11 - The institutional framework II – Marketing practice

Question 1

Why study market practices?

Answer 1

• Move away from polarized discussions of whether this or that is a real market or not
• Gives a richer characteristic of what it is that is being shaped
• Provides us with a better understanding of the processes that lead to these outcomes, how is a certain market being shaped

Question 2

The three types of market practices

Answer 2

1. Exchange practices
2. Representational practices
3. Normalising practices

Question 3

Elaborate on exchange practices

Answer 3

The concrete activities which are related to performing discrete economic transactions, including:

Idiosyncratic activities like:

• Product specification
• Negotiation of prices and delivery terms

General activities such as:

• Advertising
• Design of marketingchannels
• Comparative product testing

Question 4

Elaborate on representational practices

Answer 4

Those activities that contribute to the construction of understandings and models about how the market “looks” and how it “works”

Example:
- Collecting and processing sales statistics to assess promotional effectiveness
- Segmentation of customers

Question 5

Elaborate on normalising practices

Answer 5

Activities that contribute to establish guidelines for how a market should be (re)shaped or work according to some (group of) actor(s), including

Question 6

TRANSLATIONS AND INTERMEDIARIES IN MARKET PRACTICE

Answer 6

• The model suggest that it is difficult to conceive a market without normalizing and representational practices, as it is to conceive it without exchange practices.
• Shaping of market is a continuous process. No beginning or end.
• The market becomes the ongoing result of a network of translations that link normalizing, exchange and representational practices.

Question 7

explain the segmentation process

Answer 7

1. Designing a study based on the firms objectives
2. Selecting respondents through some sampling procedure
3. Surveying the resulting sample with instruments like questionaires
4. Analysing the collected data using some technique for multivariate data-analysis
5. Developing profiles for each of the identified clusters.
   - Segmentation is an ontological procedure  An attept to produce segments