Millions of Opportunities: An Agenda for Research in Emerging Markets

Much of the growth and much of the change that is happening in the world today is happening in emerging markets. In this article, we offer some evidence to suggest that the changes that are happening in emerging markets today are unprecedented—in scale, scope, and speed—in human history. We highlight some of the opportunities that exist for academic research on emerging markets phenomena and argue that a single construct underlies many of these opportunities: compressed change. We present a research agenda that focuses on two phenomena that are pervasive in emerging markets but rarely studied rigorously in developed markets: marketing by micro-entrepreneurs and consumption by marginalized populations. These phenomena offer researchers in marketing the opportunity to study new outcome variables as well as new explanatory variables. Moreover, they offer researchers the ability to link explanatory variables to outcome variables cleanly and in a manner that facilitates identification of causality. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015