Breakout Strategies for Emerging Markets: Business and Marketing Tactics for Achieving Growth

9. Engaging Stakeholders

Typically, companies think of awareness-building as it relates to their brand or, at most, their products. But the opportunities and challenges that companies face in emerging markets provides an impetus for them to think beyond product sales and even customers or investors. Adopting a complete stakeholder orientation, and not just a customer orientation, has been a fairly recent idea for the discipline of marketing (Bhattacharya 2010). Sisodia, Wolfe, and Sheth (2007) describe the idea that companies can do well by doing good in their book Firms of Endearment. This is philosophically aligned with a stakeholder orientation that urges companies to address the needs of all entities (including the environment) that are affected ...