2010s. It highlights the pioneering role of Oxfam and Traidcraft in the late 1950s; presents a novel structure of the fairtrade industry and highlights the UK fairtrade industry's market leadership and the benefits of mainstreaming. It also espouses the implications of mainstreaming strategy on consumer engagement and the long-term marketing viability of the industry in the UK.
Mapping microcosms: value and contestation at the Seven Sisters Indoor Market
Royal College of Art, MRes Architecture dissertation, 2019
Recent years have seen the rapid growth of cities. With it the distribution of resources, capital, and power also becoming part of the ever-changing landscapes. In an urban centre-peripheries scheme, the fluctuations of the cost of land and the agendas of development create inequalities. The access to decision making processes between marginalised communities and developers regarding construction and investment are highly polarised. However, whilst being exposed to the immediacy of everyday life, we can understand how alternative structures of governance emerge, from practicing common spatialities within some sort of public space. When public space is a space for sustained representations of the diverse layers that we encounter in the urban landscape: we can foresee its various roles underpinning the intersection between socio-political, economic and spatial configurations in perpetual negotiation. This research takes an interest in the tension between the endurance of physical space, and the ways in which social capital unravels, shifting from micro to macro structures of power and layers of infrastructure. Through the lens of social theory and empirical research, this project studies (street) markets of London at risk of disappearance, relocation or undergoing processes of redevelopment. It touches upon the cases of RRM and Brixton Markets, and takes a closer look into north-London’s Seven Sisters Market (SSIM), with the aim of identifying tactics of resistance and guidelines to safeguarding social value in the everyday, within the current political and urban development drivers. As the SSIM has become a battleground for competing visions of city-making, what other forms of architecture are the social relationship and governance structures shaping? As small-scale spaces like the market become social, spatial and economic alternatives in a city like London, how are they confronting opposite realities from the urban fabric in which they are embedded? And, how can community architecture be a tool for resilience against erasure? Because of major economic drivers and the access that different groups have to reshaping the city, the notions of what is of value and what counts as heritage become uneven. Those who have agency to decide how a place will change or be reshaped are not necessarily the same people who recognise value in them; or at least not the same value. This raises the question of where and what is of value in processes of urban transformation. Value for whom? What kind of values are at stake of being lost or kept? The SSIM is not only a market, but a community centre, a solid economic structure and platform, an enclave of nostalgia of another home, Colombian in the most part. What can we learn from within its surface, its physicality, its materiality? In a triangulation between resistance, value, and the physicality of the market, this research focuses on how its everyday activity translates into the form of bridges, bonds, games, frictions, and relationships of care, as a response to the 16-year-long struggle that the market has put up to fight back the CPO and stop the Grainger’s project that would demolish the site. This project looks to understand what the social value of the market is, where it can it be found, and how it is related to the process of evolving resistance into an alternative for the struggle.
Fairtrade Towns as Unconventional Networks of Ethical Activism
Journal of Business Ethics, 2016
The growing availability and consumption of Fairtrade products is recognised as one of the most widespread ethically inspired market developments, and as an example of activist-driven change within the wider marketing system. The Fairtrade Towns movement, now operating in over 1700 towns and cities globally, represents a comparatively recent extension of Fairtrade marketing driven by local activists seeking to promote positive change in production and consumption systems. This paper briefly explores the conventional framing of the role that ethically related activism plays in the operation of markets and in influencing market participants. It then presents key insights gathered from a grounded theory exploration of Fairtrade Towns as activist-driven marketing systems, revealing the atypical nature of the activism involved. The findings demonstrate how local activists leverage their social networks to exert pressure and generate support to promote ethical consumption. The study suggests that Fairtrade Towns offer a new role for activists as Fairtrade itself becomes more mainstream, and considers the role they are fulfilling as 'informal' local marketers. The marketing dynamics revealed represent a complex and distinctive form of relational activism that seeks to build Fairtrade markets and highlight their positive benefits, with potential lessons for other local ethical market-building efforts in future.
Interpreting Macromarketing: The Construction of a Major Macromarketing Research Collection
This commentary introduces a four-volume tome, Macromarketing, a major research collection for which the authors served as editors. Equity, poverty, and societal development were the primary foci. A lengthy vetting process resulted in eighty articles for inclusion. Among them are articles recently published in the Journal of Macromarketing; most of the articles however are drawn from economics, foreign policy, sociology, and the literature of other disciplines. This eclectic mix reveals other fields and leading scholars in them who share interests with macromarketers.
‘Spatio-market practices’: conceptualising the always spatial dimensions of market making practices
AMS Review, 2021
Socio-material conceptualisations of markets suggest that they are spatial formations. Yet, the everyday practical and spatial dimensions of market making have received little explicit attention. We thus introduce the concept of spatio-market practices, drawing on key ideas in market studies and spatial theory. We argue that examining spatio-market practices (and thus the spatial dimensions of markets) promises to provide fresh insight regarding what it takes to realise markets, their uneven distribution, and what and whom markets are (and are not) designed to serve. To demonstrate what the concept calls for, supports and promises, we take Humphreys’ (2010) influential paper as a starting point and draw on other secondary sources in order to articulate an alternative and spatially-oriented account of the growth and legitimacy of the American casino gambling market. This paper, in turn, contributes a subtle and yet incisive shift in thinking, which supports a more explicit means of e...
Contested Markets, Contested Cities
Contested Markets, Contested Cities, 2017
Learning from La Vega Central: Challenges to the survival of a publicly used (private) marketplace. In González, S (Ed.): Contested Markets Contested Cities. Gentrification and urban justice in retail spaces, London: Routledge, pp. 36-53. The author's version is broadly the same as the published one although it may have minor typographical and bibliographical errors, and it lacks any images. The final published version can be purchased here.