| As cultural brokers helping multinational companies enter the Indian market, advertising agencies do more than attaching goods to meaningful cultural categories (McCracken 1988a). Importantly, agencies work with multinational companies to represent and actively construct notions of the Indian consumer. In this sense, international advertising production revolves around the negotiation of consumer representations as the means to developing international markets. From this perspective, international advertising becomes a site of intense inter-cultural inter-organizational learning, and in turn, market development.; This dissertation is based on nine months of ethnographic work and active participation in an Indian advertising agency where I focused on the development of two campaigns for one of the agency's clients, an American manufacturer of processed foods that I call Grainberry. Overall, I have interviewed 33 advertising and marketing executives and followed a total of 23 campaigns.; Attending to the production of these advertising campaigns provides an opportunity to study representations of the Indian market as they are co-constructed, refined and exchanged by agencies and their foreign clients. In negotiating notions of ‘who the Indian consumer is’ and ‘the Indian housewife we want to portray’, I contend that these agents are ultimately involved in the socio-cultural construction of consumers and the creation of markets. |
